[Peace-discuss] Bush's 'Death Squads'

[Lisa Chason]

Bush's 'Death Squads'

By Robert Parry

01/11/05 "Consortiumnews.com" -- Refusing to admit personal misjudgments
on Iraq, George W. Bush instead is pushing the United States toward
becoming what might be called a permanent “counter-terrorist” state,
which uses torture, cross-border death squads and even collective
punishments to defeat perceived enemies in Iraq and around the world.

Since securing a second term, Bush has pressed ahead with this hard-line
strategy, in part by removing dissidents inside his administration while
retaining or promoting his protégés. Bush also has started prepping his
younger brother Jeb as a possible successor in 2008, which could help
extend George W.’s war policies while keeping any damaging secrets under
the Bush family’s control.

As a centerpiece of this tougher strategy to pacify Iraq, Bush is
contemplating the adoption of the brutal practices that were used to
suppress leftist peasant uprisings in Central America in the 1980s. The
Pentagon is “intensively debating” a new policy for Iraq called the
“Salvador option,” Newsweek
<http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/>  magazine reported on
Jan. 9.

The strategy is named after the Reagan-Bush administration’s
“still-secret strategy” of supporting El Salvador’s right-wing security
forces, which operated clandestine “death squads” to eliminate both
leftist guerrillas and their civilian sympathizers, Newsweek reported.
“Many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success –
despite the deaths of innocent civilians,” Newsweek wrote.

Central America Veterans

The magazine also noted that a number of Bush administration officials
were leading figures in the Central American operations of the 1980s,
such as John Negroponte, who was then U.S. Ambassador to Honduras and is
now U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.

Other current officials who played key roles in Central America include
Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Central American policies at the State
Department and who is now a Middle East adviser on Bush’s National
Security Council staff, and Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a
powerful defender of the Central American policies while a member of the
House of Representatives.

The insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala were crushed through the
slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians. In Guatemala, about 200,000
people perished, including what a truth commission later termed a
genocide against Mayan Indians in the Guatemalan highlands. In El
Salvador, about 70,000 died including massacres of whole villages, such
as the slaughter carried out by a U.S.-trained battalion against
hundreds of men, women and children in and around the town of El Mozote
in 1981.

The Reagan-Bush strategy also had a domestic component, the so-called
“perception management” operation that employed sophisticated propaganda
to manipulate the fears of the American people while hiding the ugly
reality of the wars. The Reagan-Bush administration justified its
actions in Central America by portraying the popular uprisings as an
attempt by the Soviet Union to establish a beachhead in the Americas to
threaten the U.S. southern border.

[For details about how these strategies worked and the role of George
H.W. Bush, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy
<http://www.secrecyandprivilege.com/> & Privilege: Rise of the Bush
Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]

More Pain

By employing the “Salvador option” in Iraq, the U.S. military would
crank up the pain, especially in Sunni Muslim areas where resistance to
the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been strongest. In effect, Bush would
assign other Iraqi ethnic groups the job of leading the “death squad”
campaign against the Sunnis.

“One Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise,
support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish
Perhmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and
their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to
military insiders familiar with discussions,” Newsweek reported. 

Newsweek quoted one military source as saying, “The Sunni population is
paying no price for the support it is giving the terrorists. 
 From
their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

Citing the Central American experiences of many Bush administration
officials, we wrote in November 2003 – more than a year ago – that many
of these Reagan-Bush veterans were drawing lessons from the 1980s in
trying to cope with the Iraqi insurgency. We pointed out, however, that
the conditions were not parallel. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ Iraq:
Quicksand  <http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/111303.html> & Blood.”]

In Central America, powerful oligarchies had long surrounded themselves
with ruthless security forces and armies. So, when uprisings swept
across the region in the early 1980s, the Reagan-Bush administration had
ready-made – though unsavory – allies who could do the dirty work with
financial and technological help from Washington.

Iraqi Dynamic

A different dynamic exists in Iraq, because the Bush administration
chose to disband rather than co-opt the Iraqi army. That left U.S.
forces with few reliable local allies and put the onus for carrying out
counterinsurgency operations on American soldiers who were unfamiliar
with the land, the culture and the language.

Those problems, in turn, contributed to a series of counterproductive
tactics, including the heavy-handed round-ups of Iraqi suspects, the
torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and the killing of innocent
civilians by jittery U.S. troops fearful of suicide bombings.

The war in Iraq also has undermined U.S. standing elsewhere in the
Middle East and around the world. Images of U.S. soldiers sexually
abusing Iraqi prisoners, putting bags over the heads of captives and
shooting a wounded insurgent have blackened America’s image everywhere
and made cooperation with the United States increasingly difficult even
in countries long considered American allies.

