Declassified: US Imperialism, Terror, and Support for Tyranny

[Horhey]

The Reaganite Phase

The incoming Reaganites immediatly went much further, seeking to justify the death squad murders of the American nuns, notably Secretary of State Alexander Haig and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. But it was still deemed worthwhile to have a show trial a few years later, while exculpating the murderous junta - and, of course, the paymaster.

The New York Times reports:

Incoming Reagan Administration officials tried to transfer at least some responsibility for the murders from the Salvadoran military to the women themselves. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the newly appointed delegate to the United Nations, called the women leftists. Mr. Haig suggested that the women, who were raped and shot point-blank in the head, might have run a roadblock.

And of course, the Reaganites didnt waste anytime getting their hands bloody.

The New York Times reports:

In one of its first acts, the Reagan Administration further bolstered the junta, increasing economic aid by $12.5 million, to $32.5 million.

In a 1981 article titled "Supply Line for a Junta", TIME Magazine reports:

19 trainers were joined in El Salvador last week by a six-man naval training team that will help repair engines and radar equipment on Salvadoran patrol boats.

The Reagan Administration is also sending four five-man training teams within the next few weeks to instruct Salvadoran troops in such subjects as intelligence, combat techniques and the use and maintenance of helicopters.

The training of Salvadoran troops by the U.S. began in early 1980 at Fort Gulick in Panama, where the School of the Americas specializes in teaching antiguerrilla warfare. The U.S. is also readying some $25 million in new equipment for El Salvador, including helicopters, vehicles, radar and surveillance equipment, and small arms.

The New York Times noted that:

United States influence has been strong. American military assistance to its clients in the region jumped from $14.2 million in 1981 to $212 million in 1986, and the security forces of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala more than doubled from 1981 to 1986.

The Administration has sent hundreds of American advisers and C.I.A. operatives to oversee the training, arming and management of Central American client states' armies and police over the last six years. In Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, they became among the most repressive and corrupt armies in Latin America.

The Reagan Administration has continued the traditional American practice of funneling military aid directly to local armies and police forces, with almost no influence from civilian officials. In Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Panama, Government officials have virtually no say in whether the aid will be given or how it will be used, according to several diplomats and local officials.

Furthermore, the Washington Post points out that:

The U.S. was deeply involved in running the war, from intelligence gathering to strategy planning to training of everyone from officers to foot soldiers. By 1982, U.S. military advisers were assigned to each of the six Salvadoran brigades, as well as each of 10 smaller detachments. The U.S. put tens of millions of dollars into developing the ultra-modern national intelligence directorate to coordinate intelligence gathering and dissemination.

U.S. military and CIA officials participated in almost every important meeting. Most brigades had a U.S. intelligence officer assigned to them, as well as a U.S. liaison officer. U.S. advisers regularly doled out small amounts of money, usually less than $1,000 at a time, for intelligence work.

The Christian Science Monitor was one of the first news organizations to reveal the CIA-Death Squad link in El Salvador:

The CIA and US military advisers have helped organize and have financed, trained, and advised special Salvadorean Army and intelligence units which, although presumably set up for counterintelligence purposes, subsequently engaged in 'death squad' activities. The Salvadorean units ''frequently torture and sometimes kill'' Salvadorean citizens - apparently with the knowledge of their US mentors.

In an article entitled "Washington's Role in El Salvador's Death Squads", the Washington Post noted that:

In late 1983, U.S. policymakers established functional, if not operational, control over the death-squad bureaucracy. One could also note that the command structure of the Salvadoran death squads was responsive to the directives of senior U.S. policymakers. The bureaucracy of death remained in place, subject to the military chain of command, whose leaders were in daily contact with U.S. advisers.

The head of the Treasury Police, whose death squads were particularly notorious, was Col. Nicolas Carranza, who received $90,000 a year from the CIA for unspecified services.

When the Salvadoran government continued to murder its civilian opponents in 1981 and 1982, Reagan administration officials came to its defense. As an instrument of U.S. policy, death squads still enjoyed support among officials in the Executive Branch.

