BUSH ADMIN Created The Death Squads That Now Rule Iraq

[kpete]

Operation enduring chaos: The retreat of the coalition & rise of the militias

Iraq's savage sectarian war, with its indiscriminate torture and killings, is an even greater obstacle to peace than the insurgency. What will happen to the country when the coalition troops eventually pull out? Kim Sengupta reports
Published: 29 October 2006


Iraq's savage sectarian war is now regarded as a greater obstacle to any semblance of peace returning than the insurgency, and was the main reason for the Americans recently pouring 12,000 troops into the capital - an operation that, they now acknowledge, has failed.

Yet, ironically, the death squads are the result of US policy. At the beginning of last year, with no end to the Sunni insurgency in sight, the Pentagon was reported to have decided to train Shia and Kurdish fighters to carry out "irregular missions". The policy, exposed in the US media, was called the "Salvador Option" after the American-backed counter-insurgency in Latin America more than 20 years ago, which led to 70,000 deaths and countless instances of human rights abuse.

Some of the most persistent allegations of abuse have been made against the Wolf Brigade, many of whom were formerly in Saddam's Baathist forces. Their main US adviser until April last year was James Steele, who, in his own biography, states that he commanded the US military group in El Salvador during the height of the guerrilla war and was involved in counter-insurgency training. The complaints against Iraqi special forces continue. At the end of last year, while in Iraq, I interviewed Ahmed Sadoun who was arrested in Mosul and held for seven months before being released without charge.

During that time, he said, he was tortured. He showed marks on his body, which were the results of the beatings and burnings. Mr Sadoun, 38, did not know which paramilitary group, accompanied by American soldiers, had seized him, but the Wolf Brigade was widely involved in suppressing disturbances in Mosul at the time.

more at:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1938380.ece

[blm]

1. No surprise - BFEE operated death squads in key countries in 70s and 80s

It's a standard operation for them. Their own brand of terrorism.

[dailykoff]

4. Absolutely.

Ginning up "civil wars" in countries marked for destabilization is SOP. I'd guess that 90% or more of the civilian deaths in Iraq have been directly engineered by US forces. Disgusting but true.

[blm]

14. That's pretty much what I have suspected all along. Or maybe"expected"

would be more accurate.

[petgoat]

18. 8-19-03 when that truck bomb blew up the UN I immediately

asked myself--"who gains from this? How do dead-end Baathists or domestic
insurgents gain from withdrawal of the UN?"

The CNN article on it juxtaposes the report with discussion of attacks by saboteurs,
presence of al Qaeda, mention of Baathists, Saudi militants--implying that one
of these groups was responsible.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/08/19/sprj.irq.main/

But who stood to gain? (The mercenaries, security contractors, KBR, Bechtel,
and the Bush Regime stood to gain.) Did that cement truck driver know there
was a bomb in his truck?

I was angered by a recent NPR characterization of a market square car-bombing as
a suicide attack demonstrating continued sectarian violence.

To report such unjustified assumptions as fact is extremely irresponsible! They
don't know who installed that bomb in that car, why they did it, or if the driver
even knew it was there.

After two British soldiers were arrested in Basra dressed as Arabs, driving a car
with explosives in the trunk, the British army smashed down the walls of the jail
with tanks and armored vehicles to get them back.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20050920&articleId=972

[tjwash]

28. That was the first thing that popped into my mind.

Remembering the death squads of El Salvador and Nicaragua under saint ronnie.

[acmavm]

2. Calling John Negroponte. Mr. Negroponte please pick up the blue

courtesy phone. There are some more people for you to kill.

You can almost hear Carly Simon singing 'Nobody Does it Better' in the background, can't you?

[razors edge]

3. He's so vein,

he probly thinks this war is about him.

[EFerrari]

6. I'd love to write a film exposing his murderous @ss. And yeah

Carly Simon's song would be perfect.

[aquart]

8. Poor George. He'd really like to watch.

[Jack Rabbit]

13. Mr. Negroponte needs to report here . . .

The Palace of Peace
The Hague
Home of the International Criminal Court

Photo from the Dossier Nederland (The Netherlands)

[Jose Diablo]

17. Negroponti

As has been said, the Salvadorian option. Makes ya wonder what Negroponti is doing right now, he is in the DHS I hear. Hmmmm.

[RaleighNCDUer]

23. Central America was the tryout - Iraq is the rehearsal.

We're the show.

