DEATH SQUADS. A while back, the administration appointed John Negroponte, veteran of Central American death squad operations, as ambassador to Iraq. Then the Defense Department started talking about a “Salvador option” for Iraq. Today the Timeses of New York and Los Angeles both report that Iraq is run by death squads. Who could’ve guessed?
As Kevin Drum notes Knight-Ridder was, as usual, ahead of the curve on this, but what, exactly, were various Iraq reporters thinking was going on? The Salvador option, after all, was hardly a state secret. Not only was it in Newsweek but at about the same time conservative columnists (I recall David Brooks in particular, but there were many others) started talking about El Salvador as a model for Iraq. And is it so shocking that the people who brought us the global network of secret torture prisons might be mixed up with some human rights abuses? Don Rumsfeld’s never been averse to keeping questionable company, after all.
[size=6]Death squad[/size]
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A death squad is an extra-judicial group whose members execute or assassinate persons they believe to be politically unreliable or undesirable. They differ from terrorist groups in that they are endorsed by governments, usually in order to eliminate political opponents; some are directly created by such governments, others are supported, protected, or merely not discouraged. Dictatorships, especially totalitarian ones, have used them to kill whole groups of people who do not fit their political ideology, religion, or race (see genocide).
The term “death squad” has more recently been extended (especially by journalists) to small groups organized by terrorist organisations such as the IRA. Steven Vincent, an American free-lance journalist recently murdered in Iraq, had previously argued that the anti-government forces there should properly be called death squads rather than “insurgents” or “guerillas.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_squad)
Cute. It’s an interesting loaded term, especially when mixed with terms like “extrajudicial” and “genocide”. Sort of like the equally irrelevant dichotomy between freedom fighters and terrorists.
You really have to wonder about who the hell thought it was a good idea to call anything a Salvador option and virtually demand such an analogy. Why not start discussing Vietnam options, for chrissakes?
