Skeptic
9th January 2005, 18:10
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/print/1/displaymode/1098/
WEB EXCLUSIVE: IN A STUNNING ADMISSION OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION's
FAILED IRAQ POLICY, RUMSFELD IS NOW CONSIDERING PLACING
SPECIAL-FORCES-LED ASSASSINATION AND/OR KIDNAPPING TEAMS IN IRAQ CALLED
THE "THE SALVADOR OPTION" AS IRAQI "INSURGENTS" [FREEDOM FIGHTERS]
ARE TAKING A HUGE TOLL ON U.S. FORCES AND PRESENTLY HOLD THE UPPERHAND
–
By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek, Updated: 10:22 a.m. ET Sunday, January. 9, 2005
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.
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-brotherâ€"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 neededâ€"perhaps one as potentially explosive as the
Salvador option.
----------------------------------------
With Mark Hosenball
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
URL:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/
This is the way the United States fights its wars: Here are some details of what it was like in Central and South Amercia:
"...El Salvador is another "Free World" bastion. In 1982, The Other Side, a religious magazine published in Philadelphia, ran anonymous testimony from a young man who had deserted the Salvadoran army and fled to Mexico. Part of his training by eight American Green Berets consisted of "teaching us how to torture." He witnessed a boy of about fifteen, suspected of supporting the guerrillas, being subjected to a demonstration torture by the green Berets. They tore out the youth's fingernails, broke his elbows, gouged out his eyes, and then burned him alive. The author reports that the torture sessions continued into the next day and included a thirteen-year-old girl. Another victim had various parts of his body burned and was then taken up in a helicopter while still alive and thrown out at 14,000 feet. The defector noted that, "often the army goes and throws people out over the sea." The editors of The Other Side withheld the Salvadoran informant's name "for obvious reasons."
Victims and survivors of the fascist coup in Chile in 1973 tell how the Chilean military-trained and financed by the United States-tortured people with electric shock, particularly on the genitals; forced victims to witness the torture of friends and relatives (including children); raped women in the presence of other family members; burned sex organs with acid or scalding water; placed rats in women's vagina and into the mouths of other prisoners; mutilated, punctured, and cut off various parts of the body, including genitalia, eyes, and tongue; injected air into women's breasts and into veins (causing slow, painful death); shoved bayonets and clubs into the vagina or anus, causing rupture and death.
Elba Vergara, a secretary to President Allende (himself murdered by Chilean generals), was made to witness repeated torture and rapes. At one point her tormentors told her they would show her their "theater."
Four men came in, bearing a cot with a sheet
Covered figure. "Sit down," one ordered. "You're
Going to see a performance by a bad actor, an
actor who has forgotten his part. Help him
remember it." They uncovered a body entirely purple, missing a foot. "Come closer," another ordered. Look at him. You'll know him." And she did. It was 27-year-0ld "El Gordo" Toledo, with who she had been 20 days before. He could hardly speak, or scream, any more. When Elba maintained that she did not know him, they said, "Let's see"-they pulled out his nails, cut off his remaining ear, cut out his tongue, gouged out his eyes, and killed him slowly as she watched, thinking, "He could be my son." Then they brought in another "actor," 26-year-old Eduard Munoz. It took them five hours to kill him, under her eyes. It was worse than any pain they could have inflicted on her, she said. Later she was forced to watch while her cellmates-ages 16, 17, and 40, nude and drugged, were directed to perform an erotic dance before they were raped. Another girl, back from a dreaded torture center, and pregnant, was so crazy that each time she awoke she screamed that her only desire was for her child to be born so she could kill it.
One could go on. Torture has been used on a systematic basis by US-sponsored autocracies in Guatemala, Greece, Uruguay, Argentina, Indonesia, Zaire, Ecuador, Paraguay, Turkey, Bolivia, Iran (under the Shah), the Philippines, and dozens of other nations.
…Manuel was among those arrested in 1972, and brought before Brazilian security police who had been schooled at US army bases in the latest methods of counterinsurgency and interrogation. For his crime of protesting the economic conditions of his life, Manuel was treated as follows:
For four months I was heavily tortured by the Army in Rio de Janeiro, and then in the Naval Information Center…Near death, I was taken to the hospital for the sixth time. The beatings had been so severe that my body was one big bruise. The blood clotted under my skin and all the hair on my body fell out. They pulled out all my fingernails. The poked needles through my sexual organs and used a rope to drag me across the floor by my testicles. Right afterwards they hung me upside down.
