Wikileaks Gets Hold of US Special Forces Counterinsurgency Manual

[populistdriven]

Source: wikileaks

Wikileaks has released a sensitive 219 page US military counterinsurgency manual. The manual, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004), may be critically described as "what we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places". Its contents are both history defining for Latin America and, given the continued role of US Special Forces in the suppression of insurgencies, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, history making.

The leaked manual, which has been verified with military sources, is official US Special Forces doctrine. It advocates, under varying circumstances, training paramilitaries, pervasive surveillance, censorship, press control and restrictions on labor unions & political parties, warrantless searches, detainment without charge, the suspension of habeas corpus, bribery, employing terrorists or prosecuting people for terrorism who are not terrorists, running false flag operations and concealing human rights abuses from journalists. And it repeatedly advocates the use of "psychological operations" (propaganda) to make these and other "population & resource control" measures more palatable.

The content has been particularly informed by the long United States involvement in El Salvador. In 2005 a number of credible media reports suggested the Pentagon was intensely debating "the Salvador option" for Iraq.<1>. And according to New York Times Magazine:

The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, with which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it. According to an Amnesty International report in 2001, violations committed by the army and associated groups included extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, disappearances and torture. . . . Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred. As part of President Reagan's policy of supporting anti-Communist forces, hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of 55 Special Forces advisers, led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses.


Read more: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/How_to_train_death_squads_and_quash_revolutions_from_San_Salvador_to_you

---

Where is our "4th Estate" on this?

*Crickets*

[hatrack]

1. The 4th Estate? They're all busy covering Tim Russert's wake . . .

:silly:

[Alcibiades]

2. Training paramilitaries

I suppose part of the advantage of Iraq in their scheme is that they don't have to train paramilitaries--they were already there. The "Anbar Awakening" does remind one of the way death squads have been used in Latin America for 30 years.

[leftchick]

3. John Pilger's "War on Democracy" Film

well worth the viewing. The US has done this repeatedly in many countries. Why would Iraq be any different?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18236.htm

[FreepFryer]

5. I loved Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA". A tale of global incompetence. (n/t)

[Delphinus]

13. I *think*

I watched that - will have to see. Sometime last year I watched a John Pilger film that was set in South America, then read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. Not a good combination.

[followthemoney]

28. Well worth viewing, indeed

Thanks for the link.

[leftchick]

29. you are welcome!

can you imagine how well educated our children would be if shown these films by Pilger and allowed to read books like Blum, Zinn and Naomi Klein? It is all required for my boys.

:)

[FreepFryer]

4. The wikileaks site is currently dropping lots of connections. Really busy? DoS? (n/t)

[bad_robbie]

6. It's Slashdotted

Which is indistinguishable from a sufficiently advanced DoS attack.

[DBoon]

7. Wait until they bring this back home

after refining their techniques, I'm sure we will see this sort of thing back in the USA, should the populace become sufficiently dissatisfied with their rulers.

Don't ever think that the folks trained to do this to "brown people" won't ever do it to US citizens.

[yardwork]

16. It's been done for years in all the privately owned and operated prisons.

Why do we have drug laws that guarantee that the U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country on earth? To maintain those profits for Halliburton subsidiaries who run the prisons.

[JohnyCanuck]

17. Wait until they bring this back home?

More than likely they already have (IMHO).

It advocates, under varying circumstances, training paramilitaries, pervasive surveillance, censorship, press control and restrictions on labor unions & political parties, warrantless searches, detainment without charge, the suspension of habeas corpus, bribery, employing terrorists or prosecuting people for terrorism who are not terrorists,running false flag operations and concealing human rights abuses from journalists. And it repeatedly advocates the use of "psychological operations" (propaganda) to make these and other "population & resource control" measures more palatable.

Even experts at the U.S. bioweapons facility at Fort Detrick think that the anthrax which was used in the 2001 attacks came from their facility:

"In an e-mail obtained by FOX News, scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues.

"Then he said he had to look at a lot of samples that the FBI had prepared ... to duplicate the letter material," the e-mail reads. "Then the bombshell. He said that the best duplication of the material was the stuff made by (name redacted). He said that it was almost exactly the same … his knees got shaky and he sputtered, 'But I told the General we didn't make spore powder!'"

Indeed, 3 of the 4 suspects the FBI is investigating are employees of Fort Detrick, which is run by the Army.

SNIP

There is strong evidence that the anthrax attacks were a false flag attack. Indeed, the bioweapons expert who actually drafted the current bioweapons law (the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989) while working for President George H.W. Bush has said that he is convinced the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the later Military Commissions Act.

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2008/05/new-development-in-anthrax.html

[DBoon]

20. I stand corrected

I should have said "bring it back home in a systematic, massive well organized effort that includes thousands of disappearances, horrific large scale torture, and dismantling of our remaining democratic institutions and civil liberties."

