Death Squads Inc. – Made in America and Coming Home Soon

by Scott Creighton

How soon til the death squads are operating in the United States? I don’t mean the destabilization campaign teams that are clearly already here running the American version of their old Operation Gladio, I mean the real death squads that our government has been setting up in neoliberalized nations via the CIA and Special Forces for a number of decades? The death squads that kick in doors at 3 am and drag out dissidents or political rivals of “made men” in the global elite cabal. Dissidents who end up being tortured to death and brutally killed, their headless bodies turning up under bridges and those are the fortunate ones, the others simply disappear, never too be seen again after being tossed from helicopters into the ocean.

When we overthrew the democratically elected president of Iran in ’53, our puppet, the Shah, needed his own death squad to help him maintain his brutal order for decades, so the CIA and Special Forces trained the SAVOK for him and they reigned with an iron fist.

In Indonesia, our puppet Suharto, who employed the step-father of one Barack Obama, used death squads and the help of the CIA to rout hundreds of thousands of dissidents and left leaning Indonesians in the first few years of his brutal tyranny. It was good for global businesses and for a few carefully chosen local elites, but no so good for most others.

In Chile in ’73 (Sept 11th 1973 to be exact) Nixon gave the go ahead to try a neoliberalism “experiment” down there and so we violently overthrew and killed their president and installed yet another brutal dictator, Augusto Pinochet. We equipped him with his own death squads as well.

The list goes on and on but let’s take a look at a few recent examples, shall we, just so we all understand this is not some aspect of past policy that has changed or mellowed over the years.

We created death squads in Iraq. Recently I watched a video of a soldier talking about what they saw happening in 2007 during the so-called “surge”. It would probably be better called the “slaughter’ because that is exactly what we created. We armed and trained the Iraqi Army and enabled them to carry out wholesale slaughter against Sunni civilians. Thousands died as a result while our CIA targeted not “terrorists” but political opponents of our various puppets or other left leaning writers, journalists, educators, and organizers. Aside from the statements from returning soldiers like the one I am talking about, it’s well documented that this took place.

In 2010, as WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of classified documents relating to the conduct of the US government, government defenders dismissively claimed that they revealed nothing new. Among the many documents disproving that claim were ones relating to a US policy in Iraq set forth in “Frago 242″, which ordered coalition troops not to stop or even investigate torture and other war crimes by the Iraqi forces they were training, but simply to “note” them.

And note them they did: the logs record thousands of cases of Iraqi forces severely beating, brutalizing and torturing Iraqi civilians while US forces, with rare exception, did nothing to stop it (when the documents were released, the Guardian detailed just some of the illustrative cases). As the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder wrote at the time, the documents contain “incredibly awful reports of systematized detainee abuse by Iraqi soldiers and security forces right under the noses of the American-led coalition, which appears to have had virtually no incentive to put a stop to them” Glenn Greenwald

And It was recently revealed that the same thing is happening in Afghanistan and that our forces are actually taking part in the torture and murder of targeted civilians. And this is all to say nothing of the drone strikes which are clearly “death squads from above” taking place literally across the globe.

Take a look at Syria and Libya. What are these terrorist acts if not a form of death squads? They go from home to home sometimes in the cities they briefly hold and ask if the families are loyal to the current government. If they are, they are slaughtered. In Libya now that NATO successfully bombed them back into peace, the death squads are running rampant, killing off all kinds of people still loyal the the country their nation once was.

On the continent of Africa, President Peace Prize just sent military members, mainly Special Forces groups, to 35 different nations in order to train their “special forces” and what do you think that training is for?

The company formerly known as Blackwater, a group of highly trained, well paid mercs run by a ultra-Christian zealot, has been operating in Pakistan since 2007 at least, running terrorist missions to blame the local version of the Taliban there. They’ve also been abducting various people who pose a problem for the corrupt military and the neoliberalized economy.