Newsweek tries to Sanitize its own reporting on the Salvador Option in Iraq

Horhey · Oct 8, 2012

Journalist Mark Danner: 'The Salvador Option': Iraq, Memory, and the Death Squad War

[video=youtube_share;qkvw6Rxm-PY]http://youtu.be/qkvw6Rxm-PY[/video]

There's just so many things wrong with this piece by Christopher Dickey, but one at a time and it gets much much worse. Dickey just straight up lies in this article.

The original expose by Michael Hirsh and John Barry:

Newsweek: 'The Salvador Option'

The Pentagon May Put Special Forces-Led Assassination or Kidnapping Teams in Iraq

By Michael Hirsh and John Barry

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.

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.

Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won't turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."
Click to expand...

Now look what Dickey claims the article says:

Newsweek: Death-Squad Democracy

Are there parallels between El Salvador in the ‘80s and Iraq today? Maybe. But the‘lessons learned’ by Washington are the wrong ones

By Christopher Dickey

For starters, what’s been written about the NEWSWEEK report by Michael Hirsh and John Barry goes far beyond what the story says. It doesn’t suggest for a minute, as the BBC reported, that the Pentagon is looking to create “paramilitary” death squads. It’s about the possible training of elite units to snatch or kill very specific insurgent leaders.
Click to expand...

Well, it's pretty clear who's interests he serves. In the next thread Ill point out how he endorsed mass murder in the same article. He even said some his friends were killed by the death squads but it was still necessary. Like Chomsky's book title says:

Log in or Sign up

Newsweek tries to Sanitize its own reporting on the Salvador Option in Iraq

Horhey Well-Known Member

Share This Page

Log in or Sign up

Newsweek tries to Sanitize its own reporting on the Salvador Option in Iraq

Horhey Well-Known Member

Share This Page

Useful Searches