Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres

Exclusive: General David Petraeus and 'dirty wars' veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse

• Mona Mahmood, Maggie O'Kane, Chavala Madlena and Teresa Smith • The Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 2013 20.04 GMT • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Steele_(US_Colonel) • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Option

• http://cdn.theguardian.tv/brightcove/2013/3/6/SEARCHFORSTEELE-16x9.mp4 Link to video: James Steele: America's mystery man in Iraq

The Pentagon sent a US 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 US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US 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 from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that 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 US military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus's "eyes and ears out on the ground" in Iraq.

"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 Guardian reporting has confirmed more details of how the interrogation system worked. "Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee," claimed Samari, talking for the first time in detail about the US role in the 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 US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US 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 SPC-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 US-advised and funded paramilitary squads in Central America in the 1980s. Steele was head of a US 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 said: "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 US military chain of command, the US ambassador in Baghdad ... and the relevant Iraqi leaders."

The Guardian has learned that the SPC units' involvement with torture entered the popular consciousness in Iraq when some of their victims were paraded in front of a TV audience on a programme called "Terrorism In The Hands of Justice."

SPC detention centres bought video cameras, funded by the US military, which they used to film detainees for the 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 TV.

"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 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 horseshit."

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. 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 by the commandos soared. It was also widely believed that the units had evolved into death squads.

The Guardian has learned that high-ranking Iraqis who worked with the US after the invasion warned Petraeus of the consequences of appointing Solagh but their pleas were ignored.

The long-term impact of funding and arming this paramilitary force was to unleash a deadly sectarian militia 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.

CV: James Steele

Vietnam

Jim Steele's first experience of war was in Vietnam, where from 1965 to 1975 US combat units were deployed against the communist North Vietnamese government and Viet Cong. 58,000 Americans were killed, dealing a blow to the nation's self-esteem and leading to a change in military thinking for subsequent conflicts.

El Salvador

A 1979 military coup plunged the smallest country in Central America into civil war and drew in US training and funding on the side of the rightwing government. From 1984 to 1986 Steele – a "counterinsurgency specialist" – was head of the US MilGroup of US special forces advisers to frontline battalions of the Salvadorean military, which developed a fearsome international reputation for its death-squad activities. Prof Terry Karl, an expert at Stanford University on El Salvador's civil war, said that Steele's main aim was to shift the fight from so-called total war, which then meant the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, to a more "discriminate" approach. One of his tasks was to put more emphasis on "human intelligence" and interrogation.

Nicaragua

He became involved in the Iran-Contra affair, which saw the proceeds from covert arms sales by senior US officials to Iran used to fund the Contras, rightwing guerrillas fighting Daniel Ortega's leftwing Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Steele ran operations at El Salvador's Ilopango airport, from where Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North illegally ran weapons and supplies to the Contras.

Iraq

Soon after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, now retired Colonel James Steele was in Baghdad as one of the White House's most important agents, sending back reports to Donald Rumsfeld and acting as the US defence secretary's personal envoy to Iraq's Special Police Commandos, whose intelligence-gathering activities he oversaw. Drawn mostly from violent Shia militia, the

commandos developed a reputation for torture and later for their death-squad activities directed against the Sunni community.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link

James Steele: America's mystery man in Iraq - video

Iraq war: 10 years on index

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A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic reveals how retired US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq. Another special forces veteran, Colonel James Coffman, worked with Steele and reported directly to General David Petraeus, who had been sent into Iraq to organise the Iraqi security services http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/06/james-steele-america-iraq-video

• Watch a five-minute edited version of this film narrated by Dearbhla Molloy http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/06/us-petraeus-torture-iraq-video

• Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link

• More on this story

•

Pentagon investigating link between US military and torture centres in Iraq http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/07/pentagon-investigating-link-military-torture

Defense Department says 'it will take time' to respond to 15-month investigation by BBC Arabic and the Guardian

• From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington's man behind brutal police squads http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/06/el-salvador-iraq-police-squads-washington

• Watch the full-length documentary on how General David Petraeus, commander of multinational forces in Iraq, was linked to special forces veteran James Steele http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/06/james-steele-america-iraq-video

• US special forces veteran links General Petraeus to torture in Iraq - video http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/06/us-petraeus-torture-iraq-video

• Richard Norton-Taylor: Donald Rumsfield must be indicted over Iraq militias http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/07/donald-rumsfeld-iraqi-torture

Pentagon investigating link between US military and torture

centres in Iraq

Defense Department says 'it will take time' to respond to 15-month investigation by BBC Arabic and the Guardian

• Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Mona Mahmood • The Guardian, Thursday 7 March 2013 19.30 GMT • Jump to comments (135)

Link to video: US special forces veteran links General Petraeus to torture in Iraq

The Pentagon is investigating allegations linking the US military to human rights abuses in Iraq by police commando units who operated a network of detention and torture centres.

A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic, published on Wednesday, disclosed that the US sent a veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee Iraqi commando units involved in some of the worst acts of torture during the American-led occupation.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses, implicate US advisers for the first time in these human rights abuses. It is also the first time that the then US commander in Iraq, David Petraeus, has been linked through an adviser to the abuses.

Colonel Jack Miller, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Guardian on Thursday: "Obviously we have seen the reports and we are currently looking into the situation."

In an email, he added: "As you know the issue surrounding accusation of abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees is a complex one that is full of history and emotion. It will take time to work a thorough response."

The Pentagon argument is that it needs time because of the legal implications and also because those named in the documentary no longer serve in the military.

The relatively muted response in the US contrasted with that in Iraq. In Samarra, one of the centres of the Sunni insurgency against US-led forces and where Iraqis are alleged to have been tortured in a library, residents greeted a showing of the documentary on Wednesday evening.

Waleed Khalid said thousands of people gathered in the city for anti-government protests were excited to watch part of the documentary and there was a plan to set up big screens to show the whole film on Friday.

He said: "We as people of Samara know the whole story as many of the people in Samarra were detainees and sustained great deal of torture and some of them we found their bodies at the forensic department.

"But it is so important for us that the world would hear our story and reconsider these violations against the detainees which amount to crimes against humanity."

The documentary names Colonel James Steele, a retired special forces veteran then aged 58, who was sent to Iraq by then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld to help organise paramilitaries in an attempt to quell the Sunni insurgency. Another special adviser, retired Colonel James Coffman, worked alongside Steele and reported directly to Petraeus.

Requests to key members of the US Senate armed services committee, which could investigate the allegations, for comment were declined or ignored.

The investigation was prompted by the release by WikiLeaks of hundreds of documents in October 2010 alleging that Iraqi government forces engaged in torture and systematic abuse of detainees.

Human Rights Watch at the time called for a US government investigation into whether its own forces breached international law by transferring thousands of Iraqi detainees from US custody in spite of a clear risk of torture.

Erin Evers, a Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch, said on Thursday: "This information provides further evidence of the problematic relationship between the US government and the Iraqi ministry of the interior which includes secret prisons. The US should investigate US complicity with or responsibility for human rights abuses committed by Iraqi security forces."

