Did the White House Confirm It's Considering Using "Death Squads" in Iraq?
It was an odd moment of White House spin--or lack of spin.
On Monday, CNN's Wolf Blitzer was interviewing Sean McCormack, a White House special assistant who handles national security matters. They discussed the Palestinian and Iraqi elections. McCormack cheerfully noted that in 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces there should be no problem with voting on January 30. He neglected to mention that the four troubled provinces in Iraq are home to about one-half of the nation's population. And as the interview was coming to a close, Blitzer said,
One final question, Sean, before I let you go. This Newsweek story saying the Pentagon is considering this so-called Salvador option to train Kurdish and Shiite fighters in Iraq to go ahead and kidnap, snatch, kill, Iraqi insurgents. You've seen the story. I wonder what the White House reaction is to it.
Blitzer was referring to a piece by Michael Hirsch and John Barry reporting that Pentagon officials worried about the deepening quagmire in Iraq were considering "the Salvador option." The article quoted a senior military officer saying, "What everyone agrees is that we can't just go on as we are. We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." And the article noted,
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....
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
This is a rather important development--or potential development. Conservatives hail US actions in El Salvador in the 1980s, but the Reagan Administration supported a military there that was tied to death squads and that massacred hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians and noncombatants. For instance, the US-backed El Salvador military massacred about 800 peasants (including many women and children) at El Mozote. At the time, the Reagan administration--notably Reagan aide Elliott Abrams--denied the massacre had happened. It is now indisputable that this horrible event did occur, and Abrams today is a National Security Council aide for George W. Bush.
Is the Pentagon truly considering unleashing paramilitary forces in Iraq? The lesson from El Salvador is that such outfits are not always controllable. They kill whom they want to kill. (In El Salvador that included an archbishop who cared about human rights and American nuns doing volunteer work.) They develop their own agendas and their own vendettas. During the civil war in Lebanon in the 1980s, militias supported by the Israelis slaughtered Palestinian civilians at refugee camps. This is a perilous path to pursue. Trying to achieve democracy through death squads does, to say the least, seem counterintuitive.
So Blitzer was right to call attention to the Newsweek article and the "Salvador option" debate. Viewers could have reasonably expected McCormack to have prepared a response for any inquiry about this important story. But here is what McCormack said:
Well, we're working very closely with the Iraqi government [and] the multinational force in fighting the former regime elements and the terrorists that are in Iraq. But as for that particular story, Wolf, I'm afraid I don't have any information for you.
No information? That was no denial. You will notice that McCormack did not say, "It's ridiculous to suggest that we would work with death squads and freelancing paramilitaries." Nor did he say, "The president is concerned about any reports indicating the Pentagon may be considering supporting death squads or paramilitary units in Iraq, and we're looking into this." In fact, it's not too hard to interpret McCormack's brief remark as an indirect confirmation of the story. If there was no truth to the report, wouldn't the White House try to shoot it down? The article had been released two days before this interview. McCormack had had plenty of time to determine if the piece was accurate. But--too bad for us--there was no more time left for the interview. Blitzer did not press McCormack on this subject and ended the segment.
This is what we're left with. A major media organization reports the Pentagon is considering recruiting death squad-like paramilitary units in Iraq, and the White House declares it has nothing to say on this explosive matter. How can we not read between the lines and draw the obvious conclusion? The awfully-named "Salvador option" is alive. Both the Newsweek article and the McCormack interview deserve follow-ups.
Posted by David Corn
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