Date: June 28, 2005 1:37:41 PM PDT
Subject: [Spy News] Salvador Option: Death Squads in Iraq
Salvador Option: Death Squads in Iraq
Hal C , Daily Kos
Tue Jun 28th, 2005 at 05:32:29 PDT
In January, Newsweek reported that the Pentagon was considering the Salvador
Option for Iraq--US-trained Death Squads—in an article titled ‘The Salvador
Option’ The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping
teams in Iraq. Today, Knight-Ridder reports that the Death Squads seem to
have arrived in an article titled Campaign of executions feared in Iraq.
Slain Sunnis have arrived at Baghdad's morgue blindfolded, bound and shot.
The author of today's K-R article himself was shot and killed under
mysterious circumstances last week in Baghdad.
The explicit purpose of the Salvador Option was to terrorize the Sunni
population. According to Newsweek.
[Director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service Maj. Gen. Muhammad
Abdallah] 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."
As of January, the Pentagon would admit only that Death Squads were on the
table.
Pentagon sources emphasize there has been no decision yet to launch the
Salvador option.
In a postscript to the Newsweek article Rumsfeld responded to the charges:
And at a news conference on Jan. 11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said
the idea of a Salvador option was "nonsense" and denied that U.S. Special
Forces were going into Syria. But when asked whether such a policy was under
consideration, he replied, "Why would I even talk about something like
that?"
Today, Knight-Ridder reports that the Salvador Option may be a reality.
BAGHDAD - Days after Iraq's new Shiite-led government was announced on April
28, the director of Baghdad's central morgue began noticing that the bodies
of Sunni Muslim men were turning up after the men had been detained by
people wearing Iraqi police uniforms.
The official response:
Ghathanfar al-Jasim, who sits on Iraq's national judicial council and
functions as an attorney general, said it was difficult to discuss
extrajudicial killings. "We cannot admit that our police are doing it; it
would make them look weak,"
and
But when battered corpses turn up outside Interior Ministry facilities,
[Raad] Sultan [an official in Iraq's Ministry of Human Rights] said, "How
can I prove it is the security forces?”
Knight-Ridder reports several examples. Here is one.
On May 5, for example, 14 Sunni farmers were abducted from an east Baghdad
vegetable market. […] The bodies of the farmers were discovered in shallow
graves the next day. They had all been blindfolded, handcuffed and shot once
in the back of the head […] "A patrol of more than 10 police vehicles drove
up and parked," said Ali Karim, a fruit vendor. "They were running through
the street with their guns, saying that the farmers had a car bomb with
them. They pushed them against the walls and asked them for their IDs."
A moment of respect for the author of the Knight Ridder article:
[The author of this article] Yasser Salihee was a special correspondent. He
was shot and killed last week in Baghdad in circumstances that remain
unclear.
That Yasser Salihee has not died in vain.
Withdraw all troops now.
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