US Training of Death Squads in Iraq? - War Is A Crime .org

order. And that part of the area is completely controlled by Shiite militias. The Sunni resistancehas very little presence down there.JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, when you mentioned these death squads, you mentioned the BadrBrigades. Now, Moqtada al-Sadr has been an opponent of the U.S. occupation --ARUN GUPTA: Yes.JUAN GONZALEZ: And he’s been hunted at several times by U.S. forces. Are you saying thatthere’s at the same time ongoing cooperation by some of his people with --?ARUN GUPTA: Well, the Badr Brigade is linked to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolutionin Iraq which is based in -- which was based in Iran. Al-Sadr's forces are distinct: the MahdiArmy. And in the words of one high-ranking U.S. official who spoke to the L.A. Times, he saidthat the Badr Brigade has special commandos and the Mahdi Army has the police at Baghdad.And he said, quote: “Everybody's got their own death squads.” Now, this is a high-ranking U.S.military official, and this is admitted by also Iraqi officials.AMY GOODMAN: We only have a minute to go, Arun. But the issue of U.S. military advisorsto these death squads?ARUN GUPTA: Yes. There are two advisors, in particular. One is named Steve Castillo. He wasa high-ranking intelligence officer with the Drug Enforcement Agency throughout LatinAmerica, and he was actually in charge of the interior ministry until the handover of sovereigntyon June 20, 2004. And the other is Jim Steele who was in charge of Special Forces, a team of 55Special Forces in El Salvador during that brutal counter-insurgency war, where they trained ElSalvadoran forces and oversaw a very brutal counterinsurgency war, where tens of thousandswere killed by death squads. And both of these are operating in the interior ministry. So the ideathat this is going on without U.S. knowledge, it's really -- it's just -- it's plausible deniability iswhat they’re trying to do.AMY GOODMAN: Arun Gupta, I want to thank you for being with us. Arun is with TheIndypendent, the newspaper of the New York IndyMedia Center. Your web site wheredocuments will be at?ARUN GUPTA: Yes, there'll be the reports over the last six month that we’ve been publishingthat are available at nyc.indymedia.org.AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, you can go to our web site at DemocracyNow.org, wherewe will link to the New York IndyMedia center.www.democracynow.org110