US Training of Death Squads in Iraq? - War Is A Crime .org

Although Bush hasn't specifically stated (to my knowledge) that death squads are among "all ofthe tools" he is using per se, Alternet.com points out that the modus operandi of the deathsquads operating in the US's Iraq conflict is identical to the modus operandi of the USGovernment's counter-insurgency techniques in the Central America in the 1980's.Amnesty International characterized the Salvadoran death squads as "official personnel actingin civilian clothes under the direction of superior officers." A 1989 Amnesty report, El Salvador"Death Squads"-A Government Strategy, identified a "persistent pattern of gross human rightsviolations by the Salvadoran armed forces" including "arbitrary arrest, torture, disappearance andextrajudicial execution."Although human rights groups have continually linked death squad activities to the Salvadorangovernment, most U.S. media have reported on death squads as if they were a mysterious,independent force. This convenient fiction allows the U.S. government to continue providingmassive military aid to the Salvadoran government as it commits horrendous cruelties-all in thename of promoting "democracy." [ http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/... ]To deal with the skyrocketing insurgency, the Pentagon is considering creating secret deathsquads in Iraq. Now, the Pentagon's brave new solution for democracy in the Middle East is torevisit the reprehensible "Salvador Option," the clandestine operation implemented by theReagan White House in the 1980s in El Salvador. According to Newsweek, "Back then, facedwith losing a war against the Salvadoran rebels, the United States government funded"nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads which killed scores ofinnocent civilians." Today, according to an explosive new article in Newsweek, the Pentagondusted off that model and has a proposal on the table to "advise, support and possibly train"secret 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's unclear whether the current proposed policy would direct the Iraqi squads to assassinatetheir targets or "snatch" them and send them to secret facilities for interrogation. In plainlanguage: the squads would be either hit men or kidnapper/torturers. [ http://www.alternet.org/...]Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has held El Salvador up as a model for Iraq. Andduring the recent Vice Presidential debates, Vice President Dick Cheney stated, "Twenty yearsago we had a similar situation in El Salvador. We had a guerilla insurgency that controlledroughly a third of the country, 75,000 people dead. And we held free elections ... And today ElSalvador is a whale of a lot better because we held free elections." According to a 1993 U.N.-sponsored truth commission, however, up to "90 percent of the atrocities in the conflict "werecommitted by the U.S.-sponsored army and its surrogates, "with the rebels responsible for 5percent and the remaining 5 percent undetermined." These death squads "abducted members ofthe civilian population and of rebel groups. They tortured their hostages, were responsible fortheir disappearance and usually executed them." [ http://www.alternet.org/... ]171