They hung me handcuffed from a grating, removed my artificial leg, and tied my penis so I could not urinate. They forced me to stand on my one leg for three days without food or drink. They gave me so many drugs that my eardrums burst and I am impotent. They nailed my penis to a table for 24 hours. They tied me up like a pig and threw me into a pool so that I nearly drowned. They put me in a completely dark cell where I remained for 30 days urinating and defecating in the same place where I had to sleep. They fed me only bread soaked in water. They put me in a rubber box and turned on a siren. For three days I neither ate nor slept and I nearly went mad…"
Manuel was not a solitary victim. After the Brazilian military junta over threw the democratically elected Goulart government, it jailed an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 people, many of whom were subjected to systematic and protracted torture. During these years, the junta enjoyed friendly relations with Washington, and Brazil was hailed as a staunch US ally, a Free World bulwark against the threat of Communism…
…Instead of being tortured, which was the usual procedure, they were brought to a hospital where they were subjected to plastic surgery:
One of the women had her mouth taken away from her. The other lost half her nose. And they were released after several days with the gentle suggestion that they be sure to visit their comrades to show off their "cures." They had been turned into walking advertisements of terror; agents of demoralization and intimidation…In the case of the woman whose mouth had been shut, the most sophisticated techniques of plastic surgery had been employed. Great care had been taken by her medical torturers to obliterate her lips forever, using cuts and stitches and folds that would frustrate even the best reconstructive techniques. [Luis, a Cuban plastic surgeon] even though he could detect a "U.S." hand in the macabre handiwork, or that of a Brazilian schooled in the United States. A small hole had been left in the face to allow the woman to take liquids through a straw and survive…
When Luis and the medical team reopened the hole where her mouth had been, the sight was far more sickening than they had expected: All of the teeth had been removed and two dog fangs---incisors-had been inserted in their place. A little surprise from the fascist madmen…
The other woman had half her nose removed, skin, cartilage, and all. A draining, raw, and frightening wound was her "treatment," the sign she was to carry around with her to warn people that rebellion was a "disease" and torture the "cure."
Excerpts taken from, 'The Sword and the dollar: Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race' By Michael Parenti.
WEB EXCLUSIVE: IN A STUNNING ADMISSION OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION's
FAILED IRAQ POLICY, RUMSFELD IS NOW CONSIDERING PLACING
SPECIAL-FORCES-LED ASSASSINATION AND/OR KIDNAPPING TEAMS IN IRAQ CALLED
THE "THE SALVADOR OPTION" AS IRAQI "INSURGENTS" [FREEDOM FIGHTERS]
ARE TAKING A HUGE TOLL ON U.S. FORCES AND PRESENTLY HOLD THE UPPERHAND
–
By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek, Updated: 10:22 a.m. ET Sunday, January. 9, 2005
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.
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-brotherâ€"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 neededâ€"perhaps one as potentially explosive as the
Salvador option.
----------------------------------------
With Mark Hosenball
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
URL:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/
This is the way the United States fights its wars: Here are some details of what it was like in Central and South Amercia:
"...El Salvador is another "Free World" bastion. In 1982, The Other Side, a religious magazine published in Philadelphia, ran anonymous testimony from a young man who had deserted the Salvadoran army and fled to Mexico. Part of his training by eight American Green Berets consisted of "teaching us how to torture." He witnessed a boy of about fifteen, suspected of supporting the guerrillas, being subjected to a demonstration torture by the green Berets. They tore out the youth's fingernails, broke his elbows, gouged out his eyes, and then burned him alive. The author reports that the torture sessions continued into the next day and included a thirteen-year-old girl. Another victim had various parts of his body burned and was then taken up in a helicopter while still alive and thrown out at 14,000 feet. The defector noted that, "often the army goes and throws people out over the sea." The editors of The Other Side withheld the Salvadoran informant's name "for obvious reasons."
Victims and survivors of the fascist coup in Chile in 1973 tell how the Chilean military-trained and financed by the United States-tortured people with electric shock, particularly on the genitals; forced victims to witness the torture of friends and relatives (including children); raped women in the presence of other family members; burned sex organs with acid or scalding water; placed rats in women's vagina and into the mouths of other prisoners; mutilated, punctured, and cut off various parts of the body, including genitalia, eyes, and tongue; injected air into women's breasts and into veins (causing slow, painful death); shoved bayonets and clubs into the vagina or anus, causing rupture and death.
