Remember When They Talked About It Publicly?

‘The Salvador Option’
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq
By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
Updated: 8:59 p.m. ET Jan. 14, 2005

Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

Now, 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. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")

Black Spot has always loved him some Sargent Schultz. But his reputation has always preceeded him. He was definitely the Right man in the Right place and time.

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. 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, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the Defense department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding...

And then there's this:

US considers 'Salvador option' in Iraq
Plan modeled on Reagan-era support for Central American 'death-squads.'
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

...the squads would be composed of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen that would "target" Sunni insurgent leaders and their sympatizers. The move comes at a time when the BBC reports that the insurgency has developed into "near open warfare." Military experts believe that instead of containing the insurgents in Fallujah, the recent battle there spread them out across Iraq.

The Pentagon refused to comment on the Newsweek report, but according to The Times of London, one military insider said, "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."

The Times also points out that John Negroponte, current US Ambassador to Iraq, was also Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85. The US used Honduras in the 80s as a base to train Nicaraguan contras to fight against the then-Sandinista-led Nicaraguan government.

The Daily Telegraph reports that this plan, known as the 'Salvador option,' would aim not only to kill insurgents leaders, but to show their sympathizers that there is a price to be paid for their support.

One military source said: "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists. From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation..."

The most amazing thing is that these people talked about the Option- they threatened their Solution- before they did it. People did notice

Dear Leader never could do the math. In the past, his frat brothers have always bailed him out. Before it's all over this time, Poppy and his buddies the Emirs and the Royal House are going to have one devilish interest to pay.