Blackwater - the Death Squad(s) of Iraq

While the media takes the public on yet another OJ ride, the truth about Blackwater slides into the background.

Daily Kos and most blogs have been aware of Blackwater for some time, i.e.

CIA-Sponsored Death Squads Rampant in Iraq
by francislholland

Wed Sep 20, 2006 at 07:40:01 AM PDT

How could we have been so blind, decrying the scores of daily deaths of Iraqis without ever demanding the end of the CIA-sponsored death squads there? Many of us have been comparing the war in Iraq to Vietnam without focusing on the more obvious parallels to the modus operandi and US personnel that Iraq shares with the previous US-sponsored conflicts in the El Salvador and Guatemala of the 1980's. The difference is crucially important, because it is the key to the source of the rampant "unexplained" and "unattributed" deaths of Iraqis that we read of in the papers each day. To determine who is doing all the death-squad killing in Iraq, lets just add up what President has told us, factor in the post-Central America anti-insurgency team he has appointed, and then draw the dreadfully obvious and necessary conclusions.

For five years, the President has told us that:

(1) "I do think Iraq is a central front in the war on terror", [ http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/06/five_years/main1980081.shtml ] and he has said,

(2) "To win the war on terror, we must be able to detain, question and, when appropriate, prosecute terrorists captured here in America and on the battlefields around the world." [ http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/09/06/bush.speech/ ], and Bush further insists incessantly that he
(3) Must use "all the tools" of anti-insurgency in Iraq. [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060831-3.html ]
Meanwhile, each day even the MSM reports one or more Iraq stories to the effect that,
Authorities in the capital discovered the bodies of six men who were blindfolded, handcuffed and shot in the back of the head, police said. [ http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=6747 ]

[G]unmen, militias, and paramilitary armies have attacked buses and minivans, killing all aboard, and they have carried out mass kidnappings of scores of Iraqis at a time.[ http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,90616,00.html ]

Since early 2005, gruesome finds of groups of corpses, often showing signs of execution or torture, have been becoming increasingly common. [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5052138.stm ]
Although Bush hasn't specifically stated (to my knowledge) that death squads are of the death squads operating in the US's Iraq conflict is identical to the modus operandi of the US Government's counter-insurgency techniques in the Central America in the 1980's.
Amnesty International characterized the Salvadoran death squads as "official personnel acting in civilian clothes under the direction of superior officers." A 1989 Amnesty report, El Salvador "Death Squads"-A Government Strategy, identified a "persistent pattern of gross human rights violations by the , torture, disappearance and extrarbitrary arrestajudicial execution." Although human rights groups have continually linked death squad activities to the Salvadoran government, most U.S. media have reported on death squads as if they were a mysterious, independent force. This convenient fiction allows the U.S. government to continue providing massive military aid to the Salvadoran government as it commits horrendous cruelties-all in the name of promoting "democracy." [ http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Norman_Solomon/Human_Rights_USNS.html ]

To deal with the skyrocketing insurgency, the Pentagon is considering creating secret death squads in Iraq. Now, the Pentagon's brave new solution for democracy in the Middle East is to revisit the reprehensible "Salvador Option," the clandestine operation implemented by the Reagan White House in the 1980s in El Salvador.
According to Newsweek, "Back then, faced with losing a war against the Salvadoran rebels the US funded "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads which killed scores of innocent civilians." Today, according to an explosive new article in Newsweek, the Pentagon dusted off that model and has a proposal on the table to "advise, support and possibly train" secret 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." It's unclear whether the current proposed policy would direct the Iraqi squads to assassinate their targets or "snatch" them and send them to secret facilities for interrogation. In plain language: the squads would be either hit men or kidnapper/torturers. [ http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/20941/ ]
...
Blackwater is the Bush family's private army (funded at taxpayer expense of course), and like Hitler's SS they operate death squads everywhere they go. Everywhere the US goes a civil war follows - most often stimulated by the squads who create fictitious rivalry between groups.
How many private contractors are operating in Iraq? How long have the Iraqis been suffering and how many remain in captivity guarded by these cretins?