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  1. #1
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    Salvador Death Squads

    ‘The Salvador Option’
    The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq

    WEB EXCLUSIVE
    By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
    Newsweek
    Updated: 10:52 a.m. ET Jan. 12, 2005


    Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

    Now, 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. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")

    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, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. 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.

    Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the Defense department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding. (In "covert" activity, U.S. personnel operate under cover and the U.S. government will not confirm that it instigated or ordered them into action if they are captured or killed.)


    Meanwhile, intensive discussions are taking place inside the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Defense department’s efforts to expand the involvement of U.S. Special Forces personnel in intelligence-gathering missions. Historically, Special Forces’ intelligence gathering has been limited to objectives directly related to upcoming military operations—"preparation of the battlefield," in military lingo. But, according to intelligence and defense officials, some Pentagon civilians for years have sought to expand the use of Special Forces for other intelligence missions.

    Pentagon civilians and some Special Forces personnel believe CIA civilian managers have traditionally been too conservative in planning and executing the kind of undercover missions that Special Forces soldiers believe they can effectively conduct. CIA traditionalists are believed to be adamantly opposed to ceding any authority to the Pentagon. Until now, Pentagon proposals for a capability to send soldiers out on intelligence missions without direct CIA approval or participation have been shot down. But counter-terrorist strike squads, even operating covertly, could be deemed to fall within the Defense department’s orbit.

    The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj. Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, may have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of interviews during the past ten days. Shahwani told the London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat that the insurgent leadership—he named three former senior figures in the Saddam regime, including Saddam Hussein’s half-brother—were essentially safe across the border in a Syrian sanctuary. "We are certain that they are in Syria and move easily between Syrian and Iraqi territories," he said, adding that efforts to extradite them "have not borne fruit so far."

    Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

    Pentagon sources emphasize there has been no decision yet to launch the Salvador option. Last week, Rumsfeld decided to send a retired four-star general, Gary Luck, to Iraq on an open-ended mission to review the entire military strategy there. But with the U.S. Army strained to the breaking point, military strategists note that a dramatic new approach might be needed—perhaps one as potentially explosive as the Salvador option.

    With Mark Hosenball


    In case "...the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads..." is too generous for you a reminder about what this entailed:

    "One especially horrid incident from one conflict involved the rape and murder of three US Roman Catholic nuns and a lay worker by National Guard troops in El Salvador in 1980. Last week, the New York Times reported that four Salvadoran troops, serving 30-year prison terms for the crime, have implicated top commanders of the Salvadoran Army as ordering the executions . . ."

    "Romero was assassinated in the middle of conducting a mass. At his funeral, in front of the cathedral where his body now lies, army snipers opened fire on a weeping crowd of 100,000, killing 40."

    "On the night of November 16, 1989, the unthinkable happened. Twenty six members of the Salvadoran military — nineteen of whom were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas — raided the Jesuit residence at the UCA, pulled Fr. Cortina's six Jesuit brothers and two women co-workers from their beds, and brutally murdered them in front of the rectory."

    El Mozote.


    - This scares me because of how muslims esp. extremists see death and whatnot, you're not really doing much to the mentality which is the reasoning for using this method of quelling uprisings. They're not so much afraid of it as they are all pumped over it. Probably just piss them off.

    Not a good idea at all.

  2. #2
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    I would think that actions like this just legitimize the self righteousness of extremists and swells their membership.
    Recently overheard: "Hey Ralph, what were you drinking that time that you set your face on fire?"

  3. #3
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    Quote Originally Posted by Oarhead
    I would think that actions like this just legitimize the self righteousness of extremists and swells their membership.
    Precisely.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Oarhead
    I would think that actions like this just legitimize the self righteousness of extremists and swells their membership.
    Only because the nimrods in charge talk about it.Back in the 50's during the cold war, we were whacking them, they were whacking us and no one was the wiser.It's called subrosa activity. The point of the exercise is it's supposed to be a secret.

  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by mrw
    Only because the nimrods in charge talk about it.Back in the 50's during the cold war, we were whacking them, they were whacking us and no one was the wiser.It's called subrosa activity. The point of the exercise is it's supposed to be a secret.
    Umm. No. Chile? Dominican Republic? Argentina? We (the CIA) were whacking them (damn leftists!) and everyone knew about it.

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by cj001f
    Umm. No. Chile? Dominican Republic? Argentina? We (the CIA) were whacking them (damn leftists!) and everyone knew about it.

    CIA stands for...clowns in action

    Zero ability to keep a secret

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by mrw
    Only because the nimrods in charge talk about it.Back in the 50's during the cold war, we were whacking them, they were whacking us and no one was the wiser.It's called subrosa activity. The point of the exercise is it's supposed to be a secret.
    I guarantee the Central Americans knew about it. When your family members are tortured and killed and your government overthrown, you're going to find out who did it and why.

  8. #8
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    tHE sALVADRIAN MODEL IS POPULAR:
    In 1984, the US was involved in the El Salvador elections that brought an assassin (Roberto d A’ubuisson) and a friend of the US to power. Roberto d’Aubuisson, leader for life of the ARENA party, that ruled El Salvador since, was named by the UN Truth Commission report to be implicated in the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. The Archbishop of El Salvador was assassinated in March 1980, while giving a mass in a church and just before sainthood.

    The 1984 elections in El Salvador “were little more than a farce designed to give democratic respectability to a regime that was perpetuating some of the worst human rights abuses in the hemisphere”, wrote Mark Engler of Foreign Policy in Focus. Those who seized power in El Salvador with the help of uncle Reagan have murdered more than 75,000 people. In 1993, the UN Truth Commission report found that the army and its death squads committed 90% of the atrocities in the conflict. Among their heinous crimes were the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, and the slaughter of hundreds of villagers. The rebels, led by the FMNL party were responsible for 5 %, and the other 5% remained unknown, said the report.

    In the March 2004 elections, the US used fear and threat against the Salvadoran people to promote its preferred candidates, members of the ARENA party. The Salvadorian people voted with a gun pointed to their head. The big loser of the elections are the majority of people of El Salvador, wrote Joe DeRaymond of Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad who monitored the elections.

    During the 2004 US elections, Vice President Dick Cheney praised El Salvador dictatorship as a model for ‘democracy-building’ in Iraq. One wonders why the US is interested in the El Salvador’s model of democracy and not a Western model of democracy for Iraq? Now, as it happens, this is something I know quite a bit about. I, for some reasons have experience living in good democratic nations. I spent some years in Switzerland, Austria, New Zealand, Scandinavia and Australia. All these major democratic countries have fairly decent models of democratic elections. Indeed, the Swiss model of democracy is the best I have experienced and is very suitable for a heterogeneous country like Iraq, which has no similarity to El Salvador.

    In 1993, the American analyst, Noam Chomsky commented on the US approach to ‘democracy-building’ in El Salvador. Chomsky wrote, “[b]y and large, our approach in El Salvador has been successful. The popular organizations have been decimated, just as Archbishop Romero predicted. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered and more than a million have become refugees. This is one of the most sordid episodes in US history-and it's got a lot of competition”. It is this successful approach that the US administration is using to promote America’s ‘democracy-building’ posture in Iraq. The US is more interested in empire-building rather than ‘democracy-building’.

    It should be borne in mind that, the US interference in election processes around the world is illegal and hypocritical. “The terror bombing of homes, hospitals and religious buildings by hundreds of airplanes and helicopter gunships is described by the media as ‘securing the city [of Fallujah] for free elections’”, wrote James Petras. The US message for Iraqis is; vote for the Occupation or you will die.

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