Noah Weisbord, an assistant professor at the Florida International University college of law, who helped draft additions to the statute of the International Criminal Court and was a law clerk to the

chief prosecutor of the ICC in the Hague, in an email, said US soldiers could theoretically be tried by the ICC even though the US is not a signatory. But such cases would have to be referred by the UN security council and, given that the US has a veto on the council, this makes it very improbable.

Countries that are signatories to the ICC such as Canada or the UK could not arrest US citizens and send them to the Hague.

Weisbord added: "There are, however, a number of fora where US soldiers can be tried for torture. For example, some states have national laws that give their courts universal jurisdiction or other types of robust extraterritorial jurisdiction. This is unrelated to ICC membership. Jurisdiction stems from their domestic laws."

Reprieve legal director Kat Craig said: "This latest exposé of human rights abuses shows that torture is endemic to US foreign policy; these are considered and deliberate acts, not only sanctioned but developed by the highest echelons of US security services. It is time to raise the legal and political cost of torture and send an unequivocal message that it has no place in this day and age. We must increase public scrutiny and accountability for state agents, both US and UK, and bring to justice those who carried out, sanctioned or conceived of these gross violations of human rights. Without criminal prosecutions – in this case of Petreaus and many other senior officials – alongside meaningful public inquiries this cycle will never be broken."

The UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson, called for the UN Human Rights Committee to investigate. On Tuesday, he had presented a report to the council in Geneva urging accountability for Bush-era crimes. "To the list of international crimes committed by that administration must now be added the evidence uncovered by the Guardian and the BBC," Emmerson said.

He added: "As long ago as 2006, during its last periodic review by the UN Human Rights Committee, the US was heavily criticised for adopting a policy of impunity towards the officials who committed these grave and systematic crimes. It is due for its next periodic review in the autumn of this year, and I have every confidence that the committee will expect to see the results of a full investigation into these new allegations. This would have the objective of bringing those responsible, including the politicians who authorised this conduct, to justice."

From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington's man

behind brutal police squads

In 2004, with the war in Iraq going from bad to worse, the US drafted in a veteran of Central America's dirty wars to help set up a new force to fight the insurgency. The result: secret detention centres, torture and a spiral into sectarian carnage

• Mona Mahmood, Maggie O'Kane, Chavala Madlena, Teresa Smith, Ben Ferguson, Patrick Farrelly, Guy Grandjean, Josh Strauss, Roisin Glynn, Irene Baqué, Marcus Morgan, Jake Zervudachi and Joshua Boswell

• The Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 2013 16.16 GMT

Link to video: James Steele: America's mystery man in Iraq http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/06/james-steele-america-iraq-video

An exclusive golf course backs onto a spacious two-storey house. A coiled green garden hose lies on the lawn. The grey-slatted wooden shutters are closed. And, like the other deserted luxury houses in this gated community near Bryan, Texas, nothing moves.

Retired Colonel Jim Steele, whose military decorations include the Silver Star, the Defence Distinguished Service Medal, four Legions of Merit, three Bronze Stars and the Purple Heart, is not at home. Nor is he at his office headquarters in Geneva, where he is listed as the chief executive officer of Buchanan Renewables, an energy company. Similar efforts to track him down at his company's office in Monrovia are futile. Messages are left. He doesn't call back.

For over a year the Guardian has been trying to contact Steele, 68, to ask him about his role during the Iraq war as US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's personal envoy to Iraq's Special Police Commandos: a fearsome paramilitary force that ran a secret network of detention centres across the country – where those suspected of rebelling against the US-led invasion were tortured for information.

On the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion the allegations of American links to the units that eventually accelerated Iraq's descent into civil war cast the US occupation in a new and even more controversial light. The investigation was sparked over a year ago by millions of classified US military documents dumped onto the internet and their mysterious references to US soldiers ordered to ignore torture. Private Bradley Manning, 25, is facing a 20-year sentence, accused of leaking military secrets.

Steele's contribution was pivotal. He was the covert US figure behind the intelligence gathering of the new commando units. The aim: to halt a nascent Sunni insurgency in its tracks by extracting information from detainees.

It was a role made for Steele. The veteran had made his name in El Salvador almost 20 years earlier as head of a US group of special forces advisers who were training and funding the Salvadoran military to fight the FNLM guerrilla insurgency. These government units developed a fearsome international reputation for their death squad activities. Steele's own biography describes his work there as the "training of the best counterinsurgency force" in El Salvador.

Of his El Salvador experience in 1986, Steele told Dr Max Manwaring, the author of El Salvador at War: An Oral History: "When I arrived here there was a tendency to focus on technical indicators … but in an insurgency the focus has to be on human aspects. That means getting people to talk to you."

But the arming of one side of the conflict by the US hastened the country's descent into a civil war in which 75,000 people died and 1 million out of a population of 6 million became refugees.

Celerino Castillo, a Senior Drug Enforcement Administration special agent who worked alongside Steele in El Salvador, says: "I first heard about Colonel James Steele going to Iraq and I said they're going to implement what is known as the Salvadoran Option in Iraq and that's exactly what happened. And I was devastated because I knew the atrocities that were going to occur in Iraq which we knew had occurred in El Salvador."

It was in El Salvador that Steele first came in to close contact with the man who would eventually command US operations in Iraq: David Petraeus. Then a young major, Petraeus visited El Salvador in 1986 and reportedly even stayed with Steele at his house.

But while Petraeus headed for the top, Steele's career hit an unexpected buffer when he was embroiled in the Iran-Contra affair. A helicopter pilot, who also had a licence to fly jets, he ran the airport from where the American advisers illegally ran guns to right-wing Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua. While the congressional inquiry that followed put an end to Steele's military

ambitions, it won him the admiration of then congressman Dick Cheney who sat on the committee and admired Steele's efforts fighting leftists in both Nicaragua and El Salvador.

In late 1989 Cheney was in charge of the US invasion of Panama to overthrow their once favoured son, General Manuel Noriega. Cheney picked Steele to take charge of organising a new police force in Panama and be the chief liaison between the new government and the US military.

Todd Greentree, who worked in the US embassy in El Salvador and knew Steele, was not surprised at the way he resurfaced in other conflict zones. "It's not called 'dirty war' for nothing; so it's no surprise to see individuals who are associated and sort of know the ins-and-outs of that kind of war, reappear at different points in these conflicts," he says.

A generation later, and half the world away, America's war in Iraq was going from bad to worse. It was 2004 – the neo-cons had dismantled the Ba'athist party apparatus, and that had fostered anarchy. A mainly Sunni uprising was gaining ground and causing major problems in Fallujah and Mosul. There was a violent backlash against the US occupation that was claiming over 50 American lives a month by 2004.

The US Army was facing an unconventional, guerrilla insurgency in a country it knew little about. There was already talk in Washington DC of using the Salvador option in Iraq and the man who would spearhead that strategy was already in place.

Soon after the invasion in March 2003 Jim Steele was in Baghdad as one of the White House's most important "consultants", sending back reports to Rumsfeld. His memos were so valued that Rumsfeld passed them on to George Bush and Cheney. Rumsfeld spoke of him in glowing terms. "We had discussion with General Petraeus yesterday and I had a briefing today from a man named Steele who's been out there working with the security forces and been doing a wonderful job as a civilian as a matter of fact."

