War on Iraq

Yahoo News is reporting that John “Death Squad’ Negroponte is to become No 2 at the US State department, directly deputising for Condoleeza Rice.

I simply cannot wait for the confirmation hearings, with a newly sworn-in Democratic majority in Congress. Finally they’ll have an opportunity – with subpoena power – to take the lid off Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney & Negroponte’s Iraq death squad initiative, if they only choose to take it.

Do you think they’ll bring up Negroponte’s time in Honduras this time?

During the Reagan administration, and while Negroponte was ambassador to the country, “Contra” militias were trained in Honduras. The Contras had hitherto made relatively small attacks across the border into Nicaragua until in 1982 thousands of marines arrived with up to 200 military advisers — airstrips were built, arms supplied and radar stations erected, all courtesy of the US taxpayer.

The Contras were trained in some of the most gruesome guerrilla war techniques. Some were trained by military officers from Argentina’s dirty war who knew nothing about the jungle but plenty about torture and execution. Others were trained in Florida and California while many others, like Honduras’ military dictator, General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, were educated in torture techniques, execution and combat at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. While it was purported by Reagan that the Contras were fighting the evil scourge of communism, referring to them as “freedom fighters,” the Contras raped, tortured and terrorised the civilian population throughout the subsequent decade, leaving the destroying the civilian infrastructure, leaving tens of thousands dead and many more displaced.

Negroponte’s role in Honduras was crucial as it meant maintaining US dominance in the region. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Negroponte’s predecessor at the UN once declared that “Central America is the most important place in the world for the United States today.” Maintaining political control of the region meant controlling its vast and rich natural resources. The Sandinistas were beginning to take matters into their own hands and started to redistribute wealth and land in Nicaragua, thus threatening US dominance in the region. Panic in the Reagan administration reached feverish and sometimes surreal levels, with the president declaring that the Sandinistas were on the verge of invading the United States. The real cause for alarm among Reaganite neo-conservatives (including the virulent anti-communist Negroponte) was that the Sandinista revolution would spread throughout El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. It had nothing to do with communism, just as the invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with preventing terrorism. More, it was that the economic system the US had maintained in Central America since 1945 was falling apart — it was simply untenable for the impoverished masses who barely had enough to eat. Washington’s solution, like its present incarnation in the Middle East, was one of force and overwhelming military power in order to maintain US hegemony. Just as Negroponte acted as the strong arm of US imperialism in Central America in the 1980s he will protect US business and political interests in the Middle East, now the “most important place in the world for the United States today.”

So what about his sterling work in Iraq? Will the confirmation hearings consider that? Let’s hope so:

El Salvador-style ‘death squads’ to be deployed by US against Iraq militants

From Roland Watson in Washington

John Negroponte was in Honduras when American money was used to train Contras to fight Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime. (AL-RAYA/AP)

THE Pentagon is considering forming hit squads of Kurdish and Shia fighters to target leaders of the Iraqi insurgency in a strategic shift borrowed from the American struggle against left-wing guerrillas in Central America 20 years ago.

Under the so-called “El Salvador option”, Iraqi and American forces would be sent to kill or kidnap insurgency leaders, even in Syria, where some are thought to shelter.

The plans are reported in this week’s Newsweek magazine as part of Pentagon efforts to get US forces in Iraq on to the front foot against an enemy that is apparently getting the better of them.

Iyad Allawi, the interim Iraqi Prime Minister, was said to be one of the most vigorous supporters of the plan.

The Pentagon declined to comment, but one insider told Newsweek: “What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are. We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defence. And we are losing.”

Hit squads would be controversial and would probably be kept secret.

The experience of the so-called “death squads” in Central America remains raw for many even now and helped to sully the image of the United States in the region.

Then, the Reagan Administration funded and trained teams of nationalist forces to neutralise Salvadorean rebel leaders and sympathisers. Supporters credit the policy with calming the insurgency, although it left a bitter legacy and stirred anti-American sentiment.

John Negroponte, the US Ambassador in Baghdad, had a front-row seat at the time as Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85.

Death squads were a brutal feature of Latin American politics of the time. In Argentina in the 1970s and Guatemala in the 1980s, soldiers wore uniform by day but used unmarked cars by night to kidnap and kill those hostile to the regime or their suspected sympathisers.

[….]

The thrust of the Pentagon proposal in Iraq, according to Newsweek, is to follow that model and direct US special forces teams to advise, support and train Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shia militiamen to target leaders of the Sunni insurgency.

It is unclear whether the main aim of the missions would be to assassinate the rebels or kidnap them and take them away for interrogation. Any mission in Syria would probably be undertaken by US Special Forces.

Nor is it clear who would take responsibility for such a programme — the Pentagon or the Central Intelligence Agency. Such covert operations have traditionally been run by the CIA at arm’s length from the administration in power, giving US officials the ability to deny knowledge of it.

Will they ask Negroponte about the Wolf Brigade, I wonder?

The very existence of the Wolf Brigade underscores the criminality of the US occupation and the utter fraud of the Bush administration claims to be bringing “liberation” and “democracy” to Iraq. Many of the commandos would have been involved in murder and torture on behalf of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The American military deliberately recruited them in order to make use of their experience in mass repression and has directly modeled their operations on those of right-wing death squads in Central America.

The main US advisor to the Wolf Brigade from the time of its formation until April 2005 was James Steele. Steele’s own biography, promoting him for the US lecture circuit, states that “he commanded the US military group in El Salvador during the height of the guerilla war” and “was credited with training and equipping what was acknowledged to be the best counter-terrorist force in the region”. In a 12-year campaign of murder and repression, the Salvadoran units, trained and advised by people like Steele, killed over 70,000 people.

Media outlets like the WaPo can gloss the death squads over as

…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.

But the ‘Salvador Option’ was deliberate US policy in Iraq, just as in Central America: that the psychopaths recruited, licensed and trained by Negroponte and his aides have now gone totally feral and out of US control in no way negates that original responsibility.

Of the memories of death and mutilation I witnessed in El Salvador, the sight of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her 16-year-old daughter with their brains blown across the neatly cropped lawn of their house, is the one that still haunts the most. They were among the country’s leading intellectuals, and I knew them well.

~

Hassan an-Ni’ami, an outspoken anti-occupation cleric, was seized by police commandos in Baghdad in late May. His hideously tortured body was dumped at a morgue 12 hours later, with police handcuffs still attached to his wrist. His chest had been burned, possibly with cigarettes. He had been whipped. His nose and one arm were broken. Horrifically, his kneecaps had been drilled through with what appeared to have been an electric drill. Finally, he had been shot multiple times in the chest and head.

Another man, Tahar Mohammed Suleiman al-Mashhadani, was detained by commandos in west Baghdad. His body was found 20 days later, “tortured almost beyond recognition” according to his family. A man calling himself “Abu Ali” told Beaumont he was detained by commandos in mid-May. He said he was beaten on his feet, hung by his arms from the ceiling and threatened with being sodomised with a bottle if he did not confess to being a “terrorist”.

Congressional Democrats can bring Bush and his entire cabal of armongers and ghouls down if they use the Negroponte hearings correctly: the evidence is all there if only they choose to grow a spine and call for it, if they not only subpoena winesses and evidence but take the bastards all the way to the Supreme Court if they have to.

If they do – and it’s a big if – appointing Negroponte could be turn out to be one of the dumbest things Bush has ever done, and he’s done quite a few.

Read more: US politics, Negroponte, State Department, Iraq, Central America, Death Squads. Confirmation hearings