Elba Vergara, a secretary to President Allende (himself murdered by Chilean generals), was made to witness repeated torture and rapes. At one point her tormentors told her they would show her their "theater."
Four men came in, bearing a cot with a sheet
Covered figure. "Sit down," one ordered. "You're
Going to see a performance by a bad actor, an
actor who has forgotten his part. Help him
remember it." They uncovered a body entirely purple, missing a foot. "Come closer," another ordered. Look at him. You'll know him." And she did. It was 27-year-0ld "El Gordo" Toledo, with who she had been 20 days before. He could hardly speak, or scream, any more. When Elba maintained that she did not know him, they said, "Let's see"-they pulled out his nails, cut off his remaining ear, cut out his tongue, gouged out his eyes, and killed him slowly as she watched, thinking, "He could be my son." Then they brought in another "actor," 26-year-old Eduard Munoz. It took them five hours to kill him, under her eyes. It was worse than any pain they could have inflicted on her, she said. Later she was forced to watch while her cellmates-ages 16, 17, and 40, nude and drugged, were directed to perform an erotic dance before they were raped. Another girl, back from a dreaded torture center, and pregnant, was so crazy that each time she awoke she screamed that her only desire was for her child to be born so she could kill it.
One could go on. Torture has been used on a systematic basis by US-sponsored autocracies in Guatemala, Greece, Uruguay, Argentina, Indonesia, Zaire, Ecuador, Paraguay, Turkey, Bolivia, Iran (under the Shah), the Philippines, and dozens of other nations.
…Manuel was among those arrested in 1972, and brought before Brazilian security police who had been schooled at US army bases in the latest methods of counterinsurgency and interrogation. For his crime of protesting the economic conditions of his life, Manuel was treated as follows:
For four months I was heavily tortured by the Army in Rio de Janeiro, and then in the Naval Information Center…Near death, I was taken to the hospital for the sixth time. The beatings had been so severe that my body was one big bruise. The blood clotted under my skin and all the hair on my body fell out. They pulled out all my fingernails. The poked needles through my sexual organs and used a rope to drag me across the floor by my testicles. Right afterwards they hung me upside down.
They hung me handcuffed from a grating, removed my artificial leg, and tied my penis so I could not urinate. They forced me to stand on my one leg for three days without food or drink. They gave me so many drugs that my eardrums burst and I am impotent. They nailed my penis to a table for 24 hours. They tied me up like a pig and threw me into a pool so that I nearly drowned. They put me in a completely dark cell where I remained for 30 days urinating and defecating in the same place where I had to sleep. They fed me only bread soaked in water. They put me in a rubber box and turned on a siren. For three days I neither ate nor slept and I nearly went mad…"
Manuel was not a solitary victim. After the Brazilian military junta over threw the democratically elected Goulart government, it jailed an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 people, many of whom were subjected to systematic and protracted torture. During these years, the junta enjoyed friendly relations with Washington, and Brazil was hailed as a staunch US ally, a Free World bulwark against the threat of Communism…
…Instead of being tortured, which was the usual procedure, they were brought to a hospital where they were subjected to plastic surgery:
One of the women had her mouth taken away from her. The other lost half her nose. And they were released after several days with the gentle suggestion that they be sure to visit their comrades to show off their "cures." They had been turned into walking advertisements of terror; agents of demoralization and intimidation…In the case of the woman whose mouth had been shut, the most sophisticated techniques of plastic surgery had been employed. Great care had been taken by her medical torturers to obliterate her lips forever, using cuts and stitches and folds that would frustrate even the best reconstructive techniques. [Luis, a Cuban plastic surgeon] even though he could detect a "U.S." hand in the macabre handiwork, or that of a Brazilian schooled in the United States. A small hole had been left in the face to allow the woman to take liquids through a straw and survive…
When Luis and the medical team reopened the hole where her mouth had been, the sight was far more sickening than they had expected: All of the teeth had been removed and two dog fangs---incisors-had been inserted in their place. A little surprise from the fascist madmen…
The other woman had half her nose removed, skin, cartilage, and all. A draining, raw, and frightening wound was her "treatment," the sign she was to carry around with her to warn people that rebellion was a "disease" and torture the "cure."
Excerpts taken from, 'The Sword and the dollar: Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race' By Michael Parenti.