Beyond the troubling images, more and more documents have surfaced
indicating that the Bush administration had adopted limited forms of
torture as routine policy, both in Iraq and the broader War on Terror.
Last August, an FBI counterterrorism official criticized abusive
practices at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee
chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair,
food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves,
and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more,” the official wrote.
“When I asked the M.P.’s what was going on, I was told that
interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the
detainee was not to be moved. On another occasion 
 the detainee was
almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had
apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the
night.”

Despite official insistence that torture is not U.S. policy, the blame
for these medieval tactics continues to climb the chain of command
toward the Oval Office. It appears to have been Bush’s decision after
the Sept. 11 attacks to “take the gloves off,” a reaction understandable
at the time but which now appears to have hurt, more than helped.

TV World

Many Americans have fantasized about how they would enjoy watching Osama
bin Laden tortured to death for his admitted role in the Sept. 11
attacks. There is also a tough-guy fondness for torture as shown in
action entertainment – like Fox Network’s “24” – where torture is a
common-sense shortcut to get results.

But the larger danger arises when the exceptional case becomes the
routine, when it’s no longer the clearly guilty al-Qaeda mass murderer,
but it is now the distraught Iraqi father trying to avenge the death of
his child killed by American bombs.

Rather than the dramatic scenes on TV, the reality is usually more like
that desperate creature in Guantanamo lying in his own waste and pulling
out his hair. The situation can get even worse when torture takes on the
industrial quality of government policy, with subjects processed through
the gulags or the concentration camps.

That also is why the United States and other civilized countries have
long banned torture and prohibited the intentional killing of civilians.
The goal of international law has been to set standards that couldn’t be
violated even in extreme situations or in the passions of the moment.

Yet, Bush – with his limited world experience – was easily sold on the
notion of U.S. “exceptionalism” where America’s innate goodness frees it
from the legal constraints that apply to lesser countries.

Bush also came to believe in the wisdom of his “gut” judgments. After
his widely praised ouster of Afghanistan’s Taliban government in late
2001, Bush set his sights on invading Iraq. Like a hot gambler in Las
Vegas doubling his bets, Bush’s instincts were on a roll.

Now, however, as the Iraqi insurgency continues to grow and inflict more
casualties on both U.S. troops and Iraqis who have thrown in their lot
with the Americans, Bush finds himself facing a narrowing list of very
tough choices.

Bush could acknowledge his mistakes and seek international help in
extricating U.S. forces from Iraq. But Bush abhors admitting errors,
even small ones. Plus, Bush’s belligerent tone hasn’t created much
incentive for other countries to bail him out.

Instead Bush appears to be upping the ante by contemplating cross-border
raids into countries neighboring Iraq. He also would be potentially
expanding the war by having Iraqi Kurds and Shiites kill Sunnis, a
prescription for civil war or genocide.

Pinochet Option

There’s a personal risk, too, for Bush if he picks the “Salvador
option.” He could become an American version of Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet or Guatemala’s Efrain Rios Montt, leaders who turned loose
their security forces to commit assassinations, “disappear” opponents
and torture captives.

Like the policy that George W. Bush is now considering, Pinochet even
sponsored his own international “death squad” – known as Operation
Condor – that hunted down political opponents around the world. One of
those attacks in September 1976 blew up a car carrying Chilean dissident
Orlando Letelier as he drove through Washington D.C. with two American
associates. Letelier and co-worker Ronni Moffitt were killed.

With the help of American friends in high places, the two former
dictators have fended off prison until now. However, Pinochet and Rios
Montt have become pariahs who are facing legal proceedings aimed at
finally holding them accountable for their atrocities. [For more on
George H.W. Bush’s protection of Pinochet, see Parry’s Secrecy
<http://www.secrecyandprivilege.com/> & Privilege.]

One way for George W. Bush to avert that kind of trouble is to make sure
his political allies remain in power even after his second term ends in
January 2009. In his case, that might be achievable by promoting his
brother Jeb for president in 2008, thus guaranteeing that any
incriminating documents stay under wraps.

President George W. Bush’s dispatching Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to inspect
the tsunami damage in Asia started political speculation that one of the
reasons was to burnish Jeb’s international credentials in a setting
where his personal empathy would be on display.

Though Jeb Bush has insisted that he won’t run for president in 2008,
the Bush family might find strong reason to encourage Jeb to change his
mind, especially if the Iraq War is lingering and George W. has too many
file cabinets filled with damaging secrets.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise
of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com <http://www.secrecyandprivilege.com/> . It's
also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History:
Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.' 
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