The the recent Wikileaks release indicates that the US Military and NATO have deployed a “Special Unit” called Task Force 373 and other units to kill people “to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial.” In short, an assassination unit that has killed suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders but also innocent civilians.

What did we call “special units” in Central American countries (think El Salvador) that went around killing people back in the 1980’s to prop up a corrupt government that just happened to be an ally of the American government? Our government when Ronald Reagan was president) called them Death Squads, as the title to this document dated 1/10/84, which was requested by then Vice President Bush from the Directorate of Intelligence, makes crystal clear:

El Salvador: Dealing with Death Squads

Here’s an image of the actual document Mr. Bush received in 1984 from the NSA archives at George Washington University:

Most of the leaders of these death squads, including the ones that operated in El Salvador, were actually trained at the infamous School of the Americas (SOA) operated by the US military. The SOA was originally established in 1946 in Panama and later moved to Ft. Benning, Georgia where it was re-named . Here’s how the Peter Kornbluh of Washington Post summarized the SOA’s history in 2004 in a review of the book The School of the Americas:

The memorandum to Richard Cheney, stamped SECRET, informed him that a Defense Department inquiry had discovered “improper material” in U.S. military intelligence training guides. The Army manuals — on interrogation, the handling of sources and counterterrorism — counseled “motivation by fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum” during questioning of detainees.

Part of the paper trail leading up to the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison? No. These were military manuals used to train thousands of Latin American officers and soldiers who passed through the School of the Americas during the 1980s and early ’90s. And when this March 10, 1992, report to then-Defense Secretary Cheney was leaked to the press, the ensuing scandal helped fuel a powerful, religious-based protest movement that, as Lesley Gill writes in this small but passionate book, “transformed a relatively obscure army school into a public pariah and pushed Congress to within a few votes of shutting down the institution.”

When the U.S. military opened the Latin American Ground School at Fort Amador in the Panama Canal Zone in 1946, and three years later reorganized the training center as the U.S. Caribbean School, it was indeed an obscure facility. Instructors initially trained small groups of troops on the use of advanced artillery and weapons systems that Washington began selling to Latin American countries such as Argentina after World War II. But in the aftermath of the 1959 Cuban revolution, the U.S. Southern Command significantly broadened the school’s core curriculum around the military doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare and expanded enrollment to train — “inculcate” is the word Gill uses more than once — Latin American militaries in the cause of anticommunism. In 1963 the facility was renamed the School of the Americas, or SOA, as it was commonly known until a concerted, decade-long human rights campaign forced the Army to temporarily close it down in December 2000. In January 2001, SOA reopened under yet another name: the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. […]

One of SOA Watch’s singular achievements was to obtain through the Freedom of Information Act a comprehensive list of the school’s 60,000 graduates. The roster of alumni is a Who’s Who of the most infamous dictators, death-squad directors and mass murderers in the Western Hemisphere — if not the world. Panama’s Gen. Manuel Noriega, who now resides in a Florida prison for international narcotics trafficking, is an SOA alum. So was the godfather of the Salvadoran death squads, Roberto D’Aubuisson, who masterminded the 1980 murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero and hundreds of other killings. So was the violent former dictator of Bolivia Gen. Hugo Banzer. The list goes on and on.

Now compare that to the the Guardian’s summary of some of these documents describing TF 373’s missions in June, 2007 in which that unit mistakenly killed Afghan police and children in two separate incidents only six days apart apart:

On the night of Monday 11 June 2007, the leaked logs reveal, the taskforce set out with Afghan special forces to capture or kill a Taliban commander named Qarl Ur-Rahman in a valley near Jalalabad. As they approached the target in the darkness, somebody shone a torch on them. A firefight developed, and the taskforce called in an AC-130 gunship, which strafed the area with cannon fire: “The original mission was aborted and TF 373 broke contact and returned to base. Follow-up Report: 7 x ANP KIA, 4 x WIA.” In plain language: they discovered that the people they had been shooting in the dark were Afghan police officers, seven of whom were now dead and four wounded. […]

… An internal report shows that the next day Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Phillips, commander of the Provincial Reconstruction Team, took senior officers to meet the provincial governor, Gul Agha Sherzai, who accepted that this was “an unfortunate incident that occurred among friends”. They agreed to pay compensation to the bereaved families, and Phillips “reiterated our support to prevent these types of events from occurring again”.

