Death Squads are Good!

Death Squads have, just as torture, an unfairly tarnished reputation. And I would like to give little background and also clarify why I think both are excellent methods to win hearts and minds among enemies of economic freedom and financial liberty, alternatively significantly reduce the hostile population.

Although death squads been used by before, during the 1930s, Hitler made extensive use of death squads, starting with the infamous Night of the Long Knives and in the 1950s the Shah of Iran used SAVAK death squads to kill thousands, the term "death squad" rose to notoriety during the 1970s and 1980s in Central and South America after the graduation of many fine men and women from "The School of the Americas*"

The Caravan of Death, an Army squad, roamed Chile in October 1973, following Augusto Pinochet's CIA backed coup.

And with the arrival of the Reagan administration, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative foreign policy experts saw a political opportunity to significantly expand Carter's Afghanistan policy into a more global "doctrine" and it was the Heritage Foundation that translated theory into concrete policy.

During the 80s the Reagan Doctrine was in full effect and John Dimitri Negroponte was from 1981 to 1985 U.S. ambassador to Honduras where Battalion 316 effectively reduced the number of socialists in the country.

On April 19, 2004, Negroponte was nominated by U.S. President George W. Bush to be the United States Ambassador to Iraq where he served to 2005 and he is now the first ever Director of National Intelligence.

So its no surprise to see a similar pattern in Iraq;

"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 sympathisers.

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."


And as we have seen, training shia militia is a great way to bring about peace and stability in Iraq and it is necessary for the US to win allies against Iran as Fredrik Malm points out.


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(*On September 20, 1996, the Pentagon released to the public seven training manuals prepared by the U.S. military and used between 1987 and 1991 for intelligence training courses in Latin America and at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA). A selection of excerpts was distributed to the press at that time. Declassified Army and CIA Manuals)

(*Now, "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation")