In Iraq, we paid for the training and creation of Death Squads. It was our official policy. So we shouldn’t be shocked in the least by news like this:
The message to the Baghdad morgue was simple – they could do what they liked with the plastic handcuffs, but the metal ones were expensive and needed to be returned. Such is the murderous state of affairs in Iraq at the moment that the demand, made by a militia gunman who is also believed to be a member of the Special Police Commandos, hardly caused a stir.
There was a similar lack of shock when a dozen bodies were brought in with identification cards showing that each had the name Omar. The catch here was that Omar is a Sunni name, and this fact was enough to seal their fate at Shia checkpoints. […]
This is a shadowy struggle, which involves tortured prisoners huddled in dungeons, murder victims mutilated with knives and electric drills, and distraught families searching for relations who have been “disappeared”. […]
Yet, ironically, the death squads are the result of US policy. At the beginning of last year, with no end to the Sunni insurgency in sight, the Pentagon was reported to have decided to train Shia and Kurdish fighters to carry out “irregular missions”. The policy, exposed in the US media, was called the “Salvador Option” after the American-backed counter-insurgency in Latin America more than 20 years ago, which led to 70,000 deaths and countless instances of human rights abuse.
Some of the most persistent allegations of abuse have been made against the Wolf Brigade, many of whom were formerly in Saddam’s Baathist forces. Their main US adviser until April last year was James Steele, who, in his own biography, states that he commanded the US military group in El Salvador during the height of the guerrilla war and was involved in counter-insurgency training.
Exactly who is James Steele and what role did he play in training paramilitary forces and commandos in Iraq? What relationship did he have with John Negroponte, former US ambassador to Honduras during the Reagan presidency, former ambassador to Iraq under President Bush, and current Director of National Intelligence? Here are some excerpts from articles and other sources which mention Steele, Negroponte and their role in developing Iraq’s death squads …
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… From The New Yorker, May 5, 2004 issue:
… I had met Steele in El Salvador, two decades earlier. He was an Army colonel then, a tall, rangy Vietnam veteran from Texas, in his late thirties. He was in El Salvador from 1984 to 1986 as the chief of a team of military advisers who had been dispatched by the Reagan Administration to assist the Salvadoran government in the campaign against the Marxist guerrillas of the F.M.L.N. Steele was a personable man, and he gave the impression of being a straight-arrow type. In the late eighties, during the Iran-Contra investigation, he testified before a Senate committee about his involvement with Oliver North’s program to supply arms to the Nicaraguan contras through the Salvadoran Air Force base at Ilopango. He worked with the Panamanian police after the U.S. invasion that toppled Manuel Noriega, and, in 1990, he helped put down an attempted armed revolt by Panamanian security forces. He left the Army as a highly decorated soldier and later worked for Enron and several other private companies. […]
When Steele arrived in Baghdad last May, however, in the chaotic aftermath of the war, and reported for duty to Jay Garner, who initially had the job of leading the postwar reconstruction, he was put in charge of training policemen. “Garner knew of my work with security forces,” Steele said. “That’s what I did in Cambodia and El Salvador and Panama, and so it was fine by me.” He went home in September, but returned to Iraq because “I think we’re on the side of the angels here.” […]
Steele advocates robust military action, “combined with the right political moves,” to quell the insurgencies. “In Fallujah, a heavy hand makes sense,” he said. “That’s the only thing some of those guys will understand. Down south, too. We can’t be seen as weak. Otherwise, this kind of thing can happen everywhere.”
From Dahr Jamail’s report on death squads for IPS, dated October 16, 2006:
A UN human rights report released September last year held interior ministry forces responsible for an organised campaign of detentions, torture and killings. It reported that special police commando units accused of carrying out the killings were recruited from Shia Badr and Mehdi militias, and trained by U.S. forces.
Retired Col. James Steele, who served as advisor on Iraqi security forces to then U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte supervised the training of these forces.
Steele was commander of the U.S. military advisor group in El Salvador 1984-86, while Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to nearby Honduras 1981-85. Negroponte was accused of widespread human rights violations by the Honduras Commission on Human Rights in 1994. The Commission reported the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political workers.
The violations Negroponte oversaw in Honduras were carried out by operatives trained by the CIA, according to a CIA working group set up in 1996 to look into the U.S. role in Honduras.
The CIA records document that his “special intelligence units,” better known as “death squads,” comprised CIA-trained Honduran armed units which kidnapped, tortured and killed thousands of people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas.
Dear Secretary Rumsfeld:
I am writing to request a copy of all records pertaining to Pentagon plans to use U.S. Special Forces to advise, support and train Iraqi assassination and kidnapping teams. […]
We know that some of the Pentagon’s Iraq experts were involved in the Reagan Administration’s paramilitary program in El Salvador.
