PART II- The Pentagon’s Salvador Option: The Deployment of Death Squads in Iraq and Syria
By: Michel
Chossudovsky, Global Research, August 16th, 2011
This present essay (Part II below) focusses on the
history of the Pentagon's "Salvador Option" in Iraq and its relevance
to Syria.The program was implemented under the tenure of John D. Negroponte,
who served as US ambassador to Iraq (June 2004-April 2005). The current
ambassador to Syria, Robert S. Ford was part of Negroponte’s team in Baghdad in
2004-2005.
Syria: Overview and Recent Developments
The Western media has played a central role in
obfuscating the nature of foreign interference in Syria including outside
support to armed insurgents. In chorus they have described recent events in
Syria as a “peaceful protest movement” directed against the government of
Bashar Al Assad, when the evidence amply confirms that Islamic paramilitary
groups have infiltrated the rallies.
Israel’s Debka Intelligence news, while avoiding the
issue of an armed insurgency, tacitly acknowledges that Syrian forces are being
confronted by an organized paramilitary: “[Syrian forces] are now running into
heavy resistance: Awaiting them are anti-tank traps and fortified barriers
manned by protesters armed with heavy machine guns”. Since when are peaceful civilian protesters armed
with “heavy machine guns” and “anti-tank traps”?
Recent developments in Syria point to a full-fledged
armed insurgency, integrated by Islamist “freedom fighters” supported, trained
and equipped by NATO and Turkey’s High Command. According to Israeli
intelligence sources:
NATO headquarters in Brussels and the Turkish high
command are meanwhile drawing up plans for their first military step in Syria,
which is to arm the rebels with weapons for combating the tanks and helicopters
spearheading the Assad regime’s crackdown on dissent. Instead of repeating the
Libyan model of air strikes, NATO strategists are thinking more in terms of
pouring large quantities of anti-tank and anti-air rockets, mortars and heavy
machine guns into the protest centers for beating back the government armored
forces (DEBKAfile, NATO to give rebels anti-tank weapons, August 14, 2011) .
The delivery of weapons to the rebels is to be
implemented “overland, namely through Turkey and under Turkish army
protection….Alternatively, the arms would be trucked into Syria under Turkish
military guard and transferred to rebel leaders at pre-arranged rendezvous.”
(Ibid)
According to Israeli sources, which remain to be
verified, NATO and the Turkish High command, also contemplate the development
of a “jihad” involving the recruitment of thousands of Islamist “freedom
fighters”, reminiscent of the enlistment of Mujahideen to wage the CIA’s jihad
(holy war) in the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war:
Also discussed in
Brussels and Ankara, our sources report, is a campaign to enlist thousands of
Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight
alongside the Syrian rebels. The Turkish army would house these volunteers,
train them and secure their passage into Syria
(Ibid).
These various
developments point towards the possible involvement of Turkish troops inside
Syria, which could potentially lead to a broader military
confrontation between Syria and Turkey as well as a full-fledged “humanitarian”
military intervention by NATO.
In recent developments, Islamist death squads have
penetrated the port city of Latakia’s Ramleh district, which includes a
Palestinian refugee camp of some 10,000 residents. These armed gunmen which
include rooftop snipers are terrorizing the local population.
In a cynical twist, the Western media has presented the
Islamist paramilitary groups in Latakia as “Palestinian dissidents” and
“activists” defending themselves against Syrian armed forces. In this regard,
the actions of armed gangs directed against the Palestinian community in Ramleh
visibly seeks to foment political conflict between Palestine and Syria. Several
Palestinian personalities have sided with the Syrian “protest movement”, while
casually ignoring the fact that the “pro-democracy” death squads are covertly
supported by Israel and Turkey.
Turkey’s foreign
minister Ahmet Davutoglu has intimated that Ankara could consider military
action against Syria if the Al Assad government doesn’t cease “immediately and
unconditionally” its actions against “protesters”. In a bitter irony, the
Islamist fighters operating inside Syria who are terrorizing the civilian
population, are trained and financed by the Turkish Erdogan government.
Meanwhile, US, NATO and Israeli military planners have
outlined the contours of a humanitarian military campaign, in which Turkey (the
second largest military force inside NATO) would play a central role.
