[Marxism] Pentagon May Use Death Squads in Iraq - Newsweek Jan. 8, 2005

[Ralph Johansen <michele@xxxxxxxx>]

<"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.">

[It seemed apparent to me that when this administration put Negroponte 
in charge in Iraq the ghoulishness was about to escalate just as it did 
with him in charge in Central America. 'The Salvador option'. It's kind 
of like sending in a Boris Karloff or Lon Cheney-type character. I have 
been watching the results and expecting worse. Interesting to me is how 
unvarnished and matter-of-fact some of these reports in mass-media 
magazines have become, about torture and violation of all the rules of 
conduct worked out in times of relative diplomatic comity. The Gonzales 
confirmation hearings were certainly instructive in that respect. 
Collegial tut-tuts from Democrats for constituents' consumption, but cut 
the guy in anyhow; he's one of us. And more to come. Note how this 
account points to the option of the spread of the war to Syria, tying-in 
the Syrians to members of Saddam's regime, as still directing operations 
from that country. 'To counter failure, spread it around and point to 
the hideous shadows.' Now that they may have cut a deal with the Iranian 
Shiites and Al-Sistani, maybe through the French for collusion in 
retention of US control in Iraq, the next vulnerable regime to pursue 
are the Syrians.]


WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
Updated: 5:33 p.m. ET Jan. 8, 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.)

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.

Photo: Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte, center, was ambassador to 
Honduras during the Reagan years
Alaa Al-Raya / AP

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
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.


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