Neil Livingstone, a consultant who worked with Oliver North at the National Security Council, reviewed U.S. policy in El Salvador in the early '80s and concluded, "Death squads are an extremely effective tool, however odious, in combatting revolutionary challenges."

[ShadowPred]

this f**king thread needs to be locked away in the depths of ATS.

You no like? Make it stop by debunking it. You can make it all go away. More coming so get to work.

No that's not what I meant at all. There's a reason I mentioned ATS.

I wish he was still with us.

He still is...

In spirit.

[Horhey]

In the 1984 article entitled "Behind the Death Squads: An Exclusive Report on the U.S. Role in El Salvador's Official Terror", award winning investigative journalist Allan Nairn reported that:

Early in the 1960s, during the Kennedy Administration, agents of the U.S. Government in El Salvador set up two official security organizations that killed thousands of peasants and suspected leftists over the next fifteen years. These organizations, guided by American operatives, developed into the paramilitary apparatus that came to be known as the Salvadoran Death Squads.

Today, even as the Reagan Administration publicly condemns the Death Squads, the CIA—in violation of U.S. law—continues to provide training, support, and intelligence to security forces directly involved in Death Squad activity.

Evidence of U.S. involvement covers a broad spectrum of activity. Over the past twenty years, officials of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. armed forces have:

• conceived and organized ORDEN, the rural paramilitary and intelligence network described by Amnesty International as a movement designed "to use clandestine terror against government opponents." Out of ORDEN grew the notorious Mano Blanco, the White Hand, which a former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Raul H. Castro, has called "nothing less than the birth of the Death Squads";

• conceived and organized ANSESAL, the elite presidential intelligence services that gathered files on Salvadoran dissidents and, in the words of one U.S. official, relied on Death Squads as "the operative arm of intelligence gathering";

• enlisted General Jose Alberto "Chele" Medrano, the founder of ORDEN and ANSESAL, as a CIA agent; Described by Jose Napoleon Duarte as "the father of the Death Squads, the chief assassin of them all," he was awarded a silver medal by President Johnson "in recognition of exceptionally meritorious service."

• trained leaders of ORDEN in surveillance techniques and use of automatic weapons, and carried some of these leaders on the CIA payroll;

• provided American technical and intelligence advisers who often worked directly with ANSESAL at its headquarters in the Casa Presidencial;

• supplied ANSESAL, the security forces, and the general staff with electronic, photographic, and personal surveillance of individuals who were later assassinated by Death Squads. According to Colonel Nicolas Carranza, director of the Salvadoran Treasury Police, such intelligence sharing by U.S. agencies continues to this day;

• kept key security officials – including Carranza, Medrano, and others – on the CIA payroll. Though the evidence is less conclusive about Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, presidential candidate of the right wing ARENA party, some of his close associates describe him as a former recipient of CIA funding;

• furnished intelligence files that D'Aubuisson used for a series of 1980 television broadcasts in which he denounced dozens of academics, trade unionists, peasant leaders, Christian Democrats, and members of the clergy as communists or guerrilla collaborators. Many of the individuals D'Aubuisson named in his television speeches were subsequently assassinated. The broadcasts launched D'Aubuisson's political career and marked the emergence of the paramilitary front which later became ARENA;

• instructed Salvadoran intelligence operatives in the use of investigative techniques, combat weapons, explosives, and interrogation methods that included, according to a former Treasury Police agent "instruction in methods of physical and psychological torture";

• and, in the last decade, violated the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, which prohibits spending U.S. funds "to provide training or advice or provide any financial support for police, prisons, or other law enforcement forces for any foreign government or any program of internal intelligence or surveillance on behalf of any foreign government";

[ShadowPred]

Forgive me for opening Pandora's Box!


http://www.abovetopsecret.com/

[Horhey]

Washington's War on Labor in El Salvador

According to Allan Nairn's, detailed study:

[There is] a pattern of sustained U.S. participation in building and managing the Salvadoran security apparatus that relies on Death Squad assassinations as its principal means of enforcement.

