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January 09, 2005
Pentagon to Train Paramilitary Death Squads in Iraq -- A la Salvador
Newsweek details a very important development:
NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria.... It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.
El Salvador, and Central America, has clearly been in the minds of this administration for awhile. Back in October, Dick Cheney mentioned it as a model for Afghanistan. Of course, the current U.S. "ambassador" to Iraq is John Negroponte, who was the ambassador to Honduras -- where he helped build "Contra" operations against the Nicaraguan people. And it was during his ambassadorship that "deaths quads" trained by CIA rained terror in Honduras. He also lied to Congress about all this and more but since this Congress seems to impervious to all insult I will not dwell on that part.
Here's Bob Parry, commenting on Dick Cheney's laudatory mention of the Salvador example:
People forget that the war on terror was also being applied in Central America, even though it was often the security forces of the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala that were conducting the terror. The 75,000 people killed in El Salvador that Mr. Cheney mentioned, the vast majority, the vast, vast majority were killed by Salvadoran security forces and not in battle but taken out and executed, often tortured and raped first. This was a bloody mess, and the United States, under then President Reagan and Vice President Bush, supported it, and they advocated it, and they tried to cover up the facts of the matter.
It's deplorable that such a shameful chapter in our history is lauded as a success but unfortunately it is not surprising. In fact, El Salvador is indeed a model of how to successfully quell an uprising that has widespread popular support: with enough force, terror and lawlessness most populations can be made to give up.
This may well be more a trial baloon rather than an actual plan at the moment but it's still very significant because it indicates the direction of this administration -- crushing the obviously growing insurgency through very bloody means. Unsurprisingly, Ayad Allawi is reportedly among "the most forthright proponents."
Hopefully, people who were part of the Central America solidarity groups in the eighties, and people from those countries, can step up and speak the truth about the "Salvador Option" as Newsweek calls the death squad plan. This path we are going down is scary and sad, with the worst immediate consequences for the people of Iraq but for all of us in the end.
Posted by zeynep at January 9, 2005 09:35 PM
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Comments
Very sad. The strategy of sadistic domination the U.S. has used in Latin America is being extended, and the dramatically stratified Latin American version of society the U.S. has backed is becoming more and more prevalent in the U.S, but, unlike in much of Latin America, without strong social movements to oppose it. That to me is the saddest thing: a large number of Americans, maybe a majority, can see all of this and either are in favor of it or don't care.
Posted by: deang at January 10, 2005 02:52 PM
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