[libodem]

20. he is the one responsible for all of the worst abuses

the whole disgusting twisted mess makes my skin crawl.

[EFerrari]

5. What do we expect when our government is run by Iran Contra

motherf#ckers?

[Jcrowley]

7. Mostly accurate

I might quibble with the highlighted section: Yet, ironically, the death squads are the result of US policy. A few words need to be replaced or eliminated to accurately assess the situation. It might read something as simple as "Death Squads are US policy." And there's no irony there it's intentional.

If you flip over the rock of American foreign
policy of the past century, this is what crawls out ...

invasions ... bombings ... overthrowing
governments ... suppressing movements
for social change ... assassinating
political leaders ... perverting
elections ... manipulating labor unions ...
manufacturing "news" ... death squads ...
torture ... biological warfare ...
depleted uranium ... drug trafficking ...
mercenaries ...

It's not a pretty picture.
It is enough to give imperialism a bad name.

Read the full details in:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA
Interventions Since World War II.
by William Blum

http://www.killinghope.org/

[Jose Diablo]

16. Oh, hi

I think we have talked about stuff at other places. Regards.

[me b zola]

9. I'm glad that this truth is seeing the light of day...

I've posted the following several times with the horrible evidence of mass death squad murders being showed on the news--the word needs to get out. Hell, I even e-mailed Jack Cafferty a little background and link when he asked a question about the death squads--we should not allow the American media to pretend as though this bit of evidence doesn't exist.

The following article is from Newsweek, Jan, 2005:

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

AP
Nuns pray over the bodies of four American sisters killed by the military in El Salvador in 1980

By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
Updated: 5:59 p.m. PT Jan 14, 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.

~more @ link~
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek

[Marrak]

10. Back Off!!

In reality...I couldn't find my ass with both hands...for going on four years - can you believe it?

<>
Back-off!

[Ms. Clio]

11. yes, exactly -- I don't have access to my archives at the moment

or I think I could retrieve several articles about the death squads from their inception.

Riverbend has written that American troops surround an area where fighting is occurring, and just watch.

[Octafish]

12. Don't forget Ing-lund. Tony the Poodle chipped in too.

Remember the photo of the tank guys on fire?

Two phony "terrorists" killed an Iraqi policeman.

They were really British SAS types.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20050920&articleId=972

Tony's boys had to storm the Iraq police HQ to free their guys.

[mom cat]

15. Our "violence cures everything" policy is doing a heck of a job.

Probably Saddam will be executed, but what will happen to the bigger thugs whohave destroyed entire countries, slaughteres close to a million benificiaries of our "liberation" and endangered democracy around the world and at home.

[civildisoBDence]

19. Covert OPS turned covert OOPS

Dick, DUHbya and Dumsfailed have screwed up everything they've touched.

Newsprism

[struggle4progress]

21. Lost History: The CIA's Fugitive Terrorist (Posada & Steele)

By Robert Parry

WASHINGTON -- ... By early October 1986, under intense White House pressure, Congress had nearly completed work on a plan to resume CIA support for the contras. But on the morning of Oct. 5, one of the last flights of North's little air force took off from Ilopango airport and sliced into southern Nicaragua to drop arms to the contras. There, a Sandinista soldier blasted the plane from the sky with a surface-to-air missile. One crew member, Eugene Hasenfus, parachuted to earth and was captured.

When the Hasenfus flight didn't return, Posada quickly sounded the alarm. "Posada's first act was to call Rodriguez, who was in Miami," the FBI summary read. "Rodriguez told him that Radio Havana had already announced the downing of an aircraft. ...Posada then went to the resupply houses and told everyone what had happened."

Posada, the fugitive terrorist, also alerted Col. James Steele, the chief of the U.S. military group in El Salvador who rushed over to meet with Posada and to review a map showing the flight plan of the lost plane ...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/lost13.html

[struggle4progress]

22. The Dirty War in Iraq

By Nicolas J. S. Davies

... On January 14, 2005 Newsweek reported on “The Salvador Option,” the proposed use of death squads as part of the U.S. strategy to subdue the country. It noted that some U.S. policymakers consider this to have been effective in Central America in the 1980s. Newsweek cited Interim Prime Minister Allawi, a former agent of both the Iraqi Mukhabarat and the CIA, as a principal proponent of this policy. A U.S. military source told Newsweek, “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists. From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.” This source was expressing precisely the rationale behind the dirty wars in Latin America and the worst abuses of the Vietnam War. The purpose of such a strategy is not to identify, detain, and kill actual resistance fighters, but rather to terrorize an entire civilian population into submission ...

