[Peace-discuss] How the US makes war: death squads

[C. G. Estabrook]

[This article first appeared in the UK, in the New Statesman.
Pilger is a London-based Australian journalist and
documentary film maker. --CGE]

   The Salvador Option has been invoked in Iraq
   
   The American public is being prepared. 
   If the attack on Iran does come, there will be 
   no warning, no declaration of war, no truth.

   By John Pilger
   May 4, 2006 

The lifts in the New York Hilton played CNN on a small screen
you could not avoid watching. Iraq was top of the news;
pronouncements about a "civil war" and "sectarian violence"
were repeated incessantly. It was as if the US invasion had
never happened and the killing of tens of thousands of
civilians by the Americans was a surreal fiction. The Iraqis
were mindless Arabs, haunted by religion, ethnic strife and
the need to blow themselves up. Unctuous puppet politicians
were paraded with no hint that their exercise yard was inside
an American fortress.

And when you left the lift, this followed you to your room, to
the hotel gym, the airport, the next airport and the next
country. Such is the power of America's corporate propaganda,
which, as Edward Said pointed out in Culture and Imperialism ,
"penetrates electronically" with its equivalent of a party line.

The party line changed the other day. For almost three years
it was that al-Qaeda was the driving force behind the
"insurgency", led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a bloodthirsty
Jordanian who was clearly being groomed for the kind of infamy
Saddam Hussein enjoys. It mattered not that al-Zarqawi had
never been seen alive and that only a fraction of the
"insurgents" followed al-Qaeda. For the Americans, Zarqawi's
role was to distract attention from the thing that almost all
Iraqis oppose: the brutal Anglo-American occupation of their
country.

Now that al-Zarqawi has been replaced by "sectarian violence"
and "civil war", the big news is the attacks by Sunnis on Shia
mosques and bazaars. 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 US, which attack Sunnis and
Shias alike. The goal is the incitement of a real civil war
and the break-up 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 unit 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. In his new book,
Empire's Workshop (Metropolitan Books), the American historian
Greg Grandin describes the Salvador Option thus: "Once in
office, [President] Reagan came down hard on central America,
in effect letting his administration's most committed
militarists set and execute policy. In El Salvador, they
provided more than a million dollars a day to fund a lethal
counter-insurgency campaign . . . All told, US allies in
central America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000
people, tortured hundreds of thousands and drove millions into
exile."

Although the Reagan administration spawned the current
Bushites, or "neo-cons", 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.
After the 2003 invasion, it was only a matter of time before
this venerable "policy" was applied in Iraq.

According to the investigative writer Max Fuller (National
Review Online), the key CIA manager of the interior ministry
death squads "cut his teeth in Vietnam before moving on to
direct the US military mission in El Salvador". Professor
Grandin names another central America veteran whose job now is
to "train a ruthless counter-insurgent force made up of
ex-Ba'athist thugs". Another, says Fuller, is well-known for
his "production of death lists". A secret militia run by the
Americans is the Facilities Protection Service, which has been
responsible for bombings. "The British and US Special Forces,"
concludes Fuller, "in conjunction with the [US-created]
intelligence services at the Iraqi defence ministry, are
fabricating insurgent bombings of Shias."

On 16 March, Reuters reported the arrest of an American
"security contractor" who was found with weapons and
explosives in his car. Last year, two Britons disguised as
Arabs were caught with a car full of weapons and explosives;
British forces bulldozed the Basra prison to rescue them. The
Boston Globe recently reported: "The FBI's counter-terrorism
unit has launched a broad investigation of US-based theft
rings after discovering that some of the vehicles used in
deadly car bombings in Iraq, including attacks that killed US
troops and Iraqi civilians, were probably stolen in the United
States, according to senior government officials."

As I say, all this has been tried before - just as the
preparation of the American public for an atrocious attack on
Iran is similar to the WMD fabrications in Iraq. If that
attack comes, there will be no warning, no declaration of war,
no truth. Imprisoned in the Hilton lift, staring at CNN, my
fellow passengers could be excused for not making sense of the
Middle East, or Latin America, or anywhere. They are isolated.
Nothing is explained. Congress is silent. The Democrats are
moribund. And the freest media on earth insult the public
every day. As Voltaire put it: "Those who can make you believe
absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

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