On August 15, Tehran reacted to the unfolding crisis in
Syria, stating that “events in Syria should be considered only as internal
affairs of that country and accused the West and its allies with trying to
destabilize Syria, in order to make the case for its eventual occupation” (Iran
Foreign ministry Statement, quoted in Iran urges West to stay out of Syria’s
‘internal matters’ Todayszaman.com, August 15, 2011).
We are at
dangerous crossroads: Were a military operation to be launched against Syria,
the broader Middle East Central Asian region extending from North Africa and
the Eastern Mediterranean to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border with China would
be engulfed in the turmoil of an extended war. A war on Syria could evolve
towards a US-NATO military campaign directed against Iran, in which Turkey and
Israel would be directly involved.
It is crucial to spread the word and break the channels
of media disinformation. A critical and unbiased understanding of what is
happening in Syria is of crucial importance in reversing the tide of military
escalation towards a broader regional war.
Background: America’s Ambassador Robert S. Ford Arrives
in Damascus (Jan. 2011)
US Ambassador
Robert Ford arrived in Damascus in late January 2011 at the height of the
protest movement in Egypt. America’s previous Ambassador to Syria was recalled by
Washington following the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafick
Hariri, which was blamed, without evidence, on the government of Bashar Al
Assad.
The author was in Damascus on January 27, 2011 when
Washington’s Envoy presented his credentials to the Al Assad government.
At the outset of my visit to Syria in January 2011, I
reflected on the significance of this diplomatic appointment and the role it
might play in a covert process of political destabilization. I did not,
however, foresee that this process would be implemented within less than two
months following the instatement of Robert S. Ford as US Ambassador to Syria.
The reinstatement of a US ambassador in Damascus, but
more specifically the choice of Robert S. Ford as US ambassador, bears a direct
relationship to the onset of the protest movement in mid-March against the
government of Bashar al Assad.
Robert S. Ford was
the man for the job. As “Number Two” at the US embassy in Baghdad (2004-2005)
under the helm of Ambassador John D. Negroponte, he played a key role in
implementing the Pentagon’s “Iraq Salvador Option”. The latter
consisted in supporting Iraqi death squadrons and paramilitary forces modeled
on the experience of Central America.
The Western media has misled public opinion on the nature
of the Arab protest movement by failing to address the support provided by the
US State Department as well as US foundations (including the National Endowment
for Democracy (NED)) to selected pro-US opposition groups. Known and documented, the U.S.
State Department “has been funding opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad,
since 2006 (U.S. admits funding Syrian opposition – World – CBC News April 18,
2011).
The protest
movement in Syria was upheld by the media as part of the “Arab Spring”,
presented to public opinion as a pro-democracy protest movement which spread
spontaneously from Egypt and the Maghreb to the Mashriq. The fact of the matter
is that these various country initiatives were closely timed and coordinated (Michel
Chossudovsky, The Protest Movement in Egypt: “Dictators” do not Dictate, They
Obey Orders, Global Research, January 29, 2011).
There is reason to
believe that events in Syria, however, were planned well in advance in
coordination with the process of regime change in other Arab countries
including Egypt and Tunisia. The outbreak of the protest movement in the
southern border city of Daraa was carefully timed to follow the events in
Tunisia and Egypt.
It is worth noting
that the US Embassy in various countries has played a central role in
supporting opposition groups. In Egypt, for instance, the April 6 Youth
Movement was supported directly by the US embassy in Cairo.
Who is Ambassador Robert Stephen Ford?
Since his arrival in Damascus in late January 2011,
Ambassador Robert S. Ford played a central role in laying the groundwork as
well as establishing contacts with opposition groups. A functioning US embassy in Damascus was seen as a
precondition for carrying out a process of political destabilization leading to
“regime change”.
Ambassador Robert S., Ford is no ordinary diplomat. He
was ambassador to Algeria before his appointment as U.S. representative in
January 2004 to the Shiite city of Najaf in Iraq. Najaf was the stronghold of
the Mahdi army. A few months later he was appointed “Number Two Man” (Minister Counsellor for Political
Affairs), at the US embassy in Baghdad at the outset of John Negroponte’s
tenure as US Ambassador to Iraq (June 2004- April 2005). Ford subsequently
served under Negroponte’s successor Zalmay Khalilzad.
Negroponte’s mandate as US ambassador to Iraq (together
with Robert S. Ford) was to coordinate out of the US embassy, the covert support to death squads
and paramilitary groups in Iraq with a view to fomenting sectarian violence and
weakening the resistance movement. Robert S. Ford as “Number Two”
(Minister Counselor for Political Affairs) at the US Embassy played a central
role in this endeavor. To understand Robert Ford’s mandate in both Baghdad and
subsequently in Damascus, it is important to reflect briefly on the history of
US covert operations and the central role played by John D. Negroponte.