In June 2004 Petraeus arrived in Baghdad with the brief to train a new Iraqi police force with an emphasis on counterinsurgency. Steele and serving US colonel James Coffman introduced Petraeus to a small hardened group of police commandos, many of them among the toughest survivors of the old regime, including General Adnan Thabit, sentenced to death for a failed plot against Saddam but saved by the US invasion. Thabit, selected by the Americans to run the Special Police Commandos, developed a close relationship with the new advisers. "They became my friends. My advisers, James Steele and Colonel Coffman, were all from special forces, so I benefited from their experience … but the main person I used to contact was David Petraeus."

Link to video: Iraq's Special Police Commandos chief Adnan Thabit: 'The Americans knew about everything I did' http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/06/iraq-special-police-commandos-adnan-thabit-video

With Steele and Coffman as his point men, Petraeus began pouring money from a multimillion dollar fund into what would become the Special Police Commandos. According to the US Government Accounts Office, they received a share of an $8.2bn (£5.4bn) fund paid for by the US taxpayer. The exact amount they received is classified.

With Petraeus's almost unlimited access to money and weapons, and Steele's field expertise in counterinsurgency the stage was set for the commandos to emerge as a terrifying force. One more element would complete the picture. The US had barred members of the violent Shia militias like the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army from joining the security forces, but by the summer of 2004 they had lifted the ban.

Shia militia members from all over the country arrived in Baghdad "by the lorry-load" to join the new commandos. These men were eager to fight the Sunnis: many sought revenge for decades of Sunni-supported, brutal Saddam rule, and a chance to hit back at the violent insurgents and the indiscriminate terror of al-Qaida.

Petraeus and Steele would unleash this local force on the Sunni population as well as the insurgents and their supporters and anyone else who was unlucky enough to get in the way. It was classic counterinsurgency. It was also letting a lethal, sectarian genie out of the bottle. The consequences for Iraqi society would be catastrophic. At the height of the civil war two years later 3,000 bodies a month were turning up on the streets of Iraq — many of them innocent civilians of sectarian war.

But it was the actions of the commandos inside the detention centres that raises the most troubling questions for their American masters. Desperate for information, the commandos set up a network of secret detention centres where insurgents could be brought and information extracted from them.

The commandos used the most brutal methods to make detainees talk. There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman took part in these torture sessions, but General Muntadher al Samari, a former general in the Iraqi army, who worked after the invasion with the US to rebuild the police force, claims that they knew exactly what was going on and were supplying the commandos with lists of people they wanted brought in. He says he tried to stop the torture, but failed and fled the country.

"We were having lunch. Col Steele, Col Coffman, and the door opened and Captain Jabr was there torturing a prisoner. He [the victim] was hanging upside down and Steele got up and just closed the door, he didn't say anything – it was just normal for him."

He says there were 13 to 14 secret prisons in Baghdad under the control of the interior ministry and used by the Special Police Commandos. He alleges that Steele and Coffman had access to all these prisons and that he visited one in Baghdad with both men.

"They were secret, never declared. But the American top brass and the Iraqi leadership knew all about these prisons. The things that went on there: drilling, murder, torture. The ugliest sort of torture I've ever seen."

Link to video: Iraqi general Muntadher al-Samari: 'He was hanging upside down. Steele didn't react'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/06/iraqi-general-muntadher-steele-video

According to one soldier with the 69th Armoured Regiment who was deployed in Samarra in 2005 but who doesn't want to be identified: "It was like the Nazis … like the Gestapo basically. They [the commandos] would essentially torture anybody that they had good reason to suspect, knew something, or was part of the insurgency … or supporting it, and people knew about that."

The Guardian interviewed six torture victims as part of this investigation. One, a man who says he was held for 20 days, said: "There was no sleep. From the sunset, the torture would start on me and on the other prisoners.

"They wanted confessions. They'd say: 'Confess to what have you done.' When you say: 'I have done nothing. Shall I confess about something I have not done?', they said: 'Yes, this is our way. The Americans told us to bring as many detainees as possible in order to keep them frightened.'

"I did not confess about anything, although I was tortured and [they] took off my toenails."

Neil Smith, a 20-year-old medic who was based in Samarra, remembers what low ranking US soldiers in the canteen said. "What was pretty widely known in our battalion, definitely in our platoon, was that they were pretty violent with their interrogations. That they would beat people, shock them with electrical shock, stab them, I don't know what else ... it sounds like pretty awful things. If you sent a guy there he was going to get tortured and perhaps raped or whatever, humiliated and brutalised by the special commandos in order for them to get whatever information they wanted."

He now lives in Detroit and is a born-again Christian. He spoke to the Guardian because he said he now considered it his religious duty to speak out about what he saw. "I don't think folks back home in America had any idea what American soldiers were involved in over there, the torture and all kinds of stuff."

Through Facebook, Twitter and social media the Guardian managed to make contact with three soldiers who confirmed they were handing over detainees to be tortured by the special commandos, but none except Smith were prepared to go on camera.

"If somebody gets arrested and we hand them over to MoI they're going to get their balls hooked, electrocuted or they're going to get beaten or raped up the ass with a coke bottle or something like that," one said.

He left the army in September 2006. Now 28, he works with refugees from the Arab world in Detroit teaching recent arrivals, including Iraqis, English.

"I suppose it is my way of saying sorry," he said.

When the Guardian/BBC Arabic posed questions to Petraeus about torture and his relationship with Steele it received in reply a statement from an official close to the general saying, "General (Ret) Petraeus's record, which includes instructions to his own soldiers … reflects his clear opposition to any form of torture."

"Colonel (Ret) Steele was one of thousands of advisers to Iraqi units, working in the area of the Iraqi police. There was no set frequency for Colonel Steele's meetings with General Petraeus, although General Petraeus did see him on a number of occasions during the establishment and initial deployments of the special police, in which Colonel Steele played a significant role."

But Peter Maass, then reporting for the New York Times, and who has interviewed both men, remembers the relationship differently: "I talked to both of them about each other and it was very clear that they were very close to each other in terms of their command relationship and also in terms of their ideas and ideology of what needed to be done. Everybody knew that he was Petraeus's man. Even Steele defined himself as Petraeus's man."

Maass and photographer Gilles Peress gained a unique audience with Steele at a library-turned-detention-centre in Samarra. "What I heard is prisoners screaming all night long," Peress said. "You know at which point you had a young US captain telling his soldiers, don't, just don't come near this."

Link to video: 'We were interviewing James Steele in Iraq and I saw blood everywhere' http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/06/james-steele-iraq-blood-video

Two men from Samarra who were imprisoned at the library spoke to the Guardian investigation team. "We'd be tied to a spit or we'd be hung from the ceiling by our hands and our shoulders would be dislocated," one told us. The second said: "They electrocuted me. They hung me up from the ceiling. They were pulling at my ears with pliers, stamping on my head, asking me about my wife, saying they would bring her here."

According to Maass in an interview for the investigation: "The interrogation centre was the only place in the mini green zone in Samarra that I was not allowed to visit. However, one day, Jim Steele said to me, 'hey, they've just captured a Saudi jihadi. Would you like to interview him?'

"I'm taken not into the main area, the kind of main hall – although out the corner of my eye I can see that there were a lot of prisoners in there with their hands tied behind their backs – I was taken to a side office where the Saudi was brought in, and there was actually blood dripping down the side of this desk in the office.

