GEN. PACE LIKES DEATH SQUADS

This is from the same Senate hearing I excerpted below.

SEN. JACK REED (D-RI): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you gentlemen, both, for your service. And, Secretary Gates, thank you particularly for signing up at a very difficult and challenging moment in our history. Thank you.

General Pace, General Petraeus labored many months to write a new counterinsurgency manual. And clearly within that manual it calls for a range of 20 to 25 counterinsurgents for every thousands of population, which in Baghdad translates to 120,000 troops. How many American forces will be there after we finish this build-up?

GEN. PACE: Thirty-one thousand, sir.

SEN. REED: And how many Iraqi forces will be there?

GEN. PACE: Fifty thousand, sir.

SEN. REED: So we're about 40,000 short of the doctrine.

GEN. PACE: Pure math, yes, sir. Not forgetting that places like El Salvador we helped with 55 soldiers total.

We only needed 55 because we supported the right-wing death squads:

On December 2, 1980, members of the National Guard of El Salvador intercepted the van carrying four American churchwomen as they were leaving the international airport in San Salvador. Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clark, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and lay missioner Jean Donovan were taken to an isolated spot where they were shot dead at close range. (This is what it looked like)

The murder of the women, along with attempts by the Salvadoran military and some American officials to cover it up, generated a grass-roots opposition in the U.S., as well as ignited intense debate over the Administration’s policy in El Salvador.