Negroponte and the “Salvador Option”
John Negroponte
had served as US ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. As
Ambassador in Tegucigalpa, he played a key role in supporting and supervising
the Nicaraguan Contra mercenaries who were based in Honduras. The cross border
Contra attacks into Nicaragua claimed some 50 000 civilian lives.
During the same period, Negroponte was instrumental in
setting up the Honduran military death squads, “operating with Washington
support, [they] assassinated hundreds of opponents of the US-backed regime”
(Bill Vann, Bush Nominee linked to Latin American Terrorism, by Bill Vann,
Global Research, November 2001, www.globalresearch.ca/articles/VAN111A.html).
“Under the rule of General Gustavo Alvarez Martnez,
Honduras’s military government was both a close ally of the Reagan
administration and was
“disappearing” dozens of political opponents in classic death squad fashion.
In a 1982 letter to The Economist, Negroponte wrote that it was “simply untrue
to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras.” The Country
Report on Human Rights Practices that his embassy sent to the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee took the same line, insisting that there were “no political
prisoners in Honduras” and that the “Honduran government neither condones nor
knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature.”
Yet according to a four-part series in the Baltimore Sun
in 1995, in 1982 alone the Honduran press ran 318 stories of murders and
kidnappings by the Honduran military. The Sun described the activities of a
secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 316, that used “shock and
suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and,
when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves.”
On August 27,
1997, CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz released a 211-page classified
report entitled “Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the
1980′s: “This report was partly declassified on Oct. 22, 1998,
in response to demands by the Honduran human rights ombudsman. Opponents of
Negroponte are demanding that all Senators read the full report before voting
on his nomination to the position of US Permanent Representative to the UN”
(Peter Roff and James Chapin, Face-off: Bush’s Foreign Policy Warriors, Global
Research November 2001, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ROF111A.html )
John Negroponte- Robert S. Ford. The Iraq “Salvador
Option”
In January 2005, following Negroponte’s appointment as US
ambassador to Iraq, the Pentagon confirmed in a story leaked to Newsweek that
it was “considering forming hit squads of Kurdish and Shia fighters to target
leaders of the Iraqi insurgency in a strategic shift borrowed from the American
struggle against left-wing guerrillas in Central America 20 years ago” (El
Salvador-style ‘death squads’ to be deployed by US against Iraq militants –
Times Online, January 10, 2005).
John Negroponte and Robert S. Ford at the US Embassy
worked closely together on the Pentagon’s project. Two other embassy officials,
namely Henry Ensher (Ford’s Deputy) and a younger official in the political
section, Jeffrey Beals, played an important role in the team “talking to a
range of Iraqis, including extremists” (See The New Yorker, March 26, 2007).
Another key individual in Negroponte’s team was James Franklin Jeffrey, America’s
ambassador to Albania (2002-2004). Jeffrey is currently the US Ambassador to
Iraq.
Negroponte also brought into the team one of his former
collaborators Colonel James Steele (ret) from his Honduras heyday:
Under the
“Salvador Option,” “Negroponte had assistance from his colleague from his days
in Central America during the 1980′s, Ret. Col James Steele. Steele, whose
title in Baghdad was Counselor for Iraqi Security Forces supervised the
selection and training of members of the Badr Organization and Mehdi Army, the
two largest Shi’ite militias in Iraq, in order to target the leadership and
support networks of a primarily Sunni resistance. Planned or not, these death
squads promptly spiraled out of control to become the leading cause of death in
Iraq.
Intentional or
not, the scores of tortured, mutilated bodies which turn up on the streets of
Baghdad each day are generated by the death squads whose impetus was John
Negroponte. And it is this U.S.-backed sectarian violence which largely led to
the hell-disaster that Iraq is today (Dahr Jamail, Managing Escalation: Negroponte and Bush’s
New Iraq Team, Antiwar.com, January 7, 2007).
John Negroponte described Robert Ford while at the
embassy in Baghdad, as “one of these very tireless people … who didn’t mind
putting on his flak jacket and helmet and going out of the Green Zone to meet
contacts.” Robert S. Ford is fluent in both Arabic and Turkish. He was
dispatched by Negroponte to undertake strategic contacts:
[O]ne 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 (Newsweek, January 8, 2005).
