Today on NPR's morning edition was a short piece on the investigation of US trained Iraqi police forming "Death Squads". The language used to describe these bands of Shiite militias that have infiltrated US trained Iraqi police forces and that are capturing and torturing Sunnis by the hundreds evokes the 1980s El Salvadoran Death Squads that killed so many during the Reagan Era.
It may be the first I've heard of it, but the story isn't new. A December 4th WaPo Editorial begins with the following paragraph:
OF ALL THE bloodshed in Iraq, none may be more disturbing than the campaign of torture and murder being conducted by U.S.-trained government police forces. Reports last week in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times chronicled how Iraqi Interior Ministry commando and police units have been infiltrated by two Shiite militias, which have been conducting ethnic cleansing and rounding up Sunnis suspected of supporting the insurgency. Hundreds of bodies have been appearing along roadsides and in garbage dumps, some with acid burns or with holes drilled in them. According to the searing account by Solomon Moore of the Los Angeles Times, "the Baghdad morgue reports that dozens of bodies arrive at the same time on a weekly basis, including scores of corpses with wrists bound by police handcuffs." The reports followed a raid two weeks ago by U.S. troops on a clandestine Baghdad prison run by the Interior Ministry, where some 170 men, most of them Sunni and most of them starved or tortured, were found.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
But is it true, you might ask? Well, I did a google search of "deathsquads" Iraq (one search.) I got lots of results of small, independent newspapers. One Knight-Ridder journalist, Tom Lasseter, got an award for breaking the story :http://www.knightridder.com/... and another (Yasser Salihee) was shot to death in Iraq by a sniper at a checkpoint while investigating death squads. Newsweek/msnbc had a web-exclusive article (1/10/2005) on the death squads. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
So, yes, it appears to be true. But was it by design or accident that this has occurred? Read the article by Newsweek (exerpted below).
They report that the pentagon is working on using these miitias as "death-squad" style assasins to hunt down the insurgency...read below for an interesting Negroponte connection.
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.
The article goes on to describe the debate within the US government...about which should oversee the death squads, about how PM Allawi supports the idea, and how Negroponte called the inclusion of his name in the article 'entirely gratuitous' since he was Ambassador of Honduras during the 80's (However, don't forget his involvement in Iran-Contra).
Winning at all costs. That is what the Bush administration is trying to do by re-using an old, still classified program of Reagan's that never should have been used in the first place.
The people of Iraq deserve better.
I am sick.