The top story published online in today’s New York Times is entitled, “30 Beheaded Bodies Found; Iraqi Death Squads Blamed.” The story reports that “the bodies of 30 beheaded men were found on a main highway near Baquba this evening, providing more evidence that the death squads in Iraq are becoming out of control.” It goes on to explain that these killings are likely the work of Shiite death squads exacting brutal revenge for what is taken to be a recent bombing campaign by Sunni insurgents, including the escalation of attacks since the destruction of the golden-domed Askariya Shrine in Samarra last month.

What is missing from this story, however, is who has trained and organized these squads.

For clues, we turn to a story that ran in Newsweek in January, 2005: “”The Salvador Option’: The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq.”

In this story, Newsweek asked, “What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called “the Salvador option”—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. “What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are,” one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. “We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing.” Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking “the back” of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

“Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported “nationalist” forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers.”

For those of us who lived through, and worked to end, the US war in Central America in the 1980s, the words “death squad” are freighted with horror. Death squads were trained and armed by the US and were unleashed against thousands of civilians, many who were dragged from their beds in the middle of the night only to be found dead in a street, a lonely country road, or the city dump. From Archbishop Oscar Romero to six Jesuit professors (and their housekeeper and her daughter) and innumerable other people throughout the region, death squads created a climate of unspeakable fear designed for the most part to suppress ordinary people working for better societies.

When Archbishop Romero was assassinated, the world asked, “Who were the ‘intellectual authors’ of this heinous crime?” In other words, not only the actual gunman, but who planned and ordered this killing?

As a 2002 BBC report underscored, the plot “was, according to declassified US documents and other witnesses, carried out by Salvadorean police intelligence agents on the orders of Major Roberto D’Aubuisson. He was at the time running the army’s intelligence war and went on to found the right-wing Arena party which is in power in El Salvador today. No-one was brought to justice and for the next decade, when President Bush’s father was heavily involved in Salvador policy, the same police agents would be at the centre of US funded efforts to wipe out left-wing guerrillas. To defeat the rebels, the US equipped and trained an army which kidnapped and disappeared more than 30,000 people, and carried out large-scale massacres of thousands of old people women and children.”

This collision of histories betwen US war in Central America and US war in Iraq suggests that the US government is quite likely the ultimate “intellectual auithor” of these despicable, unholy acts in an unholy war. We must resist with every fiber of our being this state-sponsored terrorism.

The nonviolent life demands nothing less.