Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (55 page)

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Authors: Jeremy Scahill

 
Six months after Negroponte arrived, on January 8, 2005,
Newsweek
reported that the United States was employing a new approach to defeating the insurgency in Iraq, one that harkened back to Negroponte’s previous dirty work two decades earlier.
17
It was called “the Salvador option,” which “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.”
18
The idea seemed to be that the United States would seek to use Iraqi death squads to hunt anti-occupation insurgents, while at the same time siphoning resources from the resistance and encouraging sectarian fighting. While Rumsfeld called the
Newsweek
report (which he admitted to not having read) “nonsense,”
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the situation on the ground painted a different picture.
 
By February 2005, the
Wall Street Journal
reported from Baghdad that about fifty-seven thousand Iraqi soldiers were operating in “planned units” that were “the result of careful preparation this summer between the U.S. and Iraqi commanders.”
20
At the same time, the country saw the emergence of militias “commanded by friends and relatives of [Iraqi] cabinet officers and tribal sheiks—[they] go by names like the Defenders of Baghdad, the Special Police Commandos, the Defenders of Khadamiya and the Amarah Brigade. The new units generally have the backing of the Iraqi government and receive government funding. . . . Some Americans consider them a welcome addition to the fight against the insurgency—though others worry about the risks.”
21
U.S. commanders referred to them as “pop-up” units and estimated they numbered fifteen thousand fighters. “I’ve begun calling them ‘Irregular Iraqi ministry-directed brigades,’” said Maj. Chris Wales, who was tasked in January 2005 with identifying the units.
22
The
Wall Street Journal
identified at least six of these militias, one with “several thousand soldiers” lavishly armed with “rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, mortar tubes and lots of ammunition.” One militia, the “Special Police Commandos,” was founded by Gen. Adnan Thabit, who took part in the failed 1996 coup plot against Saddam Hussein. Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who in 2005 was “overseeing the massive U.S. effort to help train and equip Iraqi military units,” told the
Journal
he gave Thabit’s unit funding to fix up its base and buy vehicles, ammunition, radios, and more weapons. “I decided this was a horse to back,” Petraeus said.
23
 
Upon his arrival in Baghdad, Negroponte joined up with other U.S. officials who were veterans of the U.S. “dirty wars” in Central America—among them Bremer’s ex-deputy, James Steele, who had been one of the key U.S. military officials managing Washington’s brutal “counterinsurgency” campaign in El Salvador in the 1980s.
24
“The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, to which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980,” wrote journalist Peter Maass at the time in
The New York Times Magazine
25
:
 
 
The cost was high—more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it. According to an Amnesty International report in 2001, violations committed by the army and its associated paramilitaries included “extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, ‘disappearances’ and torture. . . . Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred.” As part of President Reagan’s policy of supporting anti-Communist forces, hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of 55 Special Forces advisers, led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses. There are far more Americans in Iraq today—some 140,000 troops in all—than there were in El Salvador, but U.S. soldiers and officers are increasingly moving to a Salvador-style advisory role. In the process, they are backing up local forces that, like the military in El Salvador, do not shy away from violence. It is no coincidence that this new strategy is most visible in a paramilitary unit that has Steele as its main adviser; having been a key participant in the Salvador conflict, Steele knows how to organize a counterinsurgency campaign that is led by local forces. He is not the only American in Iraq with such experience: the senior U.S. adviser in the Ministry of Interior, which has operational control over the commandos, is Steve Casteel, a former top official in the Drug Enforcement Administration who spent much of his professional life immersed in the drug wars of Latin America. Casteel worked alongside local forces in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia.
26
 
 
Newsweek
described the “Salvador option” in Iraq as the United States using “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.”
27
The magazine also reported that then-interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi “is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option.”
28
This was interesting, given that the
New York Times
reported, “Negroponte had taken a low-key approach, choosing to remain in the shadows in deference to Ayad Allawi.”
29
 
Though allegations that the United States was engaged in Salvador-type operations in Iraq predate Negroponte’s tenure in Baghdad, they did seem to intensify significantly once he arrived. As early as January 2004, journalist Robert Dreyfuss reported on the existence of a covert U.S. program in Iraq that resembled “the CIA’s Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam, Latin America’s death squads or Israel’s official policy of targeted murders of Palestinian activists.”
30
The United States, Dreyfuss reported, had established a $3 billion “black” fund hidden within the $87 billion Iraq appropriation approved by Congress in November 2003. The money would be used to create “a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi exile groups. Experts say it could lead to a wave of extrajudicial killings, not only of armed rebels but of nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists.”
31
The former CIA chief of counterterrorism, Vincent Cannistraro, said U.S. forces in Iraq were working with key members of Saddam Hussein’s defunct intelligence apparatus. “They’re setting up little teams of Seals and Special Forces with teams of Iraqis, working with people who were former senior Iraqi intelligence people, to do these things,” Cannistraro said.
32
“The big money would be for standing up an Iraqi secret police to liquidate the resistance,” said John Pike, an expert on covert military budgets. “And it has to be politically loyal to the United States.”
33
 
