In January, Newsweek reported that the Pentagon was considering the Salvador Option for Iraq–US-trained Death Squads—in an article titled ‘The Salvador Option’ The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq.  Today, Knight-Ridder reports that the Death Squads seem to have arrived in an article titled Campaign of executions feared in Iraq.  Slain Sunnis have arrived at Baghdad’s morgue blindfolded, bound and shot.  The author of today’s K-R article himself was shot and killed under mysterious circumstances last week in Baghdad.

The explicit purpose of the Salvador Option was to terrorize the Sunni population.  According to Newsweek.

[director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service Maj. Gen.Muhammad Abdallah] Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, “are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them.” He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

As of January, the Pentagon would admit only that Death Squads were on the table.

Pentagon sources emphasize there has been no decision yet to launch the Salvador option.

In a postscript to the Newsweek article Rumsfeld responded:

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?”

Today, Knight-Ridder reports that what looks like the Salvador Option is becoming a reality.

BAGHDAD – Days after Iraq’s new Shiite-led government was announced on April 28, the director of Baghdad’s central morgue began noticing that the bodies of Sunni Muslim men were turning up after the men had been detained by people wearing Iraqi police uniforms.

The official response:

Ghathanfar al-Jasim, who sits on Iraq’s national judicial council and functions as an attorney general, said it was difficult to discuss extrajudicial killings.  “We cannot admit that our police are doing it; it would make them look weak,”

and

But when battered corpses turn up outside Interior Ministry facilities, [Raad] Sultan [an official in Iraq’s Ministry of Human Rights] said, “How can I prove it is the security forces?”

Knight-Ridder reports several examples.  Here is one.

On May 5, for example, 14 Sunni farmers were abducted from an east Baghdad vegetable market. […] The bodies of the farmers were discovered in shallow graves the next day. They had all been blindfolded, handcuffed and shot once in the back of the head […]  “A patrol of more than 10 police vehicles drove up and parked,” said Ali Karim, a fruit vendor. “They were running through the street with their guns, saying that the farmers had a car bomb with them. They pushed them against the walls and asked them for their IDs.”

A moment of respect for the author of the Knight Ridder article:

[The co-author of this article] Yasser Salihee was a special correspondent. He was shot and killed last week in Baghdad in circumstances that remain unclear.

This madness must be stopped.  Withdraw all troops now.