Peress picks up the story: "We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I look around and I see blood everywhere, you know. He (Steele) hears the scream from the other guy who's being tortured as we speak, there's the blood stains in the corner of the desk in front of him."

Maass says: "And while this interview was going on with this Saudi 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."

One of the torture survivors remembers how Adnan Thabit "came into the library and he told Captain Dorade and Captain Ali, go easy on the prisoners. Don't dislocate their shoulders. This was because people were having to undergo surgery when they were released from the library."

General Muntadher fled after two close colleagues were killed after they were summoned to the ministry, their bodies found on a rubbish tip. He got out of Iraq and went to Jordan. In less than a month, he says, Steele contacted him. Steele was anxious to meet and suggested he come to the luxury Sheraton hotel in Amman where Steele was staying. They met in the lobby at 8pm and Steele kept him talking for nearly two hours.

"He was asking me about the prisons. I was surprised by the questions and I reminded him that these were the same prisons where we both used to work. I reminded him of the incident where he had opened the door and Colonel Jabr was torturing one of the prisoners and how he didn't do anything. Steele said: 'But I remember that I told the officer off'. So I said to him: 'No, you didn't — you didn't tell the officer off. You didn't even tell General Adnan Thabit that this officer was committing human rights abuses against these prisoners'. And he was silent. He didn't comment or answer. I was surprised by this."

According to General Muntadher: "He wanted to know specifically: did I have any information about him, James Steele? Did I have evidence against him? Photographs, documents: things which proved he committed things in Iraq; things he was worried I might reveal. This was the purpose of his visit.

"I am prepared to go to the international court and stand in front of them and swear that high-ranking officials such as James Steele witnessed crimes against human rights in Iraq. They didn't stop it happening and they didn't punish the perpetrators."

Link to video: James Steele in Iraq: only known video footage http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/06/james-steele-iraq-video

Steele, the man, remains an enigma. He left Iraq in September 2005 and has since pursued energy interests, joining the group of companies of Texas oilman Robert Mosbacher. Until now he has stayed where he likes to be – far from the media spotlight. Were it not for Bradley Manning's leaking of millions of US military logs to Wikileaks, which lifted the lid on alleged abuses by the US in Iraq, there he may well have remained. Footage and images of him are rare. One video clip just 12 seconds long features in the hour-long TV investigation into his work. It captures Steele, then a 58-year-old veteran in Iraq, hesitating, looking uncomfortable when he spots a passing camera.

He draws back from the lens, watching warily out of the side of his eye and then pulls himself out of sight.

Donald Rumsfeld must be indicted over Iraq militias

What he knew of detention centres is not the only point. He was in charge, and if he had a plan the militias wouldn't have existed

• • o Richard Norton-Taylor o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 March 2013 12.25 GMT o Jump to comments (276)

Link to video: James Steele: America's mystery man in Iraq

If there were any lingering doubts about whether the former US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, should be indicted before a criminal court, evidence that he asked a veteran of American dirty wars in central America to help set up vicious sectarian militias in Iraq should end them once and for all.

A Guardian investigation reports that Colonel James Steele, a special forces veteran, was nominated by Rumsfeld to help organise paramilitaries to quell a growing Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Steele reported directly to Rumsfeld. The paramilitary groups were drawn from Shia militia and set up detention centres where Iraqis were tortured.

What Rumsfeld and his Pentagon officials knew precisely about these centres is not the only point, or even the main one. These militias would not have been needed, the Sunni insurgency might never have happened, had he worked out even a most elementary basic plan for what to do after the invasion of Iraq. Having ripped responsibility from the US state department for post-invasion planning, his first crime was to fail to take any responsibility himself.

Rumsfeld's notorious "stuff happens" response to looting rampages in Baghdad reflected the most cynical complacency. In evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszely, the UK's senior military representative in Baghdad at the time, quoted Rumsfeld as saying growing attacks in 2004 were the work of a "bunch of no-hopers".

Rumsfeld's covert decisions, now exposed, suggest such complacency was mere rhetoric.

His failure to take on the responsibilities of an occupying power – that was what US and UK forces were, in law as well as practice – was in clear breach of obligations laid down in the Geneva conventions.

His appointment of Paul Bremer as head of the so-called coalition provisional authority – in effect governor of Iraq – and their decision to banish Ba'ath party members and the Iraqi army, compounded the felony, leaving a huge and dangerous vacuum which was filled by assorted criminals, insurgents, and the kind of Shia militia exposed in the Guardian.

Some of those Shia militia attacked and killed British troops in Basra who were themselves in part the victims of a failure to adopt any kind of coherent or responsible plan about what to do after the invasion.

Senior military commanders made it quite clear to this writer soon after the invasion that they believed there was sufficient evidence to indict Rumsfeld and his cohorts. Strong criticism of Rumsfeld and Bremer is a theme running through evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, in autobiographies and in reports by Commons committees.

The next question is how far is the then British government, and Tony Blair in particular, implicated. His senior military advisers, and senior Whitehall officials, vented their anger and frustration, first privately and later more publicly, at Rumsfeld and his Pentagon. Blair, his foreign secretary, Jack Straw and defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, may have vented their frustration too. There is no evidence they actually did so, indeed that they would even have dared, as far as Washington was concerned, to say boo to a goose .

In any case, Rumsfeld was in charge, and was allowed to do anything he pleased, whatever his obligations under international law, and whatever those in charge of America's closest ally, Britain, might have said.

Friday, March 22, 2013 FULL SHOW | HEADLINES

BBC-Guardian Exposé Uses WikiLeaks to Link Iraq Torture

Centers to U.S. Col. Steele & Gen. Petraeus

download: Video Audio Get CD/DVD More Formats

•

WikiLeaks Iraq War Logs Expose US-Backed Iraqi Torture, 15,000 More Civilian Deaths, and Contractors Run Amok

Maggie O'Kane, multimedia investigations editor at The Guardian. She is a former foreign correspondent. Her past awards include British journalist of the year and foreign correspondent of the year.

“Behind the Death Squads: An exclusive report on the US role in El Salvador's official terror.” By Allan Nairn (The Progressive) Transcript | Printer-friendly

A shocking new report by The Guardian and BBC Arabic details how the United States armed and trained Iraqi death squads that ran torture centers. It is a story that stretches from the U.S.-backed death squads in Central America during the 1980s to the imprisoned Army whistleblower Bradley Manning. We play extended excerpts of "James Steele: America’s Mystery Man in Iraq," which exposes the role the retired U.S. colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played in training Iraqi police commando units. "We spent maybe six months trying to track down young American soldiers who served in Samarra," says the film’s executive producer, Maggie O’Kane, who notes the investigation was sparked by memos found in the Iraq War Logs released by WikiLeaks. "But many were too frightened because of what happened to Bradley Manning." A Pentagon spokesman told The Guardian it had seen the reports and is looking into the situation. "As you know, the issue surrounding accusation of abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees is a complex one that is full of history and emotion," said Col. Jack Miller. "It will take time to work a thorough response." [includes rush transcript]

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue to mark the 10th anniversary of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, we turn today to a shocking new report by The Guardian newspaper and BBC Arabic detailing how the United States armed and trained Iraqi police commando units that ran torture centers and death squads. It’s a story that stretches from the U.S.-backed involvement in Latin America to the imprisoned Army whistleblower Bradley Manning. In a moment, we’ll be joined by one of the chief reporters behind the investigation, but first I want to play an excerpt of the documentary that accompanies their report.