In El Salvador, between 1984 and 1986, Colonel Steele commanded the U.S. Military Advisor Group, training Salvadoran forces that conducted a brutal campaign against the civilian population. At other stages in his career he performed similar duties during illegal U.S. military operations in Cambodia and Panama. After failing a polygraph test, he confessed to Iran-Contra investigators that he had also shipped weapons from El Salvador to Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, leading Senator Tom Harkin to block his promotion to brigadier general. Until April 2005 Steele was the principal U.S. advisor to the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s “Special Police Commandos,” the group most frequently linked to torture and summary executions in recent reports.

Steven Casteel worked in Colombia with paramilitaries called Los Pepes that later joined forces to form the AUC in 1997 and who have been responsible for most of the violence against civilians in Colombia. Casteel is now credited with founding the Special Police Commandos in his capacity as senior advisor to the Iraqi Interior Ministry ...

Reports of torture and extrajudicial killings have followed the Special Police Commandos around the country wherever they have been deployed, from Anbar province and Mosul since October 2004 to Samarra in March 2005 to areas around Baghdad since May 2005 ...

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Nov2005/davies1105.html

[mkb]

24. America Has Done Wrong

     America is the all powerful force that tries to rule by
force the entire world.
     I think our responsibility is to work for lasting
solutions to the problems that exist.  Knowing as much as
possible carries risks, but is I think the only way we can
make the world a decent place to live.  The media does not
offer us very much in the way of valuable information, at
least in the direct sense.  Uncovering how we fit into the
world is what I believe we should be doing, at least to a
large degree.  There is information that the corporate press
does not give you that shows the way in which America has
aggressively subdued other people's struggle for justice. 
This article is one exception.  Good Luck.

[Quantess]

25. The media

"The media does not offer us very much in the way of valuable information, at least in the direct sense."

The media is all commentary, talking points, and propaganda.

[shance]

26. The Bush Administration has done wrong. Most Americans are against

what is being done in our name. We must continue fighting the abuse and genocide being inflicted by innocent Iraqis and others.

[coco77]

27. The insurgents or Iraqis depending on what bush

wants to call them are also using U.S. weapons to kill U.S. soldiers...

[nealmhughes]

29. The administration and its allies see the world in simplistic "vulgar Hegelian"

terms: good vs. evil, us vs. them, etc. without the slightest notion that individuals make up groups and that might does not make right.
Reality is not a "dialectic" of thesis meeting antithesis -- in the case of the Iraq Adventure, the real "crime" of Saddam was his attempt to be Napoleon of the Arabs, to transcend lines on maps and spread his secular Baathist "Arab Socialism" throughout the Arab World, to Shiite, Christian and Sunni alike.
Of course, Napoleon became consumed by his own "gloire" and spread the Revolution too widely and thinly befor it could be consolidated in Europe effectively. ]
Of course, Saddam's own personal sins transcend Bonaparte's to the nth degree, but this was Saddam's real "crime": not the Kurds, not the Marsh Arabs, not the torture cells, as noone seemd to care much for the opposition's outcome or the Kurds or Marsh Arabs when Iran was at war with the Iraqi government...what made him Public Enemy Number One was the attempt to deprive the al Sabahs from their gold-plated toilets and then the threat that Saudi Arabia and the other monarchies might be next... His invasion of Kuwait was "scary" in the sense that Bela Kun in Budapest was to the West! Would Queen Mary be scrubbing public latrines next? Would Queen Alexandria have her jewels confiscated when the Bolshiviks got to London?!
No, theirs is a simplistic world in which research is not rooted in the practical and the physical and the culture of places, rather in philosophy of triumph and will. In Bush World, the Sunnis would have made peace with their defeat, the Shiites would have made peace with the Sunnis, the Kurds would forgive us for our reputiation of them when they arose after Gulf Adventure I...and we would sell off the Iraqi patrimony of oil to the megacorps and give them a taste of "free enterprise," and all would be well in the world.
Sorry, but Baathism isn't black and Ayn Rand is not white, and they do not collide headon in some willful metaphysical battle where grey does not result, rather black is vanquished completely. Nor do we presently see grey, rather red, the color of blood.