[Peace-discuss] U. S. death squads

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Since they were introduced by the Kennedy administration to put down the 
post-WWII demand for social progress in Latin America, death squads have been a 
favored instrument of US policy. "During the Kennedy administration, the mission 
of the US-dominated Latin American military was shifted from 'hemispheric 
defense' to 'internal security' (which basically means war against your own 
population). That fateful decision led to 'direct [US] complicity' in 'the 
methods of Heinrich Himmler's extermination squads,' in the retrospective 
judgment of Charles Maechling, who was in charge of counterinsurgency planning 
from 1961-66" (Noam Chomsky).  The policy reached new heights in Vietnam, where 
the CIA and US Special Operations thugs admitted (in Congressional hearings in 
the 1970s) assassinating more than 20,000 people and "neutralizing" 80,000.* Bob 
Woodward's new book on Bush's "Surge" in Iraq casually reveals the continuity of 
this policy into the present administration. There's no indication that a new 
administration will abandon it. --CGE]

	September 10, 2008
	From Afghanistan to Africa
	The Return of U. S. Death Squads
	By CONN HALLINAN

United Nations officials charge that secret “international intelligence 
services” are conducting raids to kill Afghan civilians, then hiding the 
perpetrators behind an “impenetrable” wall of bureaucracy.

Philip Alston of the UN Human Rights Council said that “heavily armed 
internationals” leading local militias have killed scores of Afghan civilians. 
Coalition forces have killed more than 200 Afghan civilians since January.

He called the raids, which operate independent of the US and NATO military 
commands, “unacceptable.” Alston pointed to a specific incident last January in 
which two brothers were killed during a raid in the southern city of Kandahar, 
an area where the Taliban have a strong presence.

  “The [two] victims are widely acknowledged, even by well informed government 
officials, to have no connection to the Taliban, and the circumstance of their 
deaths is suspicious,” he said.

When Alston tried to investigate the murders, however, he hit a stonewall. “Not 
only was I unable to get any international military commander to provide their 
version of what took place, but I was unable to get any military commander to 
even admit that their soldiers were involved,” the UN official told the 
Financial Times.

Suspicion has fallen on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which led 
such teams into Afghanistan during the 1990s in an attempt to capture or kill 
Osama bin Ladin, and again during the 2001 invasion.

According to Alston, the shadow units work out of two bases: U.S. Camp Ghecko 
near Kandahar, and a base in the province of Nangarhar. “It is absolutely 
unacceptable for heavily armed internationals, accompanied by heavily armed 
Afghan forces, to be wondering around conducting dangerous raids that too often 
result in killings without anyone taking responsibility for them,” he wrote in a 
recent UN report.

Something very similar may be going on in Iraq.  In his latest book, “The War 
Within,” Bob Woodward writes that the U.S. military has a program to “locate, 
target and kill key individuals in extremist groups.” Last month U.S. Special 
Forces killed the son and nephew of the governor of Salahuddin Province north of 
Baghdad. Unlike the shootings at roadblocks by U.S. troops, a common occurrence, 
Iraqi investigators say the two men were essentially executed.

A U.S. spokesman said the raid was conducted to capture a “suspected Al Qaeda in 
Iraq operative,” and that the man was injured when he “charged” the American 
troops. The other “suspected terrorist” was wounded and arrested. “Both men were 
armed and presented hostile intent,” the spokesman said.

But according to a spokesman for Governor Hamed al-Qaisi, U.S. troops broke into 
the house at 3 AM and shot the governor’s 17-year old son to death while he 
slept. The nephew, hearing the commotion, tried to enter the room and was gunned 
down as well.

The killings are similar to one near Karbala in June, where a cousin of current 
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was killed. In both cases, Iraqi 
authorities were kept in the dark about the impending raids.

The question is: are Special Forces in Iraq and CIA units in Afghanistan 
carrying out clandestine hits? In most places in the world, those groups are 
called “death squads.”

* * *

Mercenaries are on a roll. Last month’s Associated Press story that the infamous 
mercenary firm Blackwater Worldwide was getting out of the private army business 
was a mistake. A company spokesman said the reporter had misunderstood him. 
Indeed, as the Iraq war winds down, firms like Blackwater, Triple Canopy and 
DynCorp are finding new markets to exploit, many of them in Africa.

As conservative military analyst David Isenberg points out in his column, “Dogs 
of War,” mercenaries are, in a sense, returning to their modern roots. “The 
progenitor for many of today’s private security firms was the South-Africa-based 
Executive Outcomes, which fought in Angola and Sierra Leone,” says Isenberg.

Executive Outcomes and the South African Army were routed by Angolan and Cuban 
troops during Angola’s long and bloody civil war, a conflict that was fueled in 
large part by apartheid Pretoria and the US, along with help from Zaire and the 
People’s Republic of China.

But the defeat was hardly a major setback for the mercenary industry. It’s hard 
to keep jackals down.

Cold War conflicts created a growth market, and, coupled with the Reagan 
Administration’s passion for privatization, mercenary organizations like the 
U.S. Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) and DynCorp became players in 
Latin America and the Balkans conflict.

While Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s administrations generally get the 
credit for this privatization drive, as Tim Shorrock points out in his book, 
“Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing,” it was Bill 
Clinton who really brought private enterprise into the business of gathering 
intelligence and fighting wars.

