The Pentagon is currently considering the option of creating, training and advising squads of Kurdish Peshmerga militiamen and Shiite combatants to kill rebel Sunni leaders and their sympathizers in Iraq.
"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," a Pentagon insider has told Newsweek.
The project is called "The Salvador Option" - adequately named after the Ronald Reagan death squad strategy used to battle left wing guerillas in El Salvador during the 1980s.
Won't they learn? Stop giving people the ability to kill, whether it be with weapons or military training, and sort out your own problems. I can just picture the headli(n)es in a few years time when they have to pay another poor group of people to kill the last lot they trained up and kitted out.
That's a bit of a genocidal coup to get involved in??... or at least 5 years ago it would have been a coup... with this administration.. it's the sort of thing we've come to expect on a weekly basis.
PMCs have done the dirty work in the past... now they're planning on training and assumably equipping foreign death squads?
I guess the orders allowing the torture of people were getting boring and they needed to spice things up a bit.
classic reagan era tactics. and they wonder why the muslim world despises the US. say hello to decades of civil war (and maybe a new US-trained anti-us muslim leader)
We point to the commies say they are bad and give a list...
Then they fall.
So we use that same list to build a 'safer' society and no one sees the irony.
1) KGB style ID cards. Which go a step further. 2) Stop and search for no reason. Papers please. 3) Death squads as normal business. 4) ... The list goes on....
Remember hearing how the US was the 'land of the free' during the fifties? And yet it had race segregation. Say one thing, do another. Business as usual.
Americans were really patriotic after WWII-- then they started abusing prescription medications in their new suburban homes and now they drive around in empty SUVs shouting 'We're # 1'. a very disturbing image to the rest of the world.
As for giving more money and arms to groups of militants, irregardless of what their current political status in relation to the US, is a very bad idea. I think some people missed the point of the earlier 'taliban 2.0' posts.
If the US keeps leaving loads of weapons around the globe, surely the leftovers get used on someone else- and often against the US themselves.
Take Afhganistan or Pakistan, for example. The CIA put LOTS of money into arming anti-soviet forces there. Now there is virtually no US presence, the people are stranded, and anti-US sentiment has risen. Blame this on the schools that breed the Mujahadeen (same as Afghanistan) where boys from suddenly-poor families are taken and brainwashed into becoming fighters.
It's like the US government is a big kid that leaves it's toys on the playground.
Not many people realise that Osama rose to popularity in Afghanistan because he used his Saudi family's wealth to build roads and gave money to the muslim schools after Soviet-Afghan war. He was favoured for helping rebuild their infra-structure, and, in turn, received loyalty from the warlords and their footsoldiers as well as the brainwashed students who do nothing but chant the Koran all day and don't understand a word of it.
FOr all of you that think this is a bad idea bah to you. From the start of the war US has been made to look like the bad guys with torturing prisoners or making them wear women panties on their head. But look at what they do to our prisoners they cut off their heads. They attack and kill the leaders we try to protect they are trying to disrupt the chances of a election. So i say go ahead and form the squad and kill as many as you can, what ever you need to do to end this war.
Just when you think we can't f*ck up our public relations more, we get surprised with another twist. I'm not going to get in too much of a twist over this as I understand that every possible straggly for winning in a war is going to be looked at and planned out. If they didn't look at every angle then they wouldn't be doing their jobs. Just because it's in the play book and some lightweight so called official wiped his ass on the new your post with it doesn’t mean it's going to happen. I bet that The US has a strategy for nuking Canada in their play book as well. Yes Bush is an ass but we are not nuking Canada.
When you look at the evidence from Ohio... who on earth wants a US style 'democratic' election anyway? It's a farce.
Whoever Bush and Cheney want to win that election.. will win it. No matter who people really vote for. And of course the mainsream corporate owned media are going to attribute 'torture' to the videos ridiculing Iraqis and not to the 'torture' that ends up in death.
Unarmed people getting shot happens in Iraq all the time, the bombing of innocent civilians happens (see very recent news) but you've only managed to retain the panties-on-head crap???
Uhhh.. So which is it?
Selective memory, victim of unbalanced media coverage or are you just in denial that Bush is a shithead and the current administration have f**ked everything up, both in foreign policy and domestic.
Now they're trying to appoint serious criminals in senior positions of power (like Kerik for instance!!) as well as friends who were on Enron's bankroll. (the new AG, forgot his name!).
How can you not see the corruption that's going on?? Does everything have to be televised via an infomedia (ABC,CNN,CBS,etc.) channel for you to accept that it's real??? Just curious what it would take for you to accept that Bush is a bad president.
(I'm certainly not saying Kerry would be any good either... personally, I think Kerry is part of the problem too!!)
they should just build hundreds of "McAbduld's" all over the country, make sure there's lots of super size meals to be handed out, and in 90 days or so, they'll all drop dead of liver failure and heart attacks. Problem solved.
I quote you: "So i say go ahead and form the squad and kill as many as you can, what ever you need to do to end this war."
Apart from the fact that you're an idiot for suggesting that the US throw its supposed values out the window to play hardball, look at the facts: Every time they did something like this to try and quell a problem, even if it took care of the problem in the short term, it just flared up in an even more ugly way down the road. Killing people only begets patient relatives whose life's mission is revenge. Another 9/11 anyone?
we create our own terrorist group. We are trying to fight a new kind of war the old way. Didn't the british try fighting our colonist the old way when we came up with a new type of warfare. Well we cannot listen to the Geneva convention anymore. We have to fight as same as the insurgents. I know some people might say "stooping to their level" Well that is what it takes to defeat such a enemy.
Are you kidding me?? We go in to get rid of terrorists and you want to create more. Perhaps you should look into a guy called Osama Bin Laden, He was our terrorist at one time. Some people never learn.
We never learn. NAZIS wanted to get rid of all JEWS and only tantamounted to be the most elaborative and strongest religious group in the world. Few years from now, Sunnis who are very strong in their faith will unite together and be just like JEWS; strong that is. Many dont undestand that, despite all this Sunni hating and bashing, was once directed to Shiites. NOw USA is making the biggest mistake of their lives. And I do believe it will be very very soon. Remember, hating Sunni's is not ahting Iraqi insurgents, but the most largest group of muslims in the world. So in other word every Sunni is a potential victim. And you know what happens when you corner a cat. Or is it the rat? No a sunni!
