2 to Remember

Endemic torture of prisoners

The discovery last week of starved and tortured prisoners in an Interior Ministry bunker emphasised that detention without due process remains endemic in Iraq, echoing the Saddam era. In Basra, militia elements in the police used cells to imprison and torture their enemies. When the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal broke, it emerged that among the prisoners being maltreated by US soldiers were “undocumented” detainees who had been kept hidden from the Red Cross. And Britain was shamed by the death of Baha Mousa, a Basra hotel clerk, in British military custody.

Use of napalm and phosphorus

Last week the Pentagon admitted using white phosporus as an offensive weapon in last year’s assault on Fallujah. Its official use is to create smokescreens to shield troop movements, but if fired into trenches or foxholes it can burn victims to the bone. The legality of this use is debatable. Last year the US also admitted, after previous denials, that it had used napalm – which Britain has banned – against Iraqi forces during the invasion. There is also controversy over the deployment of cluster munitions, which Britain has said should not be used in or near civilian areas.

Extra-judicial killings

Early in the insurgency, it appeared that Sunnis loyal to Saddam were attacking defenceless Shias – an impression the coalition authorities sought to reinforce. Extra-judicial killings by Shias in the paramilitary groups operated by the Interior Ministry, or in party militias, have become increasingly open. Victims are rounded up in house-to-house raids at night and their bodies, frequently handcuffed, are found dumped later. Sunni civilians are the main target, but Shias seen as collaborators under Saddam, or connected with rival militias, have also “disappeared”.

Indiscriminate ‘spray and slay’

Heavy-handed tactics against the insurgency, dubbed “spray and slay”, have attracted much criticism. The current American offensive in the west and north-west appears to replicate the methods used in Fallujah: the population is ordered to leave before the town is sealed off and subjected to an air and ground assault. Those killed are invariably described as insurgent fighters, even in incidents where there is strong evidence that groups of civilians, including women and children, have been caught up in airstrikes.

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.”)

And at a news conference on Jan. 11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the idea of a Salvador option was “nonsense” and denied that U.S. Special Forces were going into Syria. But when asked whether such a policy was under consideration, he replied, “Why would I even talk about something like that?”