From El Salvador to Iraq, the U.S. torture trail
Photo: AP
The investigation was sparked by the release of classified U.S. military logs on WikiLeaks. The picture is of Gen. Petraeus.
Media investigation links Gen. Petraeus to Iraqi torture centres set
up by a Special Forces veteran who was also involved in the 1980s ‘dirty
wars’ in Central America
The Pentagon sent a U.S. veteran of the “dirty wars” in
Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq, that
set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from
insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture
during the U.S. occupation and accelerated the country’s descent into
full-scale civil war.
Colonel James Steele, then 58,
was a retired special forces veteran nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to
help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni
insurgency, according to an investigation by the Guardian and BBC
Arabic. After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the
security forces, the membership of the Special police commandos was
increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups like the Badr brigades.
A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H. Coffman (now 59)
worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with
millions of dollars of U.S. funding. Coffman reported directly to
General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train
the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq between
2003-2005, and kept returning to the country through 2006, reported
directly to Rumsfeld.
The allegations made by both American and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC
documentary, for the first time implicates U.S. advisers in the human
rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that
General David Petraeus — who last November was forced to resign as
director of the CIA after a sex scandal — has been linked through an
adviser to this abuse. Coffman reported to Petraeus and described
himself in an interview with the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus’s “eyes and ears out on the ground” in Iraq.
Details of torture
“They worked hand in hand,” said General Muntadher al-Samari, who
worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being
set up. “I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside
the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there ...
the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture.” Additional reporting
by the Guardian confirmed further details of how the
interrogation system worked. “Every single detention centre would have
its own interrogation committee,” claimed the former General, who has
for the first time talked in detail about the U.S. role in the brutal
interrogation units. “Each one was made up of an intelligence officer
and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to
make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside
down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts.”
There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman tortured prisoners
themselves, only that they were sometimes present in the detention
centres where torture took place, and were involved in the processing of
thousands of detainees.
The Guardian/BBC
Arabic investigation was sparked by the release of classified U.S.
military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where
U.S. soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention
centres run by the police commandos across Iraq. Private Bradley
Manning, 25, is facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years after he
pleaded guilty to leaking the documents.
Samari
claimed that torture was routine in the commando-controlled detention
centres. “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. Tied up. His
whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he
had been beaten.” Gilles Peress, a photographer, came across Steele when
he was on assignment for The New York Times, visiting one of the
commando centres in the same library, in Samarra. “We were in a room in
the library interviewing Steele and I’m looking around I see blood
everywhere.” The reporter Peter Maass was also there, working on the
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, somebody shouting ‘Allah, Allah, Allah!’ But it wasn’t kind of
religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and
terror.” The pattern in Iraq provides an eerie parallel to the
well-documented human rights abuses committed by U.S.-advised and funded
paramilitary squads in Central America in the 1980s. Steele was head of
a U.S. team of special military advisers that trained units of El
Salvador’s security forces in counterinsurgency. Petraeus visited El
Salvador in 1986 while Steele was there and became a major advocate of
counterinsurgency methods.
Steele has not responded to any questions from the Guardian and
BBC Arabic about his role in El Salvador or Iraq. He has in the past
denied any involvement in torture and said publicly he is “opposed to
human rights abuses.” Coffman declined to comment.
An official speaking for Petraeus has told the BBC/Guardian investigation:
“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 U.S. military chain of command,
the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad ... and the relevant Iraqi leaders.” The Guardian has
learned that the Special police commandos unit’s involvement with
torture entered the popular consciousness in Iraq when some of their
victims were paraded in front of the television audience on a TV
programme called “Terrorism In The Hands of Justice.” SPC detention
centres bought Canon video cameras, funded by the U.S. military, which
they used to film detainees for the television show. When the show began
to outrage the Iraqi public, Samari remembers being in the home of
General Adnan Thabit — head of the special commandos — when a call came
from Petraeus’s office demanding that they stop showing tortured men on
television.
“General Petraeus’s special translator,
Sadi Othman, rang up to pass on a message from General Petraeus telling
us not to show the prisoners on TV after they had been tortured,” said
Samari. “Then 20 minutes later we got a call from the Iraqi ministry of
interior telling us the same thing, that General Petraeus didn’t want
the torture victims shown on TV.” Othman, who now lives in New York,
confirmed to the Guardian that he made the phone call on behalf
of Petraeus to the head of the SPC to ask him to stop showing the
tortured prisoners. “But General Petraeus does not agree with torture,”
he added, “to suggest he does support torture is horses***.”
Created civil war
Thabit is dismissive of the idea that the Americans he dealt with were
unaware of what the commandos were doing. “Until I left, the Americans
knew about everything I did; they knew what was going on in the
interrogations and they knew the detainees. And even some of the
intelligence about the detainees came to us from them — they are lying.”
Just before Petraeus and Steele left Iraq in September 2005, Jabr
al-Solagh was appointed as the new minister of the interior. Under
Solagh, who was closely associated with the violent Badr Brigades
militia, allegations of torture and brutality against the commandos
soared. It was also widely believed that the unit had evolved into death
squads.
The Guardian has learned that
high-ranking Iraqis who worked with the U.S. after the invasion had
warned Petraeus of the consequences of appointing Solagh to the interior
ministry but their pleas had been ignored.
The
long-term impact of funding and arming this paramilitary force was to
unleash a deadly sectarian force that terrorised the Sunni community and
helped germinate a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives.
At the height of that sectarian conflict, 3,000 bodies a month were
strewn on the streets of Iraq. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2013
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