In The Nation, Eric Alterman reminds us of Elliot Abrams’s lying on behalf of Salvadoran death squads in the Reagan years.

This was 20 years before the W. Bush administration’s “El Salvador Option” in Iraq, using the Badr Corps to hunt and kill Sunnis, which backfired, leading to Abrams’s “Redirection” policy to start tilting back toward al Qaeda.

Later he thankfully botched a coup in Venezuela.