U.S. SOLDIER: First to fight for the right and to build the nation’s might, and the Army goes rolling along.

NARRATOR: This is one of the great untold stories of the Iraq War, how just over a year after the invasion, the United States funded a sectarian police commando force that set up a network of torture centers to fight the insurgency. It was a decision that helped fuel a sectarian civil war between Shia and Sunni that ripped the country apart. At its height, it was claiming 3,000 victims a month.

This is also the story of James Steele, the veteran of America’s dirty war in El Salvador. He was in charge of the U.S. advisers who trained notorious Salvadoran paramilitary units to fight left-wing guerrillas. In the course of that civil war, 75,000 people died, and over a million people became refugees. Steele was chosen by the Bush administration to work with General David Petraeus to organize these paramilitary police commandos.

This is the only known Iraqi video footage of Steele, a shadowy figure, always in the background, observing, evaluating. The man on his left is his collaborator, Colonel James Coffman. He reported directly to General David Petraeus, who funded this police commando force from a multibillion-dollar fund.

The thousands of commandos that Steele let loose came to be mostly made up of Shia militias, like the Badr Brigades, hungry to take revenge on the Sunni supporters of Saddam Hussein. Steele oversaw the commandos, mostly made up of militias. They were torturing detainees for information on the insurgency.

GILLES PERESS: He hears the scream of the other guy who’s being tortured, you know, as we speak. There’s the blood stains on the corner of the desk in front of him.

GEN. MUNTADHER AL-SAMARI: [translated] The things that went on there: drilling, murder, torture—the ugliest sorts of torture I’ve ever seen.

NARRATOR: The U.S. was desperate for information on the insurgency. And Steele’s expertise was turning that information obtained from thousands of detainees into actionable intelligence.

TODD GREENTREE: Colonel Steele is one of the few people who understands how to conduct intelligence-driven operations against operational cells of an insurgency or terrorist organization.

NARRATOR: The Iraqi leader of these feared commandos was Adnan Thabit. In the city of Samarra, his commandos and their American advisers turned the main library into a detention center, where torture was routine occurrence.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from the Guardian/BBC Arabic documentary Searching for

Steele. The investigation into the U.S.-backed commando units was sparked by memos found in the Iraq War logs leaked by Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks.

Joining us now in London from BBC headquarters is Maggie O’Kane. She’s multimedia editor and director of investigations at The Guardian newspaper and executive producer of the new documentary, longtime reporter who’s been named British journalist of the year and foreign correspondent of the year.

Maggie, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about why you undertook this documentary, this investigation.

MAGGIE O’KANE: Well, I think when the WikiLeaks documents came out in November 2011, I had a sense, and the team that I work with who have spent a lot of time covering the war in Iraq, that there was a deeper story here. And one of the things that made us very interested was there was a reference to a thing called "Frago 242," which was Fragmentary Order 242, which was a U.S. military order instructing U.S. soldiers to ignore Iraq-on-Iraqi torture. Now, this incidence, this Frago 242, came up over a thousand times in the documents as we looked at it, and we wondered why was this order issued and what was the story behind it. And there was also references in the WikiLeaks to a General Adnan Thabit, who was visiting the American embassy. So, it was a sense that there was a deeper story to tell here and that the WikiLeaks documents, because they were the actual documents and what the State Department was sending

back to Washington about what was going on, that this was a real treasure trove that we should explore, rather than just become excited about the means of these documents being delivered.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about Jim Steele’s time in Latin America, specifically El Salvador, and go back to a clip of Searching for Steele.

NARRATOR: Vietnam, the conflict in which over 58,000 U.S. soldiers died, is where James Steele was first introduced to counterinsurgency as an alternative way of combating a guerrilla uprising. Steele served in the Vietnam War in the Blackhorse Regiment from 1968 to 1969. He was described by General George Patton Jr. as the best troop commander in his regiment.

But if Vietnam shaped his formative military career, it was in the war against left-wing insurgents in El Salvador that James Steele secured his reputation as the counterinsurgency specialist. Steele arrived in El Salvador in 1984 as the leader of the U.S. MilGroup, a group of U.S. military advisers to the El Salvadoran army.

Todd Greentree got to know James Steele when he was working in the U.S. embassy in El Salvador at the time.

TODD GREENTREE: Colonel Steele, as the MilGroup commander, was in charge of all of the special forces teams, the training teams that were out at the head—the brigade headquarters.

NARRATOR: The U.S. was trying to defeat a guerrilla insurgency, and American experts trained the Salvadoran security forces in the dark arts of counterinsurgency. Some of these Salvadoran paramilitary units were effectively death squads.

Celerino Castillo was a U.S. drug enforcement agent who was involved in training these paramilitaries. He was widely acknowledged for his efforts. Castillo met James Steele in Salvador.

CELERINO CASTILLO: A very military type, very disciplined. His decorations, medals and stuff that was given to him by the U.S. military and the Salvadoran military, were surrounding his office. So, I was very impressed with Colonel Steele.

NARRATOR: Dr. George Vickers got to know and like James Steele when he visited Salvador to write a Ph.D. thesis on U.S. military strategy in Central America.

DR. GEORGE VICKERS: He was totally committed to defeating the guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador. He used to discuss how he traveled around to the military bases where U.S. trainers were based. He talked about the importance of building human intelligence information as opposed to just technical information. I don’t think he had any hesitations about obtaining information by very rough forms that were being carried out by the Salvadoran armed forces under the eyes of U.S. military trainers.

NARRATOR: Steele was the chief American counterinsurgency expert on the ground in El Salvador, a figure of enormous authority to the El Salvadoran military.

CELERINO CASTILLO: He was the MilGroup commander in El Salvador. Nothing moves without his authority. And their objective was to eradicate the guerrilla movement. It’s very well written, through history, that there were major massacres being conducted.

NARRATOR: We put these allegations to retired Colonel Steele and have received no reply. By the end of the civil war, at least 75,000 Salvadoran civilians had died, and one million refugees had fled the country. The Salvadoran military halted the advance of the guerrillas, leading some in Washington to believe the U.S. advisory role was a success, so much so that even David Petraeus, then an ambitious 33-year-old major, visited El Salvador to study this counterinsurgency campaign. The young Petraeus even reportedly stayed in Steele’s house while there.

AMY GOODMAN: The BBC Arabic/Guardian investigation called Searching for Steele. I wanted to turn right now, in January 2005, Newsweek magazine reporting the Pentagon considering using what it described as the "Salvador Option" in Iraq. Shortly after the article’s publication, investigative journalist Allan Nairn appeared on Democracy Now! His 1984 article in The Progressive magazine, titled "Behind the Death Squads," exposed the CIA’s backing of El Salvador death squads and led to an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

ALLAN NAIRN: In El Salvador, and not just Salvador, but about three dozen other countries, the U.S. government, in an integrated effort involving the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department, backed the creation of military units that targeted civilian activists. In Salvador, I interviewed many of the officers involved in running these squads. For example, General "Chele" Medrano, who was on the CIA payroll, described how they picked their targets. He said they targeted people who speak—and these are his words—"against Yankee imperialism, against the oligarchy, against military men. These people are traitors to the country. What can the troops do? When they find them, they kill them."

