Apologies if what I'm about to write is already in the highly acclaimed death squads diary above. My computer can't handle that thread -- it freezes if I try to open it, so I'm just going to say what I have to say here.
I'm coincidentally studying the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador right now. In case you don't know or can't remember, in 1981, the elite Atlacatl battalion of the Salvadoran army, armed with American weapons whose shipment was approved by Congress, killed about 800 civilians in the town of El Mozote, including many children. The massacre was denied, then blamed on the guerillas, and there are still those (the Wall Street Journal editorial board) that continue to dispute the facts.
Nonetheless, it is clear that not only did the El Mozote massacre take place, it was part and parcel of a larger strategy of depopulating and intimidating the areas considered supportive of the guerillas. This strategy included not only frequent attacks on civilians, but also horrific torture. Below are some accounts of the events of that miserable war, taken from Mark Danner's excellent book, "The Massacre at El Mozote." They are not pleasant.
"Carrying his little brother, Chepe went with the soldiers and walked along with them as they searcehd house to house. 'We found maybe fifteen kids,' he says, 'and then they took us all to the playing field. On the way, I heard shooting and I saw some dead bodies, maybe five old people.' When they reached the playing field, 'there were maybe thirty children,' he says. 'The soldiers were putting ropes on the trees. I was seven years old, and I didn't really understand waht was happening until I saw one of the soldiers take a kid he had been carrying -- the kid was maybe three years old -- throw him in the air, and stab him with a bayonet.
They slit some of the kids' throats, and many they hanged from the tree. All of us were crying now, but we were their prisoners -- there was nothing we could do. The soldiers kept telling us, "You are guerillas and this is justice. This is justice." Finally, there were only three of us left. I watched them hang my brother. He was two years old. I could see I was going to be killed soon, and I thought it would be better to die running, so I ran. I slipped through the soldiers and dived into the bushes. They fired into the bushes, but none of their bullets hit me.'"
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"The fighting was especially brutal in San Salvador, where guerillas dug themselves in in the crowded slums, and the military managed to extract them only by bombing and strafing civilian neighborhoods. But the turning point of the offensive, and of the war itself, came during the early hours of November 16th, when commandos scaled the back wall of the shady campus of the University of Central America, roused five Jesuit priests from sleep, ordered them to lie with their faces against the ground, and emptied automatic weapons into their brains. Before they departed, the soldiers' killed a sixth priest, the Jesuits' cook, and her fifteen-year-old daughter. The scene they left behind -- the obliterated skulls of the priests, the green lawn soaked in blood and brains, the fantastically reduntant number of spent cartridges -- was one of spectacular carnage. And though the soldiers made a halfhearted attempt to scrawl a few leftist slogans, it would very shortly become clear those who had done this work were the men of the Atlacatl.
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If the Administration adopts this policy in Iraq, whatever shreds of morality they may claim for this war will be gone. This not the behavior of a liberator, it is behavior "reminiscent of Genghis Khan," to quote someone who knows about wrong wars (or used to know, anyway). We must not destroy Iraq in order to save it.