The U.S. contribution extends far beyond training. American intelligence services have actually furnished the names, photographs, and whereabouts of suspected dissidents, say Salvadoran security officials.

According to Salvadoran Colonel involved in the process, the United States routinely receives copies of all major political surveillance reports compiled by Salvadoran security forces. In turn, U.S. provide the security forces with information. Colonel Carranza confirmed this relationship.

"The Americans would directly recieve all the information on a case even before we had developed the activity, before we decided how we would terminate a case," Corranza says, referring to the procedure in effect before 1983. "Now we give everything-in realtion to captures that the Treasury Police have made-to the general staff and they give it to the embassy."

US intelligence officials "have collaborated with us in a certain technical manner, providing us with advice," says Corranza. They receive information from everywhere in the world, and they have sophisticated equipment that enables them to better inform or at least confirm the information we have. It's very helpful."

Colonel Adolfo Blandon, the armed forces chief of staff, says "six or seven" US military advisers — several of them specialists in intelligence and psychological warfare — are currently working with the general staff.

The National Guard now concentrates on monitoring "unions and strikes and the penetration of the education system, where they are brainwashing our students," says Colonel Aristedes Napoleon Montes, director of the National Guard.

As in the past, labor activists are a primary target. In violation of congressional legislation, the U.S. Trade Representative rejected a Human Rights petition to review El Salvador.

Human Rights Watch [formerly Americas Watch] reports:

In it's 1987 petition to GSP, [Human Rights Watch] presented fourty-three instances of labor-rights abuses, including unjust arrests and torture. When USTR [US Trade Representative] did not accept the [Human Rights Watch] petition, fourteen congresspersons demanded an explanation.

USTR answered that it was appropriate for the El Salvador armed forces to arrest, interrogate, and imprison trade unionists whom the US Department of State considered opponents of the Duarte government.

[SM]

I won't.

[maledoro]

You no like? Make it stop by debunking it. You can make it all go away. More coming so get to work.

The onus is on the person making the claim.

[Horhey]

US Favorite Death Squads: The Treasury Police, National Guard, and National Police

The New York Times noted that:

The Treasury police have long been considered the least disciplined and most brutal of the Salvadoran security forces .

Former CIA Station Chief, John Stockwell, observed that:

During the 1980s, the CIA created, trained, and funded death squads like the Treasury Police in El Salvador who have been responsible for killing and "disappearing" as many as 70000 people according to the count of the Catholic Church.

In an article entitled, "US TRAINS POLICE IN EL SALVADOR AS CONGRESS BAN IS LIFTED", the New York Times reports:

The Reagan Administration has begun unrestricted training for all of El Salvador's police forces, according to United States diplomats here. Three weeks ago United States military advisers began a $5 million program to train and equip the Salvadoran National Police, National Guard and Treasury Police, according to an American official.

In mid- 1985, Congress granted exemptions to El Salvador, and $4.8 million was allocated for training programmes for the National Police, the National Guard and the Treasury Police, which would be run by US advisers.

Human Rights Watch reports (formerly Americas Watch):

In January 1986, Congress removed the hold it had placed on money from other sources that the Department of State wanted to use for police training in El Salvador. Currently, $4.8 million has been allocated for police training for the Salvadoran security forces. These permitted American advisers to train a police urban commando team (responsible for the military seizure of a hospital in an attempt to break a strike: ), an urban counterterrorism unit, Treasury Police, and a special investigating unit to be used for politically sensitive crimes.

Three of the 55 U.S. military advisers assigned to El Salvador will be in charge of training about 10 Salvadorans each, he said . One adviser will work with each security force, he said. Other aid includes trucks and police cars, car and hand held radios, and other police equipment.

[Human Rights Watch] believes the training the police is an extremely dangerous undertaking by the United States, which will become tarred in with the brush of the abuses commited by the security forces.

These problems were noted in the press as well:

The new training program begun three weeks ago will help police forces, most of which have an unsavory record. The large intelligence units of the Treasury Police and the National Guard were once considered by American diplomats to be little more than standing Death Squads.

