So what am I missing here...? (Updated)

Okay, I caught just a bit of the uproar over Newsweek's piece on supposed plans for Pentagon-sponsored death squads yesterday while surfing through a few blogs.

I went and took a look at the article today just to see what all the hub-bub was about and I must say...it appears to have been written by someone with no concept of history, no idea what Special Forces soldiers already do on a routine basis, and no idea of how "assassination" differs from "engaging the enemy."

First, let's look at what the facts stated in the article ref this startling new proposal (train Iraqis to fight Iraqis? How novel!).

"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."

Right then. A senior military officer points out things aren't going so well in Iraq. He thinks we need to "go on the offensive." Sounds like a plan.

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.

While I'm not sure who "most analysts" who agree are, I won't dispute this. The notion that capturing a fixed military objective alone can succeed in uprooting an insurgency is foolish at best.

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.

All right, boys. You're starting to lose me already. If the strategy is "still-secret," do we really know what it was? How do we know it bears any resemblance to a current strategy being debated? Did their sources participate in this "still-secret" operation? Did they allude to it? Or is this a stretch made by the story's authors?

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.

How did the U.S. fund or support these "nationalist" forces? If they "allegedly" included death squads, we're already moving on to shaky factual ground. Were these "nationalist forces" trained and led by Special Forces teams? If so, that is a very typical SF mission. They did it throughout Vietnam with village defense forces and a whole slew of native bands willing to fight the VC and NVA but not willing to do it for the South Vietnamese government. Because they hunted down rebel leaders, were they death squads? How does that differ from the normal role of combatant?

The same applies to the OSS and Jedburgh Teams in WWII. Again, we find Americans training and leading irregular forces against enemy forces, often using unconventional tactics. And there were other forces given hand-me-down weapons, a minimum of training, and then instructed to "go get 'em boys." I would imagine some of the actions taken by those irregulars did not fall within the rules of war. This applies to the French Resistance, the Dutch Resistance, forces in Burma, Chinese Nationalist forces, and a whole slew of other small groups.

The line drawn between irregular forces under the control of U.S. personnel and irregular forces operating outside the control of any higher authority has been substantially blurred in this article - to the point where uninformed readers will have great difficulty defining the difference.

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.

So many (unnamed) U.S. conservatives consider this (still-secret and alleged) program to have been a success in El Salvador. I see. This is getting better by the minute.

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send 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, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions.

Following what model? The authors have failed to establish any sort of model. They have merely tied together rumor, conjecture, and innuendo. Considering there is no definitive proof that Special Forces teams advised, supported, or trained so-called death squads in El Salvador, considering the fact that those operations are "still-secret" so we have no real idea what the "model" was, and considering the difference between U.S.-trained and led forces as opposed to U.S.-supplied forces (such as many of the militias that operated in Afghanistan before and after the U.S. occupation), how can they make such a statement?

It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

How is it a policy of assassination to target guerrilla leaders? I fail to understand how this differs from direct combat with insurgents. Is it "assassination" because they plan to sneak up on the enemy and attack before being attacked? That would be a raid or ambush. Not an "assassination." But "assassination" certainly gets more reader attention, doesn't it?

How is it unusual for paramilitaries to carry out operations within their own country against insurgents? It's been going on in Afghanistan for some time. It's been going on in parts of Kurdistan for some time. Were the Pesh Merga units that operated against regular Iraqi forces at the onset of the invasion "death squads?"

How does any of his relate in any way to operations that "may or may not" have taken place in El Salvador? This article is (pardon my language) complete crap, written by authors with no idea what unconventional warfare is, no idea how Special Forces units operate (or the restrictions they operate under), and no historical knowledge of unconventional operations from the past.

They merely latched onto the "operations" that sounded most inflammatory and drew imaginary connections between those "alleged" events and "possible" operations the U.S. may conduct in another theater.

So let's remove the fluff from this story and see what we're left with.

1. The U.S. is considering training paramilitary units to operate against insurgents in Iraq.
2. The U.S. may or may not have trained, supported or funded paramilitary units in El Salvador.
3. Innocent civilians are killed during a war.

Good work! Way to get to the bottom of a story!

Sheesh.

Having jumped into this story a bit late, I see I am covering much ground already mentioned by others. At OxBlog, David Asenik offers similar evidence of the article's non-evidence.

Although I likely disagree with him on the idea of what constitutes a "death squad" vs. an irregular force operating under U.S. control, Eric at Total Information Awareness also finds himself siding with those who think this article is long on wind and short on fact.

Greg Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch also notes the hyperbole, but includes an excellent parsing of Rumsfeld's odd performance at a press conference on the matter. It seems as if Rummy can't help but get himself into hot water these days when he deals with the press. Ah for the days of Afghanistan, when everyone thought he was witty, airy, and in control....

Douglas Farah, who covered the war in El Salvador and the death squads in particular, had this to say about the Newsweek article:

But this is far different from the implication of the article, either through sloppy writing or poor knoweldge from the sources, that the U.S. trained and armed the death squads. If the article meant to discuss the possibility of forming special units to track and hunt leaders of the insurgency, that is a policy that can be debated. But do not confuse that with a "Salavador Option," as the two would be unrelated.

Iraq