Actually, they didn’t always kill them. Often they brought them to the headquarters of the treasury police, the national guard, the army, and they tortured them for days. One former member of the Salvadoran treasury police, René Hurtado, described a course that was given at army general staff headquarters, where American officers gave instruction in techniques including electroshock torture. Hurtado himself said he conducted such torture. He said—these are his words: "You put wires on the prisoner’s vital parts. You place the wires between the prisoner’s teeth, on the penis, in the vagina. The prisoners feel it more if their feet are in the water, and they’re seated on iron, so the blow is stronger. … When it’s over, you just throw him in the alleys with a sign saying, Mano Blanco, ESA (Secret Anticommunist Army), or Maximiliano Hernandez Brigade." These are the names of the Salvadoran death squads.

I was given a chance to see the archives of the Salvadoran national police, the intelligence archives, and you could see they had files marked "union," "student," "religious." They showed me a card file, which included surveillance reports on activists who had traveled to other countries. These surveillance reports were given to them, according to the captain who was giving me this tour, by the CIA. The whole filing system was set up for them by the U.S. Agency for International Development. ...

Something on the order of 75,000 Salvadoran civilians were killed by the Salvadoran military, most of them during the ’70s. And the majority of these were targeted by these death-squad-type forces. So, one point is, these were not combatants who were being killed. These were not armed guerrillas. They were sometimes engaged by the Salvadoran military in combat, but the death squad operations, which the Pentagon, according to Newsweek, is now talking about using for Iraq, these went after civilians.

AMY GOODMAN: That was investigative journalist Allan Nairn. His 1984 article in The

Progressive magazine was called "Behind the Death Squads." It exposed the CIA’s backing of El Salvador death squads and led to an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Maggie O’Kane, before we go to break and then move into the Iraq part of this story, flesh out more for us Colonel James Steele, the bridge between Salvador and Iraq.

MAGGIE O’KANE: Well, one of the things that just strikes me, listening to that, is the sort of extraordinary parallels that exist between Salvador and Iraq. One of the interesting things in the WikiLeaks documents is that General Adnan Thabit, who ran the special police commandos that were carrying out the torture, used the phrase "to fight terror with terror," which is exactly the same phrase that was used by General Montana phon. in El Salvador when they were operating what was called the "platforms," which were basically the torture and interrogation centers where the American advisers were present. And what you have seen is an almost exact parallel between the platforms in El Salvador, which were the regional torture centers, and the platforms in Iraq, which operated in the same way, which was bringing in hundreds of mostly Sunni men and boys and torturing them for information.

Now, in between the Salvador operation, we find that James Steele was involved in Iran-Contra, was one of six key people, along with Oliver North, that was funneling arms to the Ilopango air base to Nicaragua, to the Contras there. He then went on and was appointed by Dick Cheney to go to Panama to set up the police force there after the overthrow of Noriega. And between that, he goes in and out of the energy business. He’s employed by Enron. He works for various private military companies. And then he seems to be called back in at periods of crisis or at periods where they need his experience. So, in 2004, when the insurgency was gaining strength in Iraq, there is a call from Steele—to Steele directly from Donald Rumsfeld that he is to go to Iraq and to get involved in the training of the special police commandos. And this, we now understand, was to go to Iraq and set up a similar platform operation, which would involve regional torture centers, to get information on the insurgents.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re speaking with Maggie O’Kane, multimedia investigations editor at The Guardian. She’s speaking to us from London, voted best foreign correspondent of the year, as well as British journalist of the year. When we come back, we go to the excerpt of Searching

for Steele in Iraq. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: As we turn back to the documentary Searching for Steele, we turn to the city of Samarra, where the U.S.-backed Iraqi special commandos took over the city’s library and turned it into an interrogation center. This is another excerpt of the film.

NARRATOR: Samarra was the first place that the connection between James Steele and the activities of the police commandos was made known to the outside world. New York Times journalist Peter Maass convinced General Petraeus to allow him and photographer Gilles Peress to visit the commandos in Samarra. Their host was James Steele.

GILLES PERESS: What I heard is prisoners screaming all night long, you know, at which point you have the young U.S. captain telling his soldiers, "Don’t come near this thing."

NARRATOR: Gilles Peress’ stark black-and-white photographs capture how the commandos worked in Samarra. James Steele crops up in these photographs repeatedly.

PETER MAASS: I was staying at the base in Samarra, an American base, and I overheard soldiers, American soldiers at this base, talking about having watched prisoners be kind of strung up like animals after a hunt over a bar, having watched prisoners be actually tortured.

NARRATOR: Adnan Thabit and the American military made the joint decision to set up the commando headquarters and interrogation center in the city’s main library. We spoke to two men from Samarra who were imprisoned in the library. Still fearful, they asked us to conceal their identities.

TORTURE SURVIVOR 1: [translated] We would be blindfolded and handcuffed behind our backs. Then they would beat us with shovels and pipes. We’d be tied to a spit, or we’d be hung from the ceiling by our hands, and our shoulders would be dislocated.

TORTURE SURVIVOR 2: [translated] They electrocuted me. They hung me from the ceiling. They were pulling at my ears with pliers, stamping on my head, asking me about my wife, saying they would bring her here.

PETER MAASS: The interrogation center was the only place in the kind of mini Green Zone in Samarra that I was not allowed to visit. However, one day, Jim Steele said to me, "Hey, they just captured a Saudi jihadi. Would you like to interview him?"

GILLES PERESS: Was Steele completely together to bring us into the library? Maybe not.

NARRATOR: Maass and Peress were about to get an unprecedented glimpse into this clandestine world.

PETER MAASS: We kind of walk into the entrance area, and the first thing that I see is one of the Iraqi guards beating up one of the Iraqi prisoners. And then I’m taken not into the main area, kind of the main hall, although out the corner of my eye I could see there were a lot of prisoners in there with their hands tied behind their backs. I was taken to a side office where the Saudi was brought in, and there was actually blood dripping down the side of a desk in this office.

GILLES PERESS: We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele, and I’m looking around. I see blood everywhere, you know.

PETER MAASS: And while this interview was going on, me and the Saudi, with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams. There was somebody shouting, "Allah! Allah! Allah!" But it wasn’t, you know, kind of religious ecstasy or something like that; these were screams of pain and terror.

NARRATOR: We asked General Adnan why he thought the prisoners were screaming.

GEN. ADNAN THABIT: [translated] Maybe sometimes when officers visit prisons, the prisoners do start shouting. They’re a bit like whirling dervishes. They love to scream, "Allah! Allah!"

PETER MAASS: They were so loud, and they were so disturbing, that Steele left the room to go find out, you know, what was going on, because it was breaking up our interview. And while he was gone, the screaming stopped, and then he came back into the room, and the interview continued.

NARRATOR: Although James Steele did not respond to our request for an interview about his activities in Samarra, he did tell The New York Times that he opposes human rights abuses. One American soldier in Samarra was deeply affected by what he saw.

