Bush’s Death Squads

[struggle4progress]

By Robert Parry

<snip> As a centerpiece of this tougher strategy to pacify Iraq, Bush is contemplating the adoption of the brutal practices that were used to suppress leftist peasant uprisings in Central America in the ’80s. The Pentagon is “intensively debating” a new policy for Iraq called the “Salvador option,” Newsweek magazine reported on January 9. <snip>

The insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala were crushed through the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians. In Guatemala, about 200,000 people perished, including what a truth commission later termed a genocide against Mayan Indians in the Guatemalan highlands. In El Salvador, about 70,000 died including massacres of whole villages, such as the slaughter carried out by a U.S.-trained battalion against hundreds of men, women and children in and around the town of El Mozote in 1981. <snip>

Bush finds himself facing a narrowing list of very tough choices. He could acknowledge his mistakes and seek international help in extricating U.S. forces from Iraq. But he abhors admitting errors, even small ones.

Instead Bush appears to be upping the ante, expanding the war by having Iraqi Kurds and Shiites kill Sunnis. This is a prescription for civil war or genocide.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1872/

[ixion]

1. okay, someone please explain to me how using

... torture, cross-border death squads, and even collective punishments to defeat perceived enemies in Iraq and around the world.
is NOT terrorism.

And further, how can this be defined as counter-terrorism, when, in fact, it is terrorism by defintion.

Seriously, that people allow these arguments to even go on when they are flawed at the premise is beyond me.

[struggle4progress]

6. Of course it's terrorism. And of course its proponents try to ..,

... gloss over their crimes with doublespeak.

[PROGRESSIVE1]

2. Should Bush use "death squads" to "wipe out" the "opposition"...

and kill thousands of innocent Iraqis, then he can truthfully be put with such horrible "people" as Pol Pot and DAS FUHRER.

:grr:

[rkc3]

3. And with people like his father and Ronald Reagan - who did the same

fucking thing in Central America.

[Briar]

5. He has already earned his place with them.

100,000 innocent Iraqis, thousands of Afghans, and still counting.

[Dr.Phool]

4. Hey, it worked fine for Daddy.

And aren't all the same players from back then in this administration?

[struggle4progress]

7. Elliott Abrams

<snip> Abrams is one of the signers of the January 26, 1998, Project for the New American Century <snip>

In 1991, Abrams was indicted by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor for giving false testimony before Congress in 1987 about his role in illicitly raising money for the Nicaraguan Contras. He pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses of withholding information to Congress in order to avoid a trial and a possible jail term.

He was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush along with a number of other Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas night 1992.

From the December 3, 2002, Department of State Press Release:

Elliott Abrams was appointed Dec. 3, 2002, as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs, including Arab/Israel relations and U.S. efforts to promote peace and security in the region. <snip>

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Elliott_Abrams


Some older links:

Elliott Abrams: It's Back!
Posted June 14, 2001

<snip> One Abrams specialty was massacre denial. During a Nightline appearance in 1985, he was asked about reports that the US-funded Salvadoran military had slaughtered civilians at two sites the previous summer. Abrams maintained that no such events had occurred. And had the US Embassy and the State Department conducted an investigation? "My memory," he said, "is that we did, but I don't want to swear to it, because I'd have to go back and look at the cables." But there had been no State Department inquiry; Abrams, in his lawyerly fashion, was being disingenuous. Three years earlier, when two American journalists reported that an elite, US-trained military unit had massacred hundreds of villagers in El Mozote, Abrams told Congress that the story was commie propaganda, as he fought for more US aid to El Salvador's military. The massacre, as has since been confirmed, was real. And in 1993 after a UN truth commission, which examined 22,000 atrocities that occurred during the twelve-year civil war in El Salvador, attributed 85 percent of the abuses to the Reagan-assisted right-wing military and its death-squad allies, Abrams declared, "The Administration's record on El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement." Tell that to the survivors of El Mozote.

But it wasn't his lies about mass murder that got Abrams into trouble. After a contra resupply plane was shot down in 1986, Abrams, one of the coordinators of Reagan's pro-contra policy (along with the NSC's Oliver North and the CIA's Alan Fiers), appeared several times before Congressional committees and withheld information on the Administration's connection to the secret and private contra-support network. He also hid from Congress the fact that he had flown to London (using the name "Mr. Kenilworth") to solicit a $10 million contribution for the contras from the Sultan of Brunei. At a subsequent closed-door hearing, Democratic Senator Thomas Eagleton blasted Abrams for having misled legislators, noting that Abrams's misrepresentations could lead to "slammer time." Abrams disagreed, saying, "You've heard my testimony." Eagleton cut in: "I've heard it, and I want to puke." On another occasion, Republican Senator Dave Durenberger complained, "I wouldn't trust Elliott any further than I could throw Ollie North." Even after Abrams copped a plea with Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, he refused to concede that he'd done anything untoward. Abrams's Foggy Bottom services were not retained by the First Bush, but he did include Abrams in his lame-duck pardons of several Iran/contra wrongdoers.

Abrams was as nasty a policy warrior as Washington had seen in decades. He called foes "vipers." He said that lawmakers who blocked contra aid would have "blood on their hands"--while he defended US support for a human-rights-abusing government in Guatemala. When Oliver North was campaigning for the Senate in 1994 and was accused of having ignored contra ties to drug dealers, Abrams backed North and claimed "all of us who ran that program...were absolutely dedicated to keeping it completely clean and free of any involvement by drug traffickers." Yet in 1998 the CIA's own inspector general issued a thick report noting that the Reagan Administration had collaborated with suspected drug traffickers while managing the secret contra war. <snip>

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010702&s=corn


Elliott Abrams appointed to NSC (July 2001)

Controversial figures associated with the contra aid scandals of the 1980s keep resurfacing. First it was John Negroponte, US ambassador to Honduras from 1981-1985, who helped smooth the route for weapons and other supplies for the Nicaraguan contras then based in that country. President George Bush has nominated him for the post of US ambassador to the United Nations where human rights issues will be high on the agenda.

Then it was Otto Juan Reich who headed up a public diplomacy office in the Reagan White House, carrying out public relations efforts for the contra political cause -- at tax-payers' expense. He is Bush's choice for Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, though broad opposition to his nomination has apparently postponed formal action from the White House (see CAMR, Vol. 21, No. 2, April 2001).

Now comes the re-emergence of Elliott Abrams to a policy-making position in the executive branch. Abrams has been named senior director for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations at the National Security Council. <snip>

http://www.rtfcam.org/report/volume_21/No_3/article_3.htm


The Truth of El Mozote
by Mark Danner
The New Yorker, December 6, 1993.
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Danner/1993/truthelmoz01.html