COLUMN LEFT / CYNTHIA J. ARNSON : Will Justice in El Salvador Be Stillborn? : U.S. must share its files if investigation of army atrocities is to meet its August deadline.

Less than a month from now, the peace accord signed in January between the Salvadoran government and the FMLN guerrillas will be put to a test fraught with possibilities for failure. On Aug. 15, a report is due from a three-member civilian commission established by the peace accord to evaluate the records of the entire military officer corps, with an eye toward purging the armed forces of those with blemished human-rights records. The commission’s work has been hampered by the fact that the United States--its Defense Department and CIA--is the single most important source of information about the Salvadoran military, and the Bush Administration has so far kept that information to itself.

The importance of the commission’s task cannot be overstated. The military’s numerous atrocities against the civilian population helped give rise to and sustain the guerrilla insurgency. An amnesty that was proclaimed earlier this year all but ensures that those guilty of war crimes will never be brought to trial. Another civilian panel, the “truth commission,” will soon begin investigating human-rights abuses on both sides, and it most likely will recommend prosecution of select cases. But it is doubtful that the Salvadoran court system will prove capable of securing convictions of powerful military leaders.

The Salvadoran army’s own human-rights office compiles no information on human-rights abuses by the military. Human-rights and religious organizations have documented thousands of abuses, but their knowledge of command structures and individual responsibility has been limited to a handful of cases. The U.S. government alone holds the key to a genuine reform of the military. This unique opportunity must not be lost in a maze of official excuses.

At a congressional hearing, Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson pledged “to cooperate as fully as possible” with the commission. But it appears that the Administration has drawn an extremely limited definition of what it considers “possible.” U.S. officials have cautioned that the amount of information in U.S. files should not be overestimated, and, because military careers are at stake, judgments should not be based on the “hearsay” that sometimes passes for intelligence.

Both arguments are specious. The United States gave El Salvador $1 billion in military aid between 1980 and 1992, trained thousands of officers and enlisted men, and at times had at least a hundred military and intelligence advisers in the country. Intelligence operatives used El Salvador as a staging ground for the Contra war in neighboring Nicaragua and, at Congress’ urging, gathered information in the early and mid-1980s about death-squad activities. The hint that U.S. files do not contain much information suggests only that they have been cleaned out.

The warning about information being based on rumor also fails to hold up to scrutiny. It is clear that the United States over the last decade cultivated sources in and around the Salvadoran armed forces that it considers reliable and trustworthy. How else, for example, could then-Vice President George Bush have traveled to El Salvador in 1983 to present a list of individuals known to be involved in death-squad activities? That the information was on-target was evidenced in the reduction of death-squad killings after the removal or transfer of officers on Bush’s list.

The need to protect U.S. sources is a more compelling reason to withhold intelligence. But in these sensitive cases, actual documents need not be shared directly. During the trial of former National Security Council official Oliver North, the defense prepared a summary of information based on classified documents that U.S. agencies had refused to fully declassify. The compromise protected sources and methods while allowing pertinent, and even astonishing, information to enter the public record. There is no reason that a similar model could not be adopted for El Salvador, thereby allowing the commission access to U.S. files.

Aside from the technical problems, a more corrupt rationale may lie behind the U.S. reluctance to come forward with what it knows. U.S. policy toward El Salvador was a spinoff of Cold War anti-communist concerns. Consequently, the United States protected officers with horrendous human-rights records because they were efficient in prosecuting the war against leftist guerrillas. Now, the United States appears to be protecting senior officers it deems vital to the peace process, despite their involvement in major crimes.

Such inverted logic poses a mortal danger to El Salvador’s future. By sanctioning the continued service of tarnished officers, the United States forestalls the possibility that the military can be transformed into a truly democratic institution.