Freedom is on the march — marching right out of Iraq.

Just like Faik Bakir, the director of the Baghdad morgue, who fled the country in fear of death squads which he reported killed more than 7,000 people in Iraq during recent months. According to an article in The Guardian UK, the U.N. human rights office in Iraq added the majority of the bodies appeared to have been killed execution-style, with hands tied behind their backs.

Torturous death squads are yet another challenge to democracy in Iraq: A United States-imposed democracy of occupation, written in blood and enforced at gunpoint — a democracy failing miserably.

Shiite men, dressed in police uniforms, act as state-sponsored executioners who target the Sunni community. Sunnis controlled Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s rule, but now Shiites, who make up 60 percent of Iraq’s population, dispense revenge after years of oppression. Revenge is a two-way street. With sectarian violence escalating and mosques crumbling, the situation in Iraq looks more and more like civil war. What else do you call militias of the same nationality, fighting against each other in the same country?

But President George W. Bush avoids recognizing this because civil war in Iraq is exactly what critics warned him would happen. Iraq is being torn into two factions. Instead of uniting around a U.S.-sponsored democracy, Iraqis are dividing across sectarian lines. Democracy does not exist in Iraq. Freedom does not exist in Iraq. Freedom is leaving Iraq through death or exile.

Hussein’s oppression has ended, but a new kind of oppression has begun: death squad brutality. The U.S. denounces death squads publicly, but who knows what goes on behind closed doors?

“The Salvador Option,” a Newsweek article last year, claimed the pentagon considered using death-squad-type tactics in Iraq similar to the Reagan administration in El Salvador during the 1980s. Death squads in El Salvador were funded and directed by the U.S. government to kill Salvadoran rebel leaders and sympathizers. Obviously no U.S. official would publicly promote using the “The Salvador Option” in Iraq. But if the government did use this strategy, you can be certain we would never know about it. After all, knowledge of such an operation might be a threat to national security. Or worse, a threat to our perceived mission of spreading democracy.

It’s clear death squads exist in Iraq. Last month in a Chicago Tribune article, Major General Joseph Peterson said, “We have found one of the death squads.” The article explained the U.S. military captured 22 Iraqi policemen who were about to kill a Sunni prisoner.

Still, the question is whether the U.S. government privately condones these death squads. Again, the U.S. government would never publicize willing involvement with death squads. Just like the U.S. government would never willingly publicize COINTELPRO. But there are a lot of things our government does without our knowledge, so we are left asking questions.