Yet, later that week, on Sunday 17 June, as Sherzai hosted a “shura” council at which he attempted to reassure tribal leaders about the safety of coalition operations, TF 373 launched another mission, hundreds of miles south in Paktika province. The target was a notorious Libyan fighter, Abu Laith al-Libi. The unit was armed with a new weapon, known as Himars – High Mobility Artillery Rocket System – a pod of six missiles on the back of a small truck.

The plan was to launch five rockets at targets in the village of Nangar Khel where TF 373 believed Libi was hiding and then to send in ground troops. The result was that they failed to find Libi but killed six Taliban fighters and then, when they approached the rubble of a madrasa, they found “initial assessment of 7 x NC KIA” which translates as seven non-combatants killed in action. All of them were children. One of them was still alive in the rubble: “The Med TM immediately cleared debris from the mouth and performed CPR.” After 20 minutes, the child died.

TF 373 is not described as a Death Squad, but it shoukld be, for that is its assigned mission. And in carrying out that mission to hunt down and kill suspected Taliban and Al Qaida leaders in one week in 2007 it it killed seven Afghan police and seven children. It’s mission included the use of an AC-130 gunship (see video below of one in action in Afghanistan – WARNING: shows images of people being killed) …

… and rockets. These are weapons used to kill at a distance using tremendous firepower. They are also weapons that are more than likely to kill people who are not Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters as the above described incidents taken from the actual military documents released by Wikileaks indicate.

It seems that under Preident Bush’s administration our government moved beyond traing foreign governments and their dictartorial regimes how to create and operate death squads, to operating our own death squads in Afghanistan. No wonder we were losing the “hearts and minds” of the Afghan people. In addition to supporting Hamid Karzai’s corrupt and ineffectual government in Kabul, a government whose own brother has ties to drug dealing amomg other nefarious activities, are military tactics, such as the use of death squads like Task Force 373, have actively alienated many Afghans. In effect we employed means not that different in their ultimate effect than the enemies we are combating in Afghanistan.

The questions we have to ask ourselves are:

1) Does TF 373 or other “death squad” units like it continue to operate in Afghanistan?

2) Do these US military “death squads” continue to employ the same indiscriminate tactics which have led to the murder of Afghan government security forces and innocent civilians, including children?

The New York Times says yes, yes we still are:

Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment. […]

The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.

Joe Biden was right all along when he argued that escalating the US presence in in Afghanistan was not a sustainable or viable policy in secret discussions with the administration.

For Mr. Biden, a longtime senator who prided himself on his experience in foreign relations, the role represents an evolution in his own thinking, a shift from his days as a liberal hawk advocating for American involvement in Afghanistan. Month by month, year by year, the story of Mr. Biden’s disenchantment with the Afghan government, and by extension with the engagement there, mirrors America’s slow but steady turn against the war, with just 37 percent supporting more troops in last week’s CBS News poll.

“He came to question some of the assumptions and began asking questions about whether there might be other approaches that might get you as good or better results at lower cost,” said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who has been consulted by Mr. Biden on the matter. […]

“I think a big part of it is, the vice president’s reading of the Democratic Party is this is not sustainable,” said Bruce O. Riedel, who led the administration’s review this year. “That’s a part of the process that’s a legitimate question for a president — if I do this, can I sustain it with political support at home? That was the argument the vice president was making back in the winter.”

Obviously, Biden lost that argument. And so once more we see how low the US government has been willing to go to combat the “terrorist menace.” We not only have embraced the immoral and ineffective tactic of employing death squads, but this time those death squads are composed of own soldiers rather than merely foreign surrogates. Like Guantanmo Bay, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Blackwater and so many other infnmous atrocities we have committed in the name of “defending our freedoms” we can now add the name Task Force 373.

These infamous actions are both wrong from a moral standpoint, but they are also wrong from a strategic standpoint as well. As I contemplate these horrific deeds that have been done in my name and yours leaving a collective moral stain on all Americans, I am reminded of Where have all the flowers gone? the Pete Seeger anti-war song popularized by Joan Baez during the Vietnam War era, and of these verses in particular:

Where have all the young men gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

We still haven’t learned the answer, have we?