Free Iraq

This is from a January 1, 2004 article:

"With the 2004 electoral clock ticking amid growing public concern about U.S. casualties and chaos in Iraq, the Bush administration’s hawks are upping the ante militarily. To those familiar with the CIA’s Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam, Latin America’s death squads or Israel’s official policy of targeted murders of Palestinian activists, the results are likely to look chillingly familiar.
The Prospect has learned that part of a secret $3 billion in new funds—tucked away in the $87 billion Iraq appropriation that Congress approved in early November—will go toward the creation of a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi exile groups. Experts say it could lead to a wave of extrajudicial killings, not only of armed rebels but of nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists (emphasis added)—up to 120,000 of the estimated 2.5 million former Baath Party members in Iraq.
“They’re clearly cooking up joint teams to do Phoenix-like things, like they did in Vietnam,” says Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counter terrorism. Ironically, he says, the U.S. forces in Iraq are working with key members of Saddam Hussein’s now-defunct intelligence agency to set the program in motion. “They’re setting up little teams of Seals and Special Forces with teams of Iraqis, working with people who were former senior Iraqi intelligence people, to do these things,” Cannistraro says."
Phoenix Rising January 1, 2004

Several previous posting on this site have pointed to some of the results of the above mentioned 'planning' and 'funding':

"There is no better way to start a civil war" May 28, 2005
"Yet everyone but the comatose American populace ... can see it" May 26, 2005
Yet another instance of an American 'terrorist act' in Iraq May 23, 2005
"Combat terrorism" by causing it May 16, 2005
Lest we forget "Operation Iraqi Freedom" May 10, 2005
Getting to Know the General May 2, 2005
The “Salvador option”, with dressings, is being served in Iraq April 22, 2005

and documented corruption: The Demise of CIA Shadow Director in Iraq April 2, 2005

General Adnan Thabit, center, and his American CIA adviser, James Steele,
at a meeting with local sheiks near Samarra.