HRW: US ‘Death Squad’ Plan is Against Law

A statement issued by the Human Rights Watch Committee (HRW) based in New York says, "If this plan is real, the Pentagon will rue the day it dreamed it up. They are creating a monster that could someday kill the very Iraqi democracy they say they want to build."

HRW was responding to claims published in Newsweek magazine that the Pentagon is considering striking back at Sunni leaders with death squads.

"The further degradation of the Geneva Conventions would also have dangerous long-term consequences for captured US military personnel and even US civilians," said HRW’s Executive Director Kenneth Roth. "This is the opposite signal that the United States should be sending when it’s trying to convince people to abandon terrorism as a military or political tool."

The idea is apparently being referred to in the Pentagon as the "Salvador option" in reference to the death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador in the ’80s and also echoes the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assassinations of civilians who supported communist forces in Vietnam.

Apart from the experienced difficulties in controlling such units, HRW notes that deliberately targeting civilians would be a war crime.