January 10, 2005
Newsweek

'The Salvador Option'

The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq

by Michael Hirsh and John Barry

. . . 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. . . .

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[The board recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception.

Among other things, this body would launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to "quick-response" attacks by U.S. forces.--William M. Arkin, "The Secret War: Frustrated by intelligence failures, the Defense Department is dramatically expanding its 'black world' of covert operations," Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2002]

Julian Borger, "U.S. Military in Torture Scandal," Guardian, April 30, 2004

"Rumsfeld Sued for Alleged War Crimes," Deutesche Welle, November 30, 2004

Dana Priest, "Gulags for Iraqis and U.S. Muslims," Washington Post, January 2, 2005

Richard Sale, "Israel to kill in U.S., allied nations," United Press International, January 15, 2005

[This week, former military intelligence analyst William Arkin revealed a hitherto unknown directive, with the Orwellian name "JCS Conplan 0300-97," authorizing the Pentagon to employ special, ultra-secret "anti-terrorist" military units on American soil for what the author claims are "extra-legal missions."--Eric Margolis, "Paranoia Grips the U.S. Capital," Toronto Sun, February 6, 2005]

[The real news, which is not reported in the CNN "mainstream," is that the "Salvador Option" has been invoked in Iraq. This is the campaign of terror by death squads armed and trained by the U.S., which attack Sunnis and Shias alike. The goal is the incitement of a real civil war and the breakup of Iraq, the original war aim of Bush's administration.

The Ministry of the Interior in Baghdad, which is run by the CIA, directs the principal death squads. Their members are not exclusively Shia, as the myth goes. The most brutal are the Sunni-led Special Police Commandos, headed by former senior officers in Saddam's Ba'ath Party. This was formed and trained by CIA "counter-insurgency" experts, including veterans of the CIA's terror operations in central America in the 1980s, notably El Salvador. . . .

Although the Reagan administration spawned the current Bushites, or "neocons," the pattern was set earlier. In Vietnam, death squads trained, armed, and directed by the CIA murdered up to 50,000 people in Operation Phoenix. In the mid-1960s, in Indonesia, CIA officers compiled "death lists" for General Suharto's killing spree during his seizure of power. --John Pilger, "The Return of the Death Squads," New Statesman, May 8, 2006]

Naomi Klein, "The true purpose of torture: Guant‡namo is there to terrorise - both inmates and the wider world," Guardian, May 14, 2005