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

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such a strategy is not to identify, detain, and kill actual resistance fighters, but rather to terrorizean entire civilian population into submission.The exile groups who began this dirty war in the early days of the occupation have come to formthe core of successive governing institutions established by the United States. Their campaign ofkilling and torture has evolved and become institutionalized and their victims now number in thethousands. The UN report does not address the possibility of a direct U.S. role in the campaign,but the interior ministry units that are most frequently implicated in these abuses were formedunder U.S. supervision and work closely with U.S. advisors. The identities of their two principaladvisors only reinforce these concerns. They are retired Colonel James Steele and former DEAofficer Steven Casteel. Both are veterans of previous dirty wars.In El Salvador, between 1984 and 1986, Colonel Steele commanded the U.S. Military AdvisorGroup, training Salvadoran forces that conducted a brutal campaign against the civilianpopulation. At other stages in his career he performed similar duties during illegal U.S. militaryoperations in Cambodia and Panama. After failing a polygraph test, he confessed to Iran-Contrainvestigators that he had also shipped weapons from El Salvador to Contra terrorists inNicaragua, leading Senator Tom Harkin to block his promotion to brigadier general. Until April2005 Steele was the principal U.S. advisor to the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s “Special PoliceCommandos,” the group most frequently linked to torture and summary executions in recentreports.Steven Casteel worked in Colombia with paramilitaries called Los Pepes that later joined forcesto form the AUC in 1997 and who have been responsible for most of the violence againstcivilians in Colombia. Casteel is now credited with founding the Special Police Commandos inhis capacity as senior advisor to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.Assigning responsibility for atrocities to particular units or individuals is complicated by the dualnature of the Iraqi security forces, which take orders both from their nominal superiors and fromseparate chains of command in the factional militias that most of them belong to. Ultimateresponsibility for abuses is thus blurred by the fiction of the “government” and the militias asdistinct entities when the same people are really involved in both all the way to the top.Reports of torture and extrajudicial killings have followed the Special Police Commandos aroundthe country wherever they have been deployed, from Anbar province and Mosul since October2004 to Samarra in March 2005 to areas around Baghdad since May 2005. The UN reporthighlighted an incident in Badhra on August 25, in which relatives of the victims identified theabductors as Interior Ministry forces.After Special Police Commandos were deployed in Baghdad, 14 farmers were found in a shallowgrave on May 5, 2005 with their right eyeballs removed and other signs of torture after they wereseen being arrested at a vegetable market. Another incident ten days later, in which eight bodieswere found in a garbage dump, prompted Hareth al-Dhari, the secretary general of theAssociation of Muslim Scholars, to accuse the Interior Ministry directly. “This is state terrorismby the Ministry of Interior,” he claimed. The defense minister responded by blaming “terroristswearing military uniforms.”28
In another twist, the bodies of 8 men from Sadr City were found in Yussufiah, 40 kilometersfrom their homes, dressed in army uniforms even though none were soldiers. Their killersobviously wanted their deaths to appear to have been the work of resistance forces.Then there is the work and tragic death of Yasser Salihee, the Iraqi physician turned journalist,who dared to launch an investigation into abuses by the Special Police Commandos. KnightRidder posthumously published his work under the title, “Sunni men in Baghdad targeted byattackers in police uniforms” on June 27, 2005. The cautious language of the report verged onirony, but it described eyewitness accounts of numerous abductions by “large groups of mendriving white Toyota Land Cruisers with police markings. The men were wearing policecommando uniforms and bulletproof vests, carrying expensive 9-millimeter Glock pistols andusing sophisticated radios.”Knight Ridder actually interviewed Steven Casteel for their story. He predictably blamed“insurgents” impersonating commandos. As the article pointed out, this raised “troublingquestions about how insurgents are getting expensive new police equipment. The Toyotas, whichcost more than $55,000 apiece, and Glocks, at about $500 each, are hard to come by in Iraq, andthey’re rarely used by anyone other than Western contractors and Iraqi security forces.”Faik Baqr, director of the central morgue in Baghdad, said, “It is a very delicate subject forsociety when you are blaming the police officers…. It is not an easy issue. We hear that they arecaptured by the police and then the bodies are found killed…. It’s obviously in- creasing.”Yasser Salihee died on his way to get gas to drive his family to a swimming pool on his day off.He was shot by a U.S. sniper at a “checkpoint.” His editor, Steve Butler, has told me he has noreason to think Yasser’s death was connected to his work and the U.S. Army’s account of theincident describes a “random” shooting based only on rules of engagement that greatly prioritizeU.S. over Iraqi lives. However, as Italian investigators found in the case of Nicola Calipari, U.S.accounts of such incidents are not reliable and U.S. links to the forces Salihee was investigatingcast a dark shadow over his death.Finally, the Iraqi death squads appear to have violated a dirty war taboo—they’ve killed a U.S.journalist. Steven Vincent was an award-winning art critic from New York who went to Iraq as afreelance writer for National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and Harpers, and wrote a book, Inthe Red Zone, about the experiences of Iraqis in post-invasion Iraq. On July 29, 2005, he wrotein an op-ed piece in the New York Times that many of the police in Basra were also active in theShiite militias that had killed hundreds of Sunnis in the city. Four days later, he was abducted bya group of men in a brand new white Chevy pick-up with police markings. His body was foundby the side of a road outside the city with three gunshot wounds to the chest.The Associated Press has begun to track the numbers of corpses found and, as of October 7, theyhave tallied 539 since the “transitional government” took office in April. They are reporting thatthe majority are Sunnis, not Shiites or Kurds, and that “the count may be low since one or twobodies are found almost daily and are never reported.” Perhaps the UN report and the deaths,29
Page 7 and 8: guard was called upon. Now people l
Page 11 and 12: After the commandos set up their he
Page 13 and 14: more skilled than American troops I
Page 15 and 16: ‘‘I think it was all an act to
Page 17 and 18: Ministry of Interior Security Force
Page 19 and 20: ‘‘For some, there’s definitel
Page 21 and 22: with prominent Shiite cleric Hussei
Page 23 and 24: The Police Commandos’ penchant fo
Page 25 and 26: effective at responding to the atta
Page 27: http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Nov2005/da
Page 31 and 32: Subject: [oneheartpeacework] Traine
Page 33 and 34: 3. Maass, Peter, "The Way of the Co
Page 35 and 36: We now have Judith Miller’s New Y
Page 37 and 38: arrangements with the CEO of the Ir