Human Rights Watch (formerly Americas Watch) then documents direct US complicity in the Treasury Police's Death Squad activities:

Menendez de Iglesias, was arrested in September 1985 . The role of the U.S. in her ordeal was outlined in an article that apeared several months later, in the Sunday Times of London:

Serious questions have arisen over the United States' commitment to eradicating human rights abuses in El Salvador after evidence emerged of the detention and torture of a Salvadoran employee of the American embassy in San Salvador.

The evidence shows that she was illegally arrested and interrogated by U.S. officials handed over to the Salvadoran Treasury Police -- a notoriously brutal security force -- repeatedly raped and tortured while in detention and further questioned by U.S. officials while in custody.

Menendez, an economics graduate fluent in English, was interrogated for four hours in the embassy by four American security agents who told her that if she did not "collaborate" they would use "all their power" to destroy her.

After the interrogation, Menendez was handed over, at the embassy gates, to the Treasury Police. She was detained at their headquarters for a further 15 days. Sunday Times inquiries confirm she was raped repeatedly during her detention, kept blindfolded, often completely naked and, during relentless interrogation sessions, was made to stand with her arms in the air.

The Treasury Police kept her awake with drugs and jets of cold water and she was told that her parents would be in danger if she did not co-operate. If she told her husband she had been raped, they said, "we'll kill him and bring you his head," a source told the Sunday Times.

Mrs. Menendez, who suffers from a heart condition, thought she was going to die. She was refused the attendance of a Priest. "All Priests are Communists," said her captors.

During her detention by the Treasury police, she was interrogated and threatened on three occasions by American security agents, who told her: "We pay the bills. We have a lot of power."

One agent told her she could be kept in the Treasury Police cell for 15 years, then given life imprisonment or made to "disappear" if she did not provide the information they wanted. "This is my speciality. I'm an expert at dealing with terrorists," he told her.

The embassy acknowledges that "at the request of the Salvadoran authorities," US officials did question Menendez at the police headquarters. During her interrogation by the Treasury Police, Menendez was made to sign a succession of pieces of paper and, after two weeks of torture, "confessed" to to being a guerrilla sympathizer.

[SM]

Here y'are, Mal.

[maledoro]

I can't believe my eyes!

[SM]

One of my staff uses it.  You wouldn't believe your ears either.

[maledoro]

It looks like a sound investment.

[SM]

[DoomRulz]

*Sees thread*

Hmm...

*Sees huge posts and conspiracy theories*

f**k that shit!

*leaves*

Point out what you say are conspiracy theories please.

Oh, y'know, most of the stuff I skimmed through without reading properly. Basically TL ; DR.

Can you point to anything specific? Do you see any Alex Jones material here?

This whole thread is based on conspiracy theory. You're drawing lines and connecting dots when there aren't any to begin with.

[Horhey]

The Atlacatl Battalion: "The Yankees' Battalion"

The Oxford Essential Dictionary of the U.S. Military states that:

Atlacatl Battalion - the first Salvadoran unit trained by the U.S. Army's Special Forces advisors early in 1981, a counter-insurgency group deployed on search-and-destroy missions, a key element in President Ronald Reagan's drive to ensure the ability of El Salvador's military to suppress rebellions.

It was commanded by Lt. Col. Domingo Monterrosa, well known as a rabid fighter and directly responsible for the slaughter of 733 Salvadoran peasants at El Mozote in December 1981. Salvadorans called the battalion "The Yankees' Battalion."

Human Rights Watch (formerly Americas Watch) observed that:

The Atlacatl Battalion is an elite unit created, trained and equipped by the United States. Almost from the start, the Atlacatl Battalion — "the first Salvadoran army battalion to be created from scratch by U.S. funding and training" — was engaged in the murder of large numbers of civillians.

A visiting professor at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, recently described the Atlacatl soldiers as "particularly ferocious": "We've always had a hard time getting [them] to take prisoners instead of ears."