NEIL SMITH: At the time, I just felt like everybody knew and nobody cared that there was torture going on.

NARRATOR: Army medic Neil Smith remembers just how frightened Iraqi civilians in Samarra were of the special police commandos.

NEIL SMITH: What was pretty widely known in our battalion, definitely in our platoon, was that they were pretty violent with their interrogations, that they would beat people, shock them with, you know, electrical shock, stab them. I don’t know what all else—you know, sounds like pretty awful things. If you sent a guy there, he was going to get tortured and perhaps raped, or whatever, humiliated and brutalized by the special commandos in order whatever information they wanted.

GEN. MUNTADHER AL-SAMARI: [translated] 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.

NARRATOR: Petraeus defended his record with the police commandos to PBS Frontline’s Martin Smith. He says he was aware of individual militia members in the commandos, but not militia groups.

GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS: I did not see militia groups in the special police during the time that I was there.

MARTIN SMITH: Did you think about what you could have done differently, might have done differently, to have prevented the development of these militias that were effectively developing under your watch?

GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS: Well, I, again, don’t—I have not seen—you know, we kept hearing this all the time, Martin, that this or that. To find the absolute evidence of this has actually been quite difficult.

NARRATOR: But Jerry Burke, who was a senior adviser in police affairs to the Iraqi Interior Ministry says that Petraeus must have known that organized Shia militia were dominant in the police commandos.

JERRY BURKE: He had to have known. These things were discussed openly, whether it was at staff meetings or, you know, before or after various staff meetings in general conversation. Pretty much the whole world in Iraq knew that the police commandos were Badr Brigade. And he must have known about the death squad activities, and, again, it was common knowledge across Baghdad.

NARRATOR: Even Petraeus’s own special adviser in the military chain of command, Colonel James Coffman, was, according to many witnesses, working side by side with James Steele in the detention centers where torture was taking place. Colonel Coffman declined to be interviewed by us.

About General Petraeus’s relationship with James Steele, the official speaking for the general said: "Steele was one of thousands of advisers to Iraqi units working in the area of the Iraqi police." Journalist Peter Maass, who interviewed Petraeus at the time, remembers the relationship being a lot closer than the Petraeus statement would indicate.

PETER MAASS: It was very clear that they were very close to each other in terms of their command relationship and also in terms of their ideas and ideology about what needed to be done. Petraeus explicitly told me that he believed very, very strongly in the commandos, thought the commandos were successful, and wanted them to become bigger, stronger and even more prevalent in the fight against the insurgency.

NARRATOR: International humanitarian law imposes obligations on those engaged in armed conflict regarding the treatment of prisoners. Not only must prisoners not be abused, but those detaining prisoners also have an obligation to ensure respect, as well. It is not acceptable to turn a blind eye.

GEN. PETER PACE: It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. servicemember, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it.

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE DONALD RUMSFELD: But I don’t think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it’s to report it.

GEN. PETER PACE: If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it.

NARRATOR: The publication by WikiLeaks of thousands of diplomatic cables show that by July 2005 the U.S. embassy in Baghdad was telling Washington about the abuse being committed by the commandos. We also learned that Adnan Thabit was a guest at the American embassy in Baghdad. He met the U.S. ambassador for counterterrorism and talked about his approach to policing. This is an extract from what he’s reported to have said.

CABLE EXTRACT: "Summary: Fight Terror with Terror. ... Major General Thabit, who created and commands the Special Police Forces, is a Sunni officer who served time in prison for attempting to overthrow the Saddam Regime. ... They expressed the view that it’s necessary to fight terror with terror and that it is critical that their forces be respected and feared as this was what was required in Iraqi Society to command authority."

NARRATOR: We asked Ambassador Crumpton if he had been aware that Adnan Thabit’s commandos were engaged in torturing detainees.

AMB. HENRY CRUMPTON: Well, I assure you, if I knew there was torture going on at that time with the people I was talking to, I would have raised it and discussed it. You’re implying that I didn’t know that, and I resent that question, the way you phrased it, frankly.

NARRATOR: But there are indications that the U.S. government knew what the commandos were doing.

CABLE EXTRACT: "...we remain troubled by the indications that at times units commanded by Thabit cross the line."

NARRATOR: Despite these concerns, Adnan Thabit remained officially in charge until the middle of 2006. He told us that the American officials he dealt with were aware of what his men were doing.

GEN. ADNAN THABIT: [translated] 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.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from James Steele: America’s Mystery Man in Iraq , the BBC Arabic/Guardian investigation. We’ll link to the complete film online. Our guest is the executive producer of the film, Maggie O’Kane, multimedia editor and director of investigations at The

Guardian newspaper. We’ll come back to her in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: "Peace Train," by the British singer-songwriter Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens. In 2004, he was denied entry into the United States after mistakenly being

placed on the Department of Homeland security watchlist. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Our guest is Maggie O’Kane, multimedia investigations editor at The Guardian, former foreign correspondent. Her past awards include British journalist of the year and foreign correspondent of the year. She is joining us from London.

Maggie, I wanted to get your response to the Pentagon response. While the former Army Colonel Jim Steele and the former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld refused to talk to your newspaper, The Guardian, the Pentagon did issue a response after your report was published. Colonel Jack Miller, a Pentagon spokesman, told The Guardian, quote, "Obviously we have seen the reports and we are currently looking into the situation. As you know the issue surrounding accusation of abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees is a complex one that is full of history and emotion. It will take time to work a thorough response." Maggie O’Kane, your response to the Pentagon?

MAGGIE O’KANE: Well, I mean, we’re still waiting. And we know, unofficially, from sources within the Pentagon, that they’re—to quote one high-ranking military officer, he said to us, "The difficulty is that those guys were wearing the same uniform that we’re wearing now." So I think the Pentagon is in a very difficult position. And we await to hear what they’ve got to say. We have heard nothing from James Steele. We’ve heard nothing from Donald Rumsfeld.

We also know that CENTCOM, immediately after the film was broadcast on BBC Arabic, set up a monitoring unit within CENTCOM to see what the response has been among the Arab population. We know also that there were public screenings of the film in Samarra, in which people came out onto a square to watch the film, which, in a sense, is a sort of acknowledgment of what happened to the male population of that time. But so far, the Pentagon has said nothing.

I mean, one of the interesting things I find is that the interest in this in Europe, for example, is huge. I mean, 14 countries have—are showing the film over the next 10 days and have bought it. But actually, within the America mainstream television networks, there’s been very little response, and also very little response from the American mainstream media. So I presume they’re just going to try and ignore it. And except for what your program has done, and also Real TV, it seems to have been played down.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re saying that U.S. Central Command, they’re monitoring reaction to this all over the world. And in the United States, the commercial networks, they did not option this film, this documentary, play it, especially at this time, on this 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

MAGGIE O’KANE: Yeah, I mean, we have had very little response in the American mainstream media. It went out last night on ZDF in Germany, which is the German state channel. It went out on the Swedish state channel two nights ago. And it’s going out in France tomorrow. So, one wonders, since this is about, you know, America’s war in Iraq and the American special advisers, why is America not interested?

