Murder Squad in Iraq?

By David Asman

Published November 27, 2015

Newsweek magazine ran a bizarre story this week, in which it claimed that U.S. Special Forces (search) were training Iraqi commandos to be murderers.

The article, posted on the Internet as a “Web exclusive,” opened with a gruesome 1980 photograph of the exhumed graves of U.S. nuns murdered in El Salvador, over which a headline blared: “’The Salvador Option’; The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq.”

The clear implication was that U.S. Special Forces units trained Salvadorans to murder innocents in the 1980s and that now our Special Forces are training murder squads in Iraq. This is not only wrong, it’s the exact opposite of what happened. Our Special Forces were sent to El Salvador (search) in the 1980s to stop random killings, which were out of control on both sides of the conflict.

The Newsweek story is riddled with other mistakes (such as mistakenly linking the Iran-Contra (search) mess with the Salvadoran killings), but none more callous than its insult to the brave men and women of our Special Forces.

If Newsweek editors honored those units, they would issue an apology to those who worked and died in Central America in the 1980s and to those who are working so hard now in Iraq. But don’t hold your breath.

And that’s the Asman Observer.

Watch David Asman on "FOX News Live" weekdays at noon ET.

URL

https://www.foxnews.com/story/murder-squad-in-iraq