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

* Arun Gupta, former editor of The Guardian, one of the most respected independentnewspapers in recent U.S. history. He is currently an editor with the New York City IndependentMedia Center's newspaper, The Indypendent.AMY GOODMAN: Well, finally, we're joined in the studio by Arun Gupta, who has beenreporting on the proliferation of militias in Iraq. Arun is an editor with the New York CityIndependent Media Center's newspaper, The Indypendent. He writes in his article that the U.S.government is not only aware of these illegal militias, but is arming, training and funding themfor use in their counter-insurgency operations. His article will be in the May issue of Z magazine.And we welcome you to Democracy Now!ARUN GUPTA: Thank you.AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what’s happening.ARUN GUPTA: Well, these militias, which the government, the U.S. government is referring toas pop-up militias first came to prominence a couple of months ago in a report in the Wall StreetJournal. This Journal reporter Greg Jaffe noted that these militias are appearing all over Iraq.And he was interviewing various members of a General Petraeus's staff. General Petraeus is theU.S. general and head of training all security services in Iraq. And it was presented as like, gee,all these militias are starting to appear all over Baghdad, militias with names like the MuthanaBrigade, the Defenders of Khadamiya, and the special police commandos. And Petraeus's staffwas interested in funding and supporting these, but what it really appears to be turning out thatthese have been set up in secret with the U.S. government's knowledge all along and that in manyinstances these militias are actually ex-Ba'athists, many of the thugs who served under SaddamHussein in his notorious intelligence services, and they are being deployed extensivelythroughout Iraq in counter-insurgency operations. They have also been implicated in death squadoperations known as the “Salvador option,” and they also appear to be using torture extensivelythroughout Iraq, so it's a very unseemly situation. What essentially the U.S. is trying to do isprivatize, is outsource these militias and provide itself with cover, but the whole time it's actuallyfunding and creating these militias apparently.JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, your article seems to indicate also that the militias have been havingsome effect on the resistance in that the actual -- just by counting the toll of American soldiers,that there's been a reduction in recent months of the actual number of American soldiers killed.Could you talk about that?ARUN GUPTA: Yes. The peek number of U.S. soldiers killed in combat was last November,during the sacking of Fallujah. 126 U.S. soldiers died in combat. By this past March, it had fallenby 75%. So, going on that and U.S. casualties, in general, it appears that there is some success.They're using these militias extensively in the so-called Sunni Triangle area: Baghdad, Mosul,Samarra, Tikrit, Ramadi. And what it appears to be, according to Jane's Intelligence Digest isthat they're using ex-Ba'athists to hunt down their former colleagues who are directing much ofthe insurgency. So they're -- the U.S. is saying, like, well, these are a bunch of Ba'athist deadendersin the insurgency, but at the same time they're using the ex-Ba'athists themselves, whothey said they were freeing Iraq from, to hunt down insurgents. But they are also just rounding77