David Holmberg has covered major stories for newspapers in New York, Washington, Miami, Philadelphia and other cities for 30 years. He currently teaches journalism at New York University and is a Contributor to www.MaximsNews.com. 

He has been a senior editor for The Village Voice, where he covered the investigation of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. He covered the war in El Salvador in 1982 for the Philadelphia Daily News. His novel, 'Beyond Recognition,' was published in 1995. See his Bio below.  DavidHolmberg@MaximsNews.com

         UNITED NATIONS -  23 February 2005   www.MaximsNews.com / --  Pick your poison: the arrogance of power as manifested in the historic moment or in a startling, sickening retrospective.  

For the former, you can begin with "shock and awe."

That chilling war cry from the Pentagon immediately set the tone for the Bush administration's dubious venture in Iraq.  

Bombs burst in the air in prime time, as one ordeal ended for the Iraqi people and another began.

But that's old news.

The fresh imperialist revelation is a retrospective admission by an intelligence official that atrocities in El Salvador back in the '80's were engineered by the U.S. 

In Seymour Hersh's recent New Yorker analysis of the Bush administrations preparations for a possible move against Iran the source unveils what he apparently regards as a cherished legacy of the Reagan presidency:

"Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?

"We founded them and we financed them. The objective now (in the Bush administration) is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it."

In the London Review of Books, Eliot Weinberger, a New York poet and critic who has translated the works of Octavio Paz, picks up on that theme in a stunning, document-based piece titled, "What I Heard About Iraq."                          

Writes Weinberger: "I heard that the Pentagon was now exploring what it called the 'Salvadoran option,' modeled on the death squads in El Salvador in the 1980's, when John Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras and when Elliott Abrams, now White House advisor on the Middle East, called the massacre at El Mozote 'nothing but Communist propaganda.'    

"Under the plan, the US would advise, train and support para-militaries in assassination and kidnapping, including secret raids across the Syrian border.  

In the vice-presidential debate, I heard the vice-president say: "Twenty years ago we had a similar situation in El Salvador. We had a guerilla insurgency that controlled roughly a third of the country… And today El Salvador is a whale of a lot better."

This is disturbing to say the least.

Especially if you're a veteran reporter for whom the death squads were a menacing Salvadoran force back in the spring of 1982, not an instrument of U.S. policy.  

Reporters were warned, then, to be on guard for dark vans with tainted windows: death squads.  

One day I was crossing a bridge near the center of San Salvador.  

Looking down, I saw the corpse of a young male Salvadoran lying face down in a shallow creek.

"A death squad," my driver-translator told me.  

Later, during a harrowing excursion into the hills to make contact with the guerillas, I came upon one of the most desolate scenes I've witnessed as a reporter.  

In the searing midday heat, next to an abandoned building, I found the skeletal remains of several residents of a nearby village who'd been massacred. 

By a death squad? More than likely.   

The absolute silence of this death-zone was broken only by the pathetic mewing of a kitten in the nearby building.  

I found an identity card on the ground near the victims and had a fleeting hope I could trace the man.  

I was too busy with other angles during my stay in Salvador to do that, and gave the card to a Miami Herald reporter before I left.  

I hoped he might develop a story of this Salvadoran who'd been slaughtered along with his neighbors, probably for cooperating with the guerillas.  

But the Herald reporter wasn't able to put the story together either.  

Of course, if any reporter had alluded to the possibility that the U.S. was behind the death squads, he would – as Eric Alterman wrote in The Nation  – "immediately have been tarred as pro-Communist, or worse…"  

In our earnest naiveté, we weren't about to make such accusations while covering that conflict.  

We were too worried about providing "bang-bang" for our readers and viewers, and seeking out guerilla leaders in remote locations, to weave tales about diabolical American conduct.  

Not that we were innocents instinctually repulsed by covert operations – we simply didn't make that kind of linkage. (Or at least I didn't; perhaps someone else did. To no avail, I'm sure.)   

So now that Bush has a mandate in his own mind for further expansionism, it's reached the point where the kind of operatives who leak to Sy Hersh apparently feel comfortable with spouting off about the dirtiest of dirty tricks of the Reagan era. 

(Who would have thought that Richard Nixon could look benign by comparison?)    

The current administration's self-created universe is sufficiently well-defined that a few of its functionaries can be glibly forthcoming about past conduct previously perceived as largely unacceptable.  

In addition to his other achievements, Bush has raised the bar for retrospective hubris.    

You could say, sadly, that it all makes the media look like fools.  

Scrambling fools in the hills, chasing the "truth."  

Pick your poison, then; make your selection from a menu of deceptions, past and present. It's good to have choices.

     DavidHolmberg@MaximsNews.com

  David Holmberg has covered major stories for newspapers in New York, Washington, Miami, Philadelphia and other cities for 30 years.  

He covered the AIDS crisis for New York Newsday -- including an international AIDS conference in Stockholm -- and the war in El Salvador for the Philadelphia Daily News. 

He was on Newsday's investigative team for the Donald Manes affair, the major crisis of the Koch administration, and won first prize in the New York City Press Club's annual awards for his coverage of the homeless. 

He covered the Mumia Jamal case for the Philadelphia Daily News, and as national correspondent for that newspaper he also reported on vote fraud in Mississippi and the trial of Miami police officers growing out of the Liberty City riots. 

While in Miami, he wrote about anti-Castro bombings and the treatment of Haitian immigrants in the Bahamas. 

He has been a senior editor for The Village Voice, where he covered the investigation of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. 

He has written about the Emmett Till Case for The Nation, Newsday, The Daily News, and The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post. 

For the Post; he obtained the last interview with Roy Bryant, the confessed murderer of Till. 

He was a Ford Foundation fellow in African studies at Columbia University, and has written three novels. 

His short story, "History," dealing in part with 9/11, was published in The Paterson Literary Review in 2003.  

He currently teaches journalism at New York University and is a Contributor to www.MaximsNews.com

Photo by Ryan Mercer.

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