The plan had the support of the US appointed Iraqi
government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. The Pentagon declined to comment, but
one insider told Newsweek: “What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as
we are. We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents.
Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing.”
Hit squads would be controversial and would probably be
kept secret. The experience of the so-called “death squads” in Central America
remains raw for many even now and helped to sully the image of the United
States in the region.
…. John Negroponte, the US Ambassador in Baghdad, had a
front-row seat at the time as Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85.
Death squads were a brutal feature of Latin American
politics of the time. In Argentina in the 1970s and Guatemala in the 1980s, soldiers
wore uniform by day but used unmarked cars by night to kidnap and kill those
hostile to the regime or their suspected sympathizers.
In the early 1980s President Reagan’s Administration
funded and helped to train Nicaraguan contras based in Honduras with the aim of
ousting Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime. The Contras were equipped using money
from illegal American arms sales to Iran, a scandal that could have toppled Mr.
Reagan.
It was in El Salvador that the United States trained
small units of local forces specifically to target rebels.
The thrust of the
Pentagon proposal in Iraq, according to Newsweek, is to follow that model and
direct US Special Forces teams to advise, support and train Kurdish Peshmerga
fighters and Shia militiamen to target leaders of the Sunni insurgency.
It is unclear whether the main aim of the missions would
be to assassinate the rebels or kidnap them and take them away for
interrogation. Any mission
in Syria would probably be undertaken by US Special Forces. Nor is it
clear who would take responsibility for such a program — the Pentagon or the
Central Intelligence Agency.
Such covert operations have traditionally been run by the CIA at arm’s length
from the administration in power, giving US officials the ability to deny
knowledge of it (Times Online).
Under Negroponte’s
helm at the US Embassy in Baghdad, a wave of covert civilian killings and
targeted assassinations was unleashed. Engineers, medical doctors, scientists
and intellectuals were also targeted. The objective was to create factional
divisions between Sunni, Shiite, Kurds and Christians, as well as weed out
civilian support for the Iraqi resistance. The Christian community was one of
the main targets of the assassination program.
The Pentagon’s
objective also consisted in training an Iraqi Army, Police and Security Forces,
which would carry out a homegrown “counterinsurgency” program (unofficially) on
behalf of the U.S.
The Role of General David Petraeus
A “Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq”
(MNSTC) was established under the command of General David Petraeus with the
mandate to train and equip a local Iraqi Army, Police and Security forces.
General David Petraeus’s (who was appointed by Obama to head the CIA in July
2011), assumed the command of the MNSTC in June 2004 at the very outset of
Negroponte’s tenure as ambassador.
The MNSTC was an integral part of the Pentagon’s
“Operation Salvador Iraq” under the helm of Ambassador John Negroponte. It was
categorized as an exercise in counterinsurgency. At the end of Petraeus’ term, the MNSTC had trained some
100,000 Iraqi Security Forces, police, etc., which constituted a body of local
military personnel to be used to target the Iraqi resistance as well as its
civilian supporters.
From Baghdad to
Damascus: The Syria “Salvador Option”
While conditions in Syria are markedly different to those
in Iraq, Robert S. Ford’s stint as “Number Two Man” at the US Embassy in
Baghdad has a direct bearing on the nature of his activities in Syria including
his contacts with opposition groups.
In early July, US
Ambassador Robert Ford travelled to Hama and had meetings with members of the
protest movement (Low-key U.S. diplomat transforms Syria policy – The
Washington Post, July 12, 2011). Reports confirm that Robert Ford had numerous
contacts with opposition groups both before and after his July trip to Hama. In
a recent statement (August 4), he confirmed that the embassy will continue
“reaching out” to opposition groups in defiance of the Syrian authorities.
General David Petraeus: President Obama’s New Head of the
CIA
Obama’s newly appointed CIA head, David Petraeus who led
the MNSTC. “Counterinsurgency”
program in Baghdad in 2004 in coordination with Ambassador John Negroponte, is
slated to play a key intelligence role in relation to Syria –including covert
support to opposition forces and “freedom fighters”, the infiltration of Syrian
intelligence and armed forces, etc. These tasks would be carried out in liaison
with Ambassador Robert S. Ford. Both men worked together in Iraq; they were
part of Negroponte’s extended team in Baghdad in 2004-2005.
© Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research
