"Salvador Option" - US to Send
Death Squads to Iraq...
> By Scott Ritter (Former
Senior UN Arms Inspector in Iraq)
Michael Hirsh and John Barry, Newsweek
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq.
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.)
[click here for photos from
Iraq]
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-brother-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 needed-perhaps one as
potentially explosive as the Salvador option.
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Also visit:
Democracy Now's Jan 10, 2005 report: http://www.democracynow.org/print.pl?sid=05/01/10/1456242
The Christian Science Monitor on Janu 10: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0110/dailyUpdate.html
The
BBC's 2002 report "US Role in Salvador's brutal
war"