Colonel James Steele, Counselor to the U.S. Ambassador for Iraqi Security Forces, formerly led the U.S. Military Advisory Group in El Salvador from 1984-1986, where he developed special operating forces at brigade level during the height of the conflict. The role of these forces in El Salvador was to attack “insurgent” leadership, their supporters, sources of supply, and base camps. Currently Colonel Steele has been assigned to work with the new elite Iraqi counter-insurgency unit known as the Special Police Commandos, operating under Iraq’s Interior Ministry.
Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, was U.S. Ambassador to Iraq from June 2004 to April 2005. From 1981 to 1985, [Negroponte] was ambassador to Honduras where he played a key role in coordinating U.S. covert aid to the Contras, anti-Sandinista militias who targeted civilians in Nicaragua. Additionally, [Negroponte] oversaw the U.S. backing of a military death squad in Honduras, Battalion 3-16, which specialized in torture and assassination. The U.S. had similar programs of supporting paramilitary groups set up Nicaragua and Honduras as its program in El Salvador. In a Democracy Now interview on January 10, 2005, Allan Nairn, who broke the story about U.S. support of death squads in El Salvador, suspected that Ambassador Negroponte would most likely be involved in the economic side of U.S. support to death squads in Iraq.
We know that a wave of abductions and executions, in the style of the death squads of El Salvador, and with ties to an official government sponsor, and to the U.S., has hit Iraq. …
From Max Fuller’s article for The Center for Global Research, dated June 2, 2005:
From 1984 to 1986 then Col. Steele had led the US Military Advisory Group in El Salvador, where he was responsible for developing special operating forces at brigade level during the height of the conflict. These forces, composed of the most brutal soldiers available, replicated the kind of small-unit operations with which Steele was familiar from his service in Vietnam. Rather than focusing on seizing terrain, their role was to attack ‘insurgent’ leadership, their supporters, sources of supply and base camps. In the case of the 4th Brigade, such tactics ensured that a 20-man force was able to account for 60% of the total casualties inflicted by the unit (Manwaring, El Salvador at War, 1988, p 306-8). In military circles it was the use of such tactics that made the difference in ultimately defeating the guerrillas; for others, such as the Catholic priest Daniel Santiago, the presence of people like Steele contributed to another sort of difference:
People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador – they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch.
Well, I think that paints a pretty good picture of what Mr. Steele’s role was in Iraq. He was hired to replicate his earlier “success,” training and “advising” paramilitary death squads in El Salvador, in Iraq. And I guess he’s good at his job (Washington Post, December 4, 2005):
Reports last week in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times chronicled how Iraqi Interior Ministry commando and police units have been infiltrated by two Shiite militias, which have been conducting ethnic cleansing and rounding up Sunnis suspected of supporting the insurgency. Hundreds of bodies have been appearing along roadsides and in garbage dumps, some with acid burns or with holes drilled in them. According to the searing account by Solomon Moore of the Los Angeles Times, “the Baghdad morgue reports that dozens of bodies arrive at the same time on a weekly basis, including scores of corpses with wrists bound by police handcuffs.” The reports followed a raid two weeks ago by U.S. troops on a clandestine Baghdad prison run by the Interior Ministry, where some 170 men, most of them Sunni and most of them starved or tortured, were found.
These US trained forces, infiltrated with Shi’ite militia members now control and operate out of Baghdad hospitals and morgues (CBS News online report, dated October 4, 2006):
An assembly line of rotting corpses lined up for burial at Sandy Desert Cemetery is what civil war in Iraq looks like close up.
The bodies are only a fraction of the unidentified bodies sent from Baghdad every few days for mass burial in the southern Shiite city of Kerbala, CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan reports.
They come from the main morgue that’s overflowing, relatives too terrified to claim their dead because most are from Iraq’s Sunni minority, murdered by Shiite death squads.
And the morgue itself is believed to be controlled by the same Shiite militia blamed for many of the killings: the Mahdi Army, founded and led by anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
[…]The chilling details are spelled out in an intelligence report seen by CBS News. Among some of the details of the report are:
# Hospitals have become command and control centers for the Mahdi Army militia.
# Sunni patients are being murdered; some are dragged from their beds.
# The militia is keeping hostages inside some hospitals, where they are tortured and executed.
# They’re using ambulances to transport hostages and illegal weapons, and even to help their fighters escape from U.S. forces.
And now, they have grown beyond the ability of our forces in Iraq to disarm, control or rein them in:
So when your Republican friends mouth the standard GOP talking point that we are fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here, ask them if this is what they had in mind. We, our Government, the Bush administration, has trained and equipped ruthless killers who are conducting genocidal atrocities against their Sunni neighbors. This is the grand strategy of to which the Republicans point so proudly.
These are the tactics which our “advisors” employed to defeat the “terrorists.” We bought and paid for these assassins, torturers and murderers, and now our troops are at their mercy. Our forces are enmeshed in a civil war which was the direct result of the Bush administration’s policy to form, train and fund Shi’ite death squads. Ask them if they think that was such a good idea, now.
Ask them if they think the price we paid was worth it.
