IRAQ WAR LOGS: Echoes of El Salvador in Tales of US-Approved Death Squads

[Panaconda]

Echoes of El Salvador in Tales of US-Approved Death Squads

by Patrick Cockburn

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The Pentagon will huff and puff with rage as it did over the Wikileaks release of US military documents about Afghanistan, when it took the contradictory position that there was little new in what has been leaked, but important sources of intelligence had somehow still been compromised.

The leaks are important because they prove much of what was previously only suspected but never admitted by the US army or explained in detail. It was obvious from 2004 that US forces almost always ignored cases of torture by Iraqi government forces, but this is now shown to have been official policy. Of particular interest to Iraqis, when Wikileaks releases the rest of its hoard of documents, will be to see if there is any sign of how far US forces were involved in death squad activities from 2004.

From the summer of 2004 Iraq slipped into a sectarian civil war of great savagery as al-Qa'ida launched attacks on the Shia who increasingly dominated the government. From late in 2004 Interior Ministry troops trained by the Americans were taking part in savage raids on Sunni or suspected Baathist districts. People prominent in Saddam Hussein's regime were arrested and disappeared for few days until their tortured bodies were dumped beside the roads.

Iraqi leaders whispered that the Americans were involved in the training of what were in fact death squads in official guise. It was said that US actions were modeled on counter-insurgency methods pioneered in El Salvador by US-trained Salvadoran government units.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/patrick-cockburn-echoes-of-el-salvador-in-tales-of-usapproved-death-squads-2114410.html