Horhey
Sidekick
- Joined
- Nov 6, 2006
- Messages
- 1,216
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 31
18 March 2003: The United States invades Iraq to "shock and awe" the world into U.S. subservience and to establish permanent garrisons in a dependent client state at the center of the world's major energy producing region - "a vital prize for any Power interested in world influence or domination". The latter objective failed due to mass non violent resistance from the country's Shi'ite population, lead by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. See my blog: Defeat: How the U.S. and Britain lost Iraq
[YT]_ca1HsC6MH0[/YT]
"The Salvadorization of Iraq" was the headline of a New York Times Magazine cover story, characterizing the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. Obviously, this meant "it’s not a pretty campaign", reported Peter Maass:
As first reported by Newsweek:
[YT]_ca1HsC6MH0[/YT]
"The Salvadorization of Iraq" was the headline of a New York Times Magazine cover story, characterizing the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. Obviously, this meant "it’s not a pretty campaign", reported Peter Maass:
For a complete history, see my blog: U.S.-Run State Terror in El Salvador Civil WarNARRATOR (Video): This is one of the great untold stories of the Iraq War, how just over a year after the invasion, the United States funded a sectarian police commando force that set up a network of torture centers to fight the insurgency. It was a decision that helped fuel a sectarian civil war between Shia and Sunni that ripped the country apart. At its height, it was claiming 3,000 victims a month.
This is also the story of James Steele, the veteran of America’s dirty war in El Salvador. He was in charge of the U.S. advisers who trained notorious Salvadoran paramilitary units to fight left-wing guerrillas. In the course of that civil war, 75,000 people died, and over a million people became refugees. Steele was chosen by the Bush administration to work with General David Petraeus to organize these paramilitary police commandos.
As first reported by Newsweek:
The "Salvador option" actually originated with the CIA's Phoenix Program in South Vietnam, a paramilitary intelligence gathering campaign, which utilized the technique of "counter-terror", i.e. 'meeting terror with terror', targeting Viet Cong guerrillas and sympathizers for assassination, abduction, torturous interrogation, and subsequent execution. Maggie O’Kane, a multimedia investigations editor at The Guardian observes that:‘The Salvador Option’, Newsweek, Jan. 9, 2005
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq
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.
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 shi'ite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions.
Maj. Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, 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."
Although the Special Police Squads (SPD's) eventually quelled the Sunni insurgency, it also enforced the repressive conditions that gave rise to the Islamic State:[O]ne of the things that just strikes me, listening to that, is the sort of extraordinary parallels that exist between Salvador and Iraq. One of the interesting things in the WikiLeaks documents is that General Adnan Thabit, who ran the special police commandos that were carrying out the torture, used the phrase "to fight terror with terror," which is exactly the same phrase that was used by General Montana phon. in El Salvador when they were operating what was called the "platforms," which were basically the torture and interrogation centers where the American advisers were present. And what you have seen is an almost exact parallel between the platforms in El Salvador, which were the regional torture centers, and the platforms in Iraq, which operated in the same way, which was bringing in hundreds of mostly Sunni men and boys and torturing them for information.
From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington's man behind brutal police squads, Guardian, March 6, 2013
In 2004, with the war in Iraq going from bad to worse, the US drafted in a veteran of Central America's dirty wars to help set up a new force to fight the insurgency. The result: secret detention centres, torture and a spiral into sectarian carnage
Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres, Guardian, March 6, 2013
Exclusive: General David Petraeus and 'dirty wars' veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse
Soon after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, now retired Colonel James Steele was in Baghdad as one of the White House's most important agents, sending back reports to Donald Rumsfeld and acting as the US defence secretary's personal envoy to Iraq's Special Police Commandos, whose intelligence-gathering activities he oversaw. Drawn mostly from violent Shia militia, the commandos developed a reputation for torture and later for their death-squad activities directed against the Sunni community.
Last edited: