By Cliff Montgomery – Mar. 9th, 2013
A number of American and Iraqi witnesses have connected top U.S. advisers – including former CIA Director General David Petraeus – to human rights abuses perpetrated by Iraq’s anti-insurgency police forces, according to an investigation released on Wednesday by two of England’s most respected news sources.
Iraq’s American-trained anti-insurgency police forces operated a number of secret detention centers where they routinely “conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country’s descent into full-scale civil war,” added an article from The Guardian.
Perhaps no one should be surprised. The U.S. special forces veteran chosen by top Pentagon brass to help create Iraq’s anti-insurgency police units – Colonel James Steele – also trained security forces in El Salvador that perpetrated human rights abuses during the 1980s.
The Guardian and the BBC have jointly produced an eye-opening documentary on the whole matter.
Donald Rumsfeld nominated Colonel Steele, pulling the 58-year-old special forces veteran out of retirement to help put together Iraqi paramilitaries that might shut down a then-raging Sunni insurgency, declared the news sources.
The Special Police Commando (SPC) units soon were accepting fighters from such violent Shia groups as the infamous Badr brigades.
“Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld,” the Guardian article stated.
Another adviser, Colonel James Coffman, also was pulled out of retirement to work with Steele in the U.S.- funded detention centers.
“Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces,” stated the article.
Coffman once told the Pentagon newspaper Stars and Stripes that he served as the “eyes and ears out on the ground” for Petraeus during their tenure in Iraq.
“They worked hand in hand,” General Muntadher al-Samari told Guardian/BBC reporters. Samari worked with Coffman and Steele during the creation of the Iraqi commando units. The three were together for a year.
“I never saw them [i.e., Coffman and Steele] apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres,” declared Samari.
“They knew everything that was going on there…the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture,” he added.
“Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee,” Samari told the reporters.
“Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators,” he continued.
“This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess,” Samari told reporters, “like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts.” The detainees were routinely tortured, he said.
“I remember a 14-year-old who was tied to one of the library’s columns. And he was tied up, with his legs above his head,” Samari offered as an example.
“His whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he had been beaten,” Samari said to the reporters.
Interviews with American journalists who worked in Iraq during that time appeared to support Samari’s statements.
Photographer Gilles Peress was working for The New York Times on assignment in Samarra, and visited the same commando center in which Samari says the 14-year-old had been tortured. Peress was documenting an interview with Colonel Steele when he noticed something quite odd.
“We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and [as] I’m looking around I see blood everywhere,” Peress told Guardian and BBC investigators.
Reporter Peter Maass was there to work on the Times story with Peress.
“And while this interview was going on with a Saudi jihadi with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams,” Maass told investigators, “[and] somebody shouting: ‘Allah, Allah, Allah!’ But it wasn’t kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror.”
Guardian/BBC Arabic journalists say there’s no reason to suspect that either Steele or Coffman personally tortured prisoners. But, they say, it is clear that the two leaders sometimes were at detention centers where acts of torture occurred. Steele and Coffman also did their part to help process thousands of detainees at those centers.
“Steele has not responded to any questions from the Guardian and BBC Arabic about his role in El Salvador or Iraq,” declared a Guardian article on the report.
“He has in the past denied any involvement in torture and said publicly he is ‘opposed to human rights abuses.’ Coffman declined to comment,” continued the article.
A spokesperson for Petraeus told the news venues:
“During the course of his years in Iraq, General Petraeus did learn of allegations of Iraqi forces torturing detainees. In each incident, he shared information immediately with the US military chain of command, the US ambassador in Baghdad…and the relevant Iraqi leaders.”
The allegations of torture on Iraqi detainees sound quite similar to the proven human rights abuses performed by the paramilitary groups of El Salvador in the 1980s – those squads also were advised and funded by the United States.
“Salvadorans [were] already reeling in early 1980 from attacks by security forces and government-backed death squads on a growing opposition movement,” points out The National Security Archive, an “investigative journalism center” that works “to check rising government secrecy,” according to its mission statement.
“The United States funneled billions of dollars to the tiny country,” pointed out the Archive, “in support of the brutal army and security forces during a counter-insurgency war that left 75,000 civilians dead.”
The actions of El Salvador’s government-backed fighters “further polarized the country and set the stage for the civil war that would rage for the next twelve years,” states the Archive.
Steele and Petraeus appear to have had deep ties to Salvadoran forces during that time.
For two years (1984-1986), “Steele – a ‘counter-insurgency specialist’ – was head of the US MilGroup of… special forces advisers to front-line battalions of the Salvadorean military,” stated the Guardian.
The right-wing Salvadorean army “developed a fearsome international reputation for its death-squad activities,” the paper added.
“Petraeus visited El Salvador in 1986 while Steele was there and became a major advocate of counter- insurgency methods,” stated the Guardian.
