Thursday, February 16, 2006
Coincidence?
January 8, 2005
February 16, 2006
Is this what we've sunk to? Have we become the embodiment of what we're supposed to be fighting? You know, there was a time when something like this would have shocked me. A time when I wouldn't have even considered the United States would stoop so low as to do something like this. But not anymore. Now I just shake my head and chalk it up as yet another example of Bushco leadership. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
- 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. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")
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 Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.
February 16, 2006
- The Iraqi Interior Ministry has launched an investigation into an alleged police death squad.
Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority has claimed for more than a year that members of Iraq's Shiite Muslim-dominated security forces intimidate, kidnap and murder Sunnis, but the probe was triggered by Iraqi soldiers' chance discovery of 22 Iraqi men in police uniforms allegedly preparing to kill a Sunni man.
Is this what we've sunk to? Have we become the embodiment of what we're supposed to be fighting? You know, there was a time when something like this would have shocked me. A time when I wouldn't have even considered the United States would stoop so low as to do something like this. But not anymore. Now I just shake my head and chalk it up as yet another example of Bushco leadership. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
