[Mb-civic] "Salvador Option" --Pentagon propsal for new US backed death squads

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

The brief intro to this report from Newsweek is by Ed Pearl, who 
sent this to me.  The "Salvador option" means U.S.-back death 
squads, just like those in Central America in the 1980s, which 
officially never happened but which are now tacitly admitted by the 
Pentagon by the name they use for this proposal.  It means our tax 
dollars used for abduction, torture, and sometimes murder of 
numerous people, many of them innocent civilians.  It has sadly 
happened many times in the past, and if this "option" is pursued will 
happen again, unless Americans rise up in outrage to stop it.  Also 
worth noting that Iraq's "interim government" supports this option, 
an indication of their role as ruthless collaborators......mha atma

----------

In the 1980's the U.S. denied creating death squads in Central 
America who, in turn, had copied activities in Vietnam which 
assassinated tens, if not hundreds of  thousands of people. 
Thosetargetted in both areas were primarily not guerillas, whose 
success depended on concealing their activities, but mainly
the educated, labor and human rights organizers, professionals, 
relatives and friends ofunderground suspects and ultimately 
anyone who did not prove themselves firm-enough supporters of the 
regime.
All thisactivity internationally illegal since WWI and now, the 
Geneva accords.It was all denied again and 
again,byUSadministrations and military in both campaigns, 
stretching three decades,to congress, themedia, the public and all 
international fora. And now, tacitly admitted, actually promotedby 
use of the  name itself. What it did in Vietnam and then in Central 
America waseliminatethe verypeople who could have 
reconstructed the society after the wars and leave them devastated 
- in Vietnam, forthirty years and counting.
Woe betide poor Iraq, if we can't stop it.
Ed
------
Newsweek

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

By Michael Hirsh and John Barry

Updated: 5:27 p.m. ET Jan. 10, 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 HosenballEDITOR'S NOTE: This report, initially 
published on Jan. 8, was updated on Jan. 10 to include 
Negroponte's comments to NEWSWEEK

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

URL: '+url+'
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/


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