According to Shorrock, Clinton “picked up the cudgel where the conservative 
Reagan left off,” and by the end of his last term, had cut 360,000 federal jobs, 
while spending on private contractors had jumped 44 percent over 1993.

The right-wing Heritage Foundation, a major force in the current Bush 
Administration, called Clinton’s 1996 budget the “boldest privatization agenda 
put forth by any president to date.”

One obvious advantage to hiring Blackwater, DynCorp, MPRI, and Triple Canopy was 
that it short circuits Congressional oversight, bypasses pesky obstacles like 
the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and hides the cost of the wars.

Now the mercenaries are returning to their old haunts in Africa to train 
“peacekeepers.” The problem is that today’s “peacekeeper” may become tomorrow’s 
thug. An examination of training programs by the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies 
Institute found that “Every armed group that plundered Liberia over the past 25 
years had at its core” U.S. trained soldiers.

Addressing the current training of Liberian soldiers by DynCorp, the study warns 
there is a definite downside “to creating an armed elite.” If the U.S. withdraws 
its training funds, “Liberia will be sitting on a time bomb; a well-trained and 
armed force of elite soldiers who are used to good pay and conditions of 
service, which may be impossible for the government of Liberia to sustain on its 
own.”

MPRI is training militaries in Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Malawi, 
Nigeria, Rwanda and Senegal. DynCorp is doing the same in Darfur and Somalia. 
While the cover story is fighting terrorism and ensuring stability, U.S. 
military intervention—direct and through mercenaries and its client state, 
Ethiopia—has thoroughly destabilized Somalia, creating a crisis that rivals Darfur.

While the malnutrition rate in Darfur is 13 percent, in some areas of Somalia it 
is 19 percent. The UN considers 15 percent to be the “emergency threshold.

“The situation in Somalia is the worst on the continent,” says the UN’s top 
official in Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah.

According to Eric Laroche, the head of the UN’s humanitarian services in 
Somalia, conditions were much better under the Islamic Courts Union that the 
U.S-sponsored invasion overthrew. “It was much more peaceful and much easier for 
us to work. The Islamist s didn’t cause us any problems,” he said.

In spite of Blackwater’s reputation as trigger-happy cowboys who gunned down 17 
unarmed Iraqi civilians last year, the company may soon see action in the Sudan. 
Actress and Darfur activist Mia Farrow recently met with the corporation’s 
owner, Erik Prince, to discuss using the company in a military role in the 
western Sudan.

According to a 2007 study by the industrial College of the Armed Forces, “Africa 
may do for the [mercenary] industry in the next 20 years what Iraq has done in 
the past four years, provide a significant growth engine.”

Behind that growth, says Nicole Lee of TransAfrica, “is nothing short of a 
sovereignty and resource grab.” The National Energy Policy Development Group 
estimates that by 2015, a quarter of U.S. oil imports will come from Africa. 
Most of these will come from the Gulf of Guinea and the western regions of North 
Africa, but Sudan has the second largest reserves on the continent.

The U.S. has established a military command for the region—Africom—but no nation 
has agreed to host it yet. While suspicions about U.S. goals in Africa run high, 
those doubts apparently don’t extend to U.S.-based mercenary organizations. 
While countries are holding Africom at arm’s length, those same countries are 
embracing Blackwater, DynCorp. Triple Canopy, and MPRI.

Mercenaries are not just an American phenomena. Israel has begun privatizing its 
security checkpoints using the Israeli mercenary company Modiin Ezrahi According 
to a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, “By the end of the year all the 
people [guards] at the checkpoints will be civilians.”

Israel claims it is replacing the army with mercenaries because it wants to 
demilitarize the checkpoints, but peace activists say that argument is nonsense. 
Hanna Barag of the human rights organization Machsom Watch says the civilian 
security guards are “Rambos” who behave no differently than Israeli soldiers.

The UN reports an increase in “significant difficulties” since the mercenaries 
took over.

Daniel Levy, a former advisor to current Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, 
says the real reason is that it walls off the Israeli population from the 
burdens of trying to control 2.5 million Palestinians. “It separates [the 
occupation] from Israeli society,” he told the Financial Times, “these guys 
[mercenaries] don’t go home and tell their mothers what they are doing.”

In the end, the bottom line is the bottom line. Private contractors in 
Iraq—190,000 strong—will cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $100 billion by the 
end of 2008.

http://www.counterpunch.org/hallinan09102008.html
_________________________________________________

*Quote from Lieutenant Vincent Okamoto, intelligence-liaison officer for the 
Phoenix Program for 2 months in 1968 and a recipient of the Distinguished 
Service Cross. Wounded 3 times, he is the highest-decorated Japanese-American 
veteran of the Vietnam War. He has served as president of the Japanese American 
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Committee and as a Los Angeles Superior Court judge:

“The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It's not like you 
had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go into 
a village and just grab someone and say, 'Where's Nguyen so-and-so?' Half the 
time the people were so afraid they would say anything. Then a Phoenix team 
would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he 
could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him 
through the village and say, 'When we go by Nguyen's house scratch your head.' 
Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, 'April 
Fool, motherfucker.' Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they 
were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. 
Sometimes they'd come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people. 


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_program