Page 39 and 40: November 6, 2003, was designated fo
Page 41 and 42: March 9, 2006 -- Los Angeles Times
Page 43 and 44: http://www.newyorker.com/printables
Page 45 and 46: The former official says that the B
Page 47 and 48: officials in Colombia. The book “
Page 49 and 50: The majority of the Bush Administra
Page 51 and 52: Part Three:200451
Page 53 and 54: military base on Honduran territory
Page 55 and 56: Not everyone in Chile is opposed to
Page 57 and 58: Secret US Gulfstream jets and Swedi
Page 59 and 60: If ever possible…FOOTNOTES:Seymou
Page 61 and 62: Part Four:200561
Page 63 and 64: The organization said U.S. and Iraq
Page 65 and 66: For starters, what’s been written
Page 67 and 68: http://www.counterpunch.org/hersh01
Page 69 and 70: Fallujah I called him at home. I'm
Page 71 and 72: these people worked as night clerks
Page 73 and 74: http://nyc.indymedia.org/newswire/d
Page 75 and 76: y shifting their targets, concentra
Page 77 and 78: * Arun Gupta, former editor of The
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From Iran-Contra To IraqThe NationB
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his actions this time around become
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might have been imagined.According
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put out by the Interior Ministry, t
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in/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/arch
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However, the analogy is misleading
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http://nytimes.com/cfr/internationa
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which have raised sectarian tension
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http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstr
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A grocer in west Baghdad told Salih
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use of their experience in mass rep
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Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Iraqi
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http://www.informationclearinghouse
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The slaughter and destruction in we
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SEC. RUMSFELD: I'm not going to com
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insurgency. The Iraqi forces, the m
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Part Five:2006111
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They told soldiers they were taking
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http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq
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One photo showed what appeared to b
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Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, who announ
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Baghdad, the 14 Sunnis seized from
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"You've got the facilities protecti
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Peterson, the U.S. officer in charg
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homes or mosques by men in uniform
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moniker that sounds about as unauth
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there is a general consensus that t
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the government officials, media lac
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experience with Saddam's government
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http://www.globalecho.org/view_arti
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working within the country's interi
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Mr. Karim was originally sentenced
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Close to one million Iraqis, most o
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Neither Republicans nor Democrats s
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Democratic position and that of the
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This year's Democratic primaries an
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http://www.informationclearinghouse
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Of Hariri's assassination, Syrian o
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Sourcewatch information on Aegis:
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RAMOPS RISK MANAGEMENT GROUP (compr
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Section 2: Organization of the FPS1
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The UK was criticized for starting
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http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/
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FPS, proposing to give its members
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http://www.greenleft.org.au/2006/68
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personnel and CIA operators and con
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Although Bush hasn't specifically s
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massive military aid to the Salvado
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The convoy was traveling in the Cam
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/articl
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http://news.independent.co.uk/world
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The Mehdi Army does not always have
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clarification of what happened in S
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http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Bri
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"What our police found in their car
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3. the international cadre of war f
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If you thought the U.S. wouldn't bl
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Regrettably, that is prospect that
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The initial demand from the puppet
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www.prisonplanet.com/articles/septe
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FLASHBACK: Sick strategies for sens
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into the river. That thought alone
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Zarqawi is actually a real person o
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Examples “were found during the M
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Witnesses said about 150 Iraqi pris
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A British military source has said
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Meanwhile, frantic negotiations con
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The British troops believed the two
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Naturally, the sleazy Laurence-emul
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eing arrested by the Iraqi police o
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When viewed in the context of all t
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throw rose petals at the invaders,
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enders’ in the Sunni Community. S
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thus making people believe that cas
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