As in the USA becomes Guatemala under Efrain Rios Monte

[grahamhgreen]

8. Link no work...

[Judi Lynn]

21. This might work:

http://www.networkmirror.com/0mlPNW6RNpCiYpgj/wikileaks.org/wiki/How_to_train_death_squads_and_quash_revolutions_from_San_Salvador_to_you.html

[populistdriven]

25. It's working again, they just got hammered with traffic earlier nt

[pattmarty]

9. Well, looks like we have finally become the Nazis.

If this shit doesn't parallel WWII with the Nazis and Japanese, then you're blind.

[AndyTiedye]

14. The Bush Family Always Were Nazis. They Bankrolled the REAL Nazis

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescott_Bush

[Aviation Pro]

10. Oh, you mean FM 31-20-3?

Yawn, downloadable through Army Knowledge Online (AKO). Boring read, try the Ranger Handbook for something more lively.

[digidigido]

11. Link is Down

[populistdriven]

26. Try it again, It's working now, the site was overwhelmed with traffic earlier nt

[oldskool]

12. Pandors box

Of course the link is down,just read the article. It seems to
me Pandora's Box is open.

[yardwork]

15. Read Naomi Klein's The Schock Doctrine.

The U.S. developed these manuals in the early 1960s and put them to work right away in Latin America, Vietnam, and elsewhere around the world. The torture techniques are based on psy-ops research funded by the U.S. government at universities in the 1950s. We learned a lot from the Nazis, and we've put it to use for decades.

[JohnyCanuck]

19. The Strategy of Tension

The Strategy of Tension
by Nafeez Ahmed

During the Cold War, indeed through to the late 1980s, the United States, United Kingdom, and Western European governments and secret services, participated in a sophisticated NATO-backed operation to engineer terrorist attacks inside Western Europe, to be blamed on the Soviet Union. The objective was to galvanize public opinion against leftwing policies and parties, and ultimately to mobilize popular support for purportedly anti-Soviet policies at home and abroad – most of which were really designed to legitimize brutal military interventions against nationalist independence movements in the “Third World”.

SNIP

Among the documents Ganser brings to attention is the classified Field Manual 30-31, with appendices FM 30-31A and FM 30-31B, authored by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to train thousands of stay-behind officers around the world. The field manual was published in the 1987 parliamentary report of the Italian parliamentary investigation into the terrorist activities of “P2”, the CIA-MI6 sponsored Italian anti-communist network. As Ganser observes: “FM 30-31 instructs the secret soldiers to carry out acts of violence in times of peace and then blame them on the Communist enemy in order to create a situation of fear and alertness. Alternatively, the secret soldiers are instructed to infiltrate the left-wing movements and then urge them to use violence.” In the manual’s own words:

“There may be times when Host Country Governments show passivity or indecision in the face of Communist subversion and according to the interpretation of the US secret services do not react with sufficient effectiveness… US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger. To reach this aim US army intelligence should seek to penetrate the insurgency by means of agents on special assignment, with the task of forming special action groups among the most radical elements of the insurgency… In case it has not been possible to successfully infiltrate such agents into the leadership of the rebels it can be useful to instrumentalise extreme leftist organizations for one’s own ends in order to achieve the above described targets… These special operations must remain strictly secret. Only those persons which are acting against the revolutionary uprising shall know of the involvement of the US Army…” (p. 234-297)

The existence of this secret operation exploded into public controversy when in August 1990 upon the admissions in parliament by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, the existence of ‘Gladio’ was exposed as a secret sub-section of Italian military-intelligence services, responsible for domestic bombings blamed on Italian Communists. Ganser documents in intricate detail how a subversive network created by elements of western intelligence services – particularly that of the US and UK - orchestrated devastating waves of terrorist attacks blamed on the Soviet Union, not only in Italy, but also in Spain, Germany, France, Turkey, Greece, i.e. throughout western Europe. Despite a number of European parliamentary inquiries; an European Union resolution on the Gladio phenomenon; NATO’s close-doors admissions to European ambassadors; confirmations of the international operation from senior CIA officials; and other damning documentary evidence; NATO, the CIA and MI6 have together consistently declined to release their secret files on the matter.

http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2007/05/strategy-of-tension.html

[Overseas]

18. K&R !! /nt

[Judi Lynn]

22. Thank you, bushmeat, for making this information available. It's important. n/t

[populistdriven]

27. Thanks! I hope someday the public will wake up to the damage we have caused nt

[tom_paine]

23. Looks like the Bushies have attacked the site or shut it down

(although I am willing to believe this was yet ANOTHER coincidence that just happened to serve Bushie interests)

In either case, the link is down.

[Kaleko]

24. It took a while but I just got through.

Here's the link again: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/How_to_train_death_squads_and_quash_revolutions_from_San_Salvador_to_you