Death Squads...Right On Schedule

A body-dumping ground on the Iranian border, a long row of corpses bound and shot execution-style on the road outside Mosul, 169 emaciated and tortured detainees concealed in an Interior Ministry bunker in central Baghdad, and Donald Rumsfeld, at a press conference this week has the temerity to say that he has no evidence of counterinsurgency death squads operating in Iraq, and then he turns to one of his generals and says, "Do you?” and the general shakes his head and parrots, “I do not, sir.”

Despite the disingenuous denial by the Secretary of Defense that counterinsurgency death squads are now operating with his blessings, their appearance at this time was inevitable. A guerrilla war entering its third year with no end in sight, a surrogate army that can't stand on its own, and an upcoming election...now is the exquisitely vicious, perfect time to bring in paramilitaries to crack down on “rejectionists” (sic-Bush) and eviscerate their civilian support. We need look no further than the Reagan administration's war-mongering in Central America to find the model for this tactic and the footprints of the players who are still operating today. Men like Dick Cheney who as a senator was a passionate supporter of the discredited communist domino theory that Reagan used to defeat Carter in 1980 and then to restore military support to Latin American dictators. And John Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and previous Ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1987; responsible then for funneling covert funds and arms to the Contras after congress had banned further military aid, and under whose watch human rights violations in Honduras became systematic. Men like Steve Casteel, ex-DEA official in Latin America and in charge of the Iraq Interior Ministry until handover of sovereignty on June 20, 2004, and Jim Steele, in charge of Special Forces in El Salvador in the early 80's, also now operating in the Interior Ministry of Iraq.

In El Salvador, paramilitary death squads were funded, trained and armed by the U.S. They were extremist nationalists, pathological killers, ex-Salvador intelligence operatives like Roberto D’Aubuisson; they were the brainchild of the CIA. They were known as El Mano Blanco, The White Hand, and they were responsible for the murders of first Archbishop Romero and then forty mourners at his funeral on the steps of the San Salvador Cathedral, for the rape and murder of four Maryknoll nuns on the road from the airport, for the dumping of corpses with warnings stuffed in their mouths at the journalists’ hotel in San Salvador, for the massacre of over 800 campesinos at El Mozote, for the apocalyptic body-dump of El Playon, and for the "disappearance" of tens of thousands more.

In Iraq now, the rebellion is made up of a bewildering array of over 100 insurgent groups (ref. SITE Institute) with more joining in every day in an incomprehensible maelstrom of ideologues, gangsters, assassins, die-hard Baathists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Jihadi pop-ups, Sunni and Shiite vendettas, and the ever-present Ali Baba intrigues. From the onset, Iraq was a war of ideas that we came into losing before the battle on the ground even began, when Bush let slip that he was launching a “crusade.” In the arena of ideas, it’s been one debacle after another for the U.S.A. as the Bush administration has consistently outraged the world with new lows of mendacity, creeping fascism, propaganda at home and propaganda abroad, torture gulags and secret prisons, chemical weapons and war crimes in Fallujah. Rather than rising above the fray and projecting the image of a democratic ideal, an honorable force under civilian control, the Bush administration has utterly failed in the court of world opinion. And in America, even some of their most deluded supporters are losing their will to fight to the last drop of somebody else’s blood.

The Iraqi death squads were initially Sunni militias, ex-Republican Guards with a taste for brutality and commando fighting, trained by U.S. Special Forces, supplied with arms, uniforms and sophisticated communication equipment, ushered past curfews in convoys of masked gangs (ref Peter Maas NYTimes May 1, 2005.) They are increasingly recruited from Shiite Militias and are known as the Wolf Brigade, the Scorpion Brigade, the Lion Brigade, and the Fearless Warriors. Their purpose is a counterinsurgency timed for maximum effect when political campaigns are taking place and when the U.S. is contemplating withdrawal before regular Iraqi troops can operate on their own. Death squads are a last resort, perhaps the last resort of a bankrupt strategy before the final catastrophe, that most reprehensible and cowardly tactic of all…a full-on American air war.

The following is exerpted from a 1999 interview with Amb.Robert E. White, U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador 1979-1981; appointed by President Carter, fired by President Reagan:

“The Reagan administration came in and they simply didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand is more like it. Now it’s my belief that they looked upon El Salvador as something they could put their stamp on and demonstrate the difference between the sort of do-goody (sic), indecisive Carter administration and the tough, no-nonsense Reagan administration that would know how to deal with communist revolutionaries. Unfortunately, they simply didn’t understand: the Salvadoran military do not kill armed people; they kill unarmed people. They have no experience what-so-ever in fighting and no stomach for fighting either.”

“A former CIA station chief who had left the agency came to El Salvador and spoke with a lot of military officers and the people who owned the country, and the message as reported to me later was: ‘Look, we’re in. Human rights is no longer an issue. We’re going to roll these revolutionaries up and just trust us to do the right thing.’”

“We spent probably six billion, seven billion dollars. We killed seventy-five thousand people, many of whom died horribly, through torture. We drove a million refugees to the United States and all of this to try in vain to defeat a revolutionary force that was ready to negotiate peace in 1981. Now if anyone can make sense of that from the point of view of the United States national interest, I would like to hear it.”