Pentagon “Cracking Down” on “Salvador Option” Death Squads It Created

By Kurt Nimmo

"How soon we forget, that is if we noticed in the first place.

It was January 14, 2005, when Michael Hirsh and John Barry, writing for Newsweek, told us about the possibility of the Pentagon implementing the so-called “Salvador Option” in Iraq. Following the “model” of the “Salvador Option,” dispatching death squads “to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers,” as was prosecuted under Reagan in El Salvador, “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.”.....

If you read USA Today this morning, you would come away with the impression Iraq’s Shi’ites—most notably the politically expedient and oft-demonized Muqtada al-Sadr and his al-Mahdi Army—came up with the idea to hunt down and slaughter Sunni insurgents, supporters, and obviously no small number of innocent bystanders all on their lonesome.

In addition, we are told, al-Sadr’s Shi’a followers are attacking U.S. forces in Iraq with IEDs manufactured from Iranian parts. “The new Iraqi-U.S. security plan launched this month focuses on disarming the radical Shiite cleric’s Mahdi Army, which the U.S. military accuses of setting roadside bombs, infiltrating government ministries and conducting mass kidnappings and murders. Several Mahdi Army leaders have been arrested in recent weeks,” reports USA Today, a rather daffy declaration, as Iraqi Shi’ites “infiltrating” a puppet government consisting primarily of fellow Shi’ites is sort of like Texan farmers infiltrating the Texas Farm Bureau......

Counting on our persistent amnesia, or lack of attention altogether, the Pentagon expects us to believe, as the miscreant Krauthammer expects us to believe, that Iraq’s death squads are a homegrown phenomenon, when in fact there is plenty of evidence they are trained and coordinated by the Pentagon. It is not merely happenstance or “ancient animosities” driving the current wave of sectarian slaughter in Iraq. As Max Fuller reported last November, al-Sadr’s al-Mahdi Army has worked closely with Interior Ministry commandos, mostly notably in Balad in October.

Silverstein would have us believe the rise of Shi’a death squads reveals “American blindness, incompetence, and cynicism,” when in fact it reveals a concerted effort to destroy the country, with the help of Shi’a militias, apparently including on occasion al-Sadr’s faithful, myopically following their own anti-Sunni (or rather anti-Ba’athists) agenda."