Julian Assange
Monday June 15, 2008
http://statismwatch.ca/2008/06/18/us-counterinsurgency-manual-leaked-calls-for-false-flag-operations-suspension-of-human-rights/
How to covertly train paramilitaries, censor the press,
ban unions, employ terrorists, conduct warrantless searches,
suspend habeas corpus, conceal breaches of the Geneva Convention
and make the population love it
Wikileaks has released a sensitive
219 page US military counterinsurgency
manual. The manual, Foreign Internal Defense
Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994,
2004), may be critically described as “what we learned about
running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin
America and how to apply it to other places”. Its contents are
both history defining for Latin America and, given the continued
role of US Special Forces in the suppression of insurgencies,
including in Iraq and Afghanistan, history making.
The leaked manual, which has been verified with military
sources, is the official US Special Forces doctrine for Foreign
Internal Defense or FID.
FID operations are designed to prop up a “friendly” government
facing a popular revolution or guerilla insurgency. FID
interventions are often covert or quasi-covert due to the unpopular
nature of the governments being supported (”In formulating a
realistic policy for the use of advisors, the commander must
carefully gauge the psychological climate of the HN [Host Nation]
and the United States.”)
The manual directly advocates training paramilitaries, pervasive
surveillance, censorship, press control and restrictions on labor
unions & political parties. It directly advocates warrantless
searches, detainment without charge and (under varying
circumstances) the suspension of habeas
corpus. It directly advocates employing
terrorists or prosecuting individuals for terrorism who are not
terrorists, running false flag operations and concealing
human rights abuses from journalists. And it repeatedly advocates
the use of subterfuge and “psychological operations”
(propaganda) to make these and other “population & resource
control” measures more palatable.
The content has been particularly informed by the long United
States involvement in El Salvador.
In 2005 a number of credible media reports suggested the
Pentagon was intensely debating “the Salvador option” for
Iraq.[1].
According to the New York Times Magazine:
The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, with which it
has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing
government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency
in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high — more than
70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country
with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and
torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads
affiliated with it. According to an Amnesty International report in
2001, violations committed by the army and associated groups
included ‘‘extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings,
‘disappearances’ and torture. . . . Whole villages were targeted by
the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred.’’ As part of
President Reagan’s policy of supporting anti-Communist forces,
hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled
to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of 55 Special Forces advisers,
led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions
that were accused of significant human rights abuses.
…
Selected extracts follow. Note that the manual is 219 pages long
and contains substantial material throughout. These extracts should
merely be considered representative. Emphasis has
been added for further selectivity. The full manual can be found at
US Special Forces counter-insurgency manual FM
31-20-3.