Veteran journalist Allan Nairn, who exposed U.S.-backed death squads in Central America in the 1980s, said whether Negroponte was involved with the “Salvador option” in Iraq or not, “These programs, which backed the killing of foreign civilians, it’s a regular part of U.S. policy. It’s ingrained in U.S. policy in dozens upon dozens of countries.”
34
Duane Clarridge, who ran the CIA’s “covert war against communism in Central America from Honduras,” visited his old colleague Negroponte in Baghdad in the summer of 2004. In Iraq, “[Negroponte] was told to play a low-key role and let the Iraqis be out front,” Clarridge told the
New York Times
. “And that’s what he likes to do, anyway.”
35
According to the
Times
, “Negroponte shifted more than $1 billion to build up the Iraqi Army from reconstruction projects, a move prompted by his experience with the frailty of the South Vietnamese Army.”
36
 
Negroponte called the connection of his name to the “Salvador option” in Iraq “utterly gratuitous.”
37
But human rights advocates who closely monitored his career said the rise in death-squad-type activity in Iraq during Negroponte’s tenure in Baghdad was impossible to overlook. “What we’re seeing is that the U.S. military is losing the war [in Iraq], and so the Salvador option was really a policy of death squads,” said Andres Contreris, Latin American program director of the human rights group Non-violence International. “It’s no coincidence that Negroponte, having been the Ambassador in Honduras, where he was very much engaged in this kind of support for death squads, was the Ambassador in Iraq, and this is the kind of policy that was starting to be implemented there, which is not just going after the resistance itself but targeting for repression and torture and assassination the underlying support base, the family members, and those in the communities where the resistance is. These kinds of policies are war crimes.”
38
 
Negroponte’s time in Iraq was short-lived—on February 17, 2005, President Bush nominated him as the first Director of National Intelligence. Some would say Negroponte had a job to do in Iraq, he did it, and then left. By May of that year, he was back in the United States, while reports increasingly appeared describing an increase in death-squad-style activity in Iraq. “Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country’s divide along ethnic and sectarian lines,” the
Washington Post
reported a few months after Negroponte left Iraq.
39
“In 2005, we saw numerous instances where the behavior of death squads was very similar, uncannily similar to that we had observed in other countries, including El Salvador,” said John Pace, a forty-year United Nations diplomat who served as the Human Rights Chief for the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq during Negroponte’s time in the country. “They first started as a kind of militia, sort of organized armed groups, which were the military wing of various factions.”
40
Eventually, he said, “Many of them [were] actually acting as official police agents as a part of the Ministry of Interior. . . . You have these militias now with police gear and under police insignia basically carrying out an agenda which really is not in the interest of the country as a whole. They have roadblocks in Baghdad and other areas, they would kidnap other people. They have been very closely linked with numerous mass executions.”
41
 
Shortly before Negroponte left Iraq, former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter predicted that “the Salvador Option will serve as the impetus for all-out civil war. In the same manner that the CPA-backed assassination of Baathists prompted the restructuring and strengthening of the Sunni-led resistance, any effort by US-backed Kurdish and Shia assassination teams to target Sunni resistance leaders will remove all impediments for a general outbreak of ethnic and religious warfare in Iraq. It is hard as an American to support the failure of American military operations in Iraq. Such failure will bring with it the death and wounding of many American service members, and many more Iraqis.”
42
Ritter’s vision would appear prophetic in the ensuing months, as Iraq was hit with an unprecedented and sustained level of violence many began describing as an all-out civil war.
 
In October 2005, correspondent Tom Lasseter from the Knight Ridder news agency spent a week on patrol with “a crack unit of the Iraqi army—the 4,500-member 1st Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Division.”
43
He reported, “Instead of rising above the ethnic tension that’s tearing their nation apart, the mostly Shiite troops are preparing for, if not already fighting, a civil war against the minority Sunni population.” The unit was responsible for security in Sunni areas of Baghdad, and Lasseter reported that “they’re seeking revenge against the Sunnis who oppressed them during Saddam Hussein’s rule.” He quoted Shiite Army Maj. Swadi Ghilan saying he wanted to kill most Sunnis in Iraq. “There are two Iraqs; it’s something that we can no longer deny,” Ghilan said. “The army should execute the Sunnis in their neighborhoods so that all of them can see what happens, so that all of them learn their lesson.”
 
Lasseter reported that many of the Shiite officers and soldiers said they “want a permanent, Shiite-dominated government that will finally allow them to steamroll much of the Sunni minority, some 20 percent of the nation and the backbone of the insurgency.” Lasseter described the First Brigade, which was held up by U.S. commanders as a template for the future of Iraq’s military, like this: “They look and operate less like an Iraqi national army unit and more like a Shiite militia.” Another officer, Sgt. Ahmed Sabri, said, “Just let us have our constitution and elections . . . and then we will do what Saddam did—start with five people from each neighborhood and kill them in the streets and then go from there.” By November 2006 an estimated one thousand Iraqis were being killed every week,
44
and the Iraqi death toll had passed an estimated six hundred thousand people since the March 2003 invasion.
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