AMY GOODMAN: A very important question. I wanted—

MAGGIE O’KANE: Or why, indeed, does the Pentagon feel that they don’t actually have to respond to these—to this investigation?

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about WikiLeaks, Maggie O’Kane. You spoke about this at the beginning of the broadcast, but the significance of the information, of the documents they released, as the foundation of this report and so many others?

MAGGIE O’KANE: Well, Amy, it wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the WikiLeaks document, because so many things are about deniability and distancing and not taking responsibility. And El Salvador is a classic example. You can push away with a distance, and you can put a layer of, you know, the local police forces in between your actions, and there’s always been plausible deniability. What WikiLeaks gave us was a clear indication from the U.S. State Department that they knew what was—they knew what was going on. And it was that bedrock, and also the information from Frago 242 that officially there was an order to ignore torture, that, you know, give journalists like me and other investigative journalists the basis of something to work on, something that actually can’t be denied, because it’s there in black and white. And that is an extraordinarily valuable tool for an investigative journalism. And you wouldn’t be seeing this film, we wouldn’t be looking back at El Salvador, if it hadn’t been for WikiLeaks.

AMY GOODMAN: Maggie, I wanted to turn to another clip. The U.S.-backed police commandos are also accused of evolving into a Shia death squad targeting Sunnis. I want to return to your film.

NARRATOR: One man who survived Samarra and Nisoor Square says that the police commandos lied about the fate of some of his fellow detainees.

TORTURE SURVIVOR 3: [translated] They started releasing some of the detainees. They were claiming that these detainees would return to their families. They were killing them and dumping their bodies on the streets of Baghdad.

JERRY BURKE: It became very obvious that this was criminal activity by the special commandos. They were eliminating their own opposition and terrorizing citizens from the Sunni community. We lost the support of a lot of Iraqi citizens who became very cynical and very anti-American. Even the ones who were friendly with us couldn’t understand why we were allowing this to happen.

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE DONALD RUMSFELD: Good afternoon, folks.

REPORTER: Are you concerned over—and, in fact, is the United States looking into growing reports of uniformed deaths squads in Iraq perhaps assassinating and torturing hundreds of Sunnis? And if that’s true, what would that say about stability in Iraq?

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE DONALD RUMSFELD: I’m not going to comment on hypothetical questions. I have not seen reports that hundreds are being killed by roving death squads at all. I’m not going to get into speculation like that.

REPORTER: Well, sir, that’s not a hypothetical, I don’t believe. The Sunnis themselves are charging that hundreds have been assassinated, people shot in the head, found in alleys.

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE DONALD RUMSFELD: What you’re talking about are unverified, to my knowledge at least, unverified comments. I just don’t have any data from the field that I could comment on in a specific way.

NARRATOR: But Donald Rumsfeld should have known about the death squad activities. James Steele had written to Rumsfeld six weeks earlier warning him that the police commandos, armed and financed by the U.S., were effectively a Shia militia engaged in death squad activities.

MEMO TO DON RUMSFELD: "MEMO TO DON RUMSFELD

“FROM JIM STEELE

"...thugs like the commander of the Wolf Brigade who has been involved in death squad activities, extortion of detainees and a general pattern of corruption. ... Nearly all of the new recruits within the commandos are Shia. Many of them are Badr members."

AMY GOODMAN: Maggie O’Kane, talk more about what you have found here.

MAGGIE O’KANE: Well, I think what’s very important to understand here is that there was a creation of the special police commandos, which began in 2004, and over the period of the next year, they developed into a force that was nearly 12,000 strong, which had been armed by the Americans, had been—was being advised by them, and included this network of torture platforms. Then you had another step, which was, in June 2005, you had a highly sectarian Shia minister taking over in the Ministry of the Interior. And basically this force now was handed over also to his control, and it began a full-scale war on the Sunni community, which involved large-scale death squad activity.

Now, before this was—this was building up, Steele left in September 2004. Some of the other advisers stayed. And then, despite the warnings of many within the Iraqi political establishment, who said, "Do not hand this force over to the control of Jabr," it was allowed to happen. So, again, this brought the killing onto a new scale. Our information is that while Steele was organizing the platform of torture centers, there was not wide-scale death squad activity. That took place after 2005, when, effectively, the special police commandos were handed over to Jabr Solagh. And then hell broke out in Iraq. Through 2005 and 2006, there was a civil war, a sectarian civil war, in which as many as 3,000 bodies a month were turning up in the streets of Iraq. That’s what—and that was precipitated and certainly aided by the formation of the special police commandos.

AMY GOODMAN: A central figure in your investigation is a former Iraqi general who spoke out for the first time in your film about Army Colonel Jim Steele and the U.S.-backed torture program.

NARRATOR: General Muntadher al-Samari is a former general in the Iraqi army. After the invasion, he worked with the Americans to rebuild the police force. But Muntadher was very disturbed by the abuse and torture he witnessed being committed by the police commandos. He tried, on a number of occasions, to stop it. He has never spoken before about the part the U.S. played in running the special police commandos.

GEN. MUNTADHER AL-SAMARI: [translated] The Ministry of Interior had 14 to 15 prisons. They were secret, never declared. But the American top brass and the Iraqi leadership knew all about these prisons, the things that went on there—drilling, murder, torture—the ugliest sorts of torture I’ve ever seen.

NARRATOR: General Muntadher alleges that James Steele had access to all of these prisons and that he visited one in Baghdad with him.

GEN. MUNTADHER AL-SAMARI: [translated] Yes, that’s James Steele. That’s what he always used to wear: jeans and a leather jacket. I remember he always wore his gun here, on the right-hand side.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of the documentary Searching for Steele. Maggie O’Kane, multimedia investigations editor at The Guardian, talk more about the significance of what he said and also Steele’s relationship with Petraeus, Maggie.

MAGGIE O’KANE: Well, in terms of the relationship with Petraeus, the main link between Colonel Steele and General Petraeus was Colonel James Coffman, who was the direct link in the chain of command between Petraeus and special police commandos. Colonel Coffman was appointed as the special adviser to the special—to the police commandos, reporting directly to General Petraeus. He described himself in the Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, when he was interviewed, as General Petraeus’s eyes and ears on the ground in Iraq.

So, from our interviews with people who worked within the special police commandos who observed Steele and Coffman, one said to me, "Steele and Coffman were never apart. In the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centers, I never saw them separated. They came in separate cars every morning and left separately, but worked hand in hand." So there was clearly a close working relationship between Steele and Coffman, who was reporting to General Petraeus.

But we understand that Steele was sent to Iraq by Donald Rumsfeld, and we understand that because Donald Rumsfeld actually writes to George Bush in September 2004 and tells him about sending James Steele to Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: What most surprised you by this investigation, Maggie, by what you found?

MAGGIE O’KANE: I think the most surprising thing was the scale and the organization of the—of the torture, that it was sort of so well organized, that there were these platforms, that there were hundreds of people being lifted all of the time.

And the other thing that surprised me about it is that somehow in the kind of fog of war, that we never, as journalists, never really seem to reach the—to report it in a way that people could really understand what was happening there. There were reports. It was called "The Way of the Commandos." There were reports that torture was going on, but somehow it never penetrated, or it was never sort of acknowledged that that’s the way the war was being conducted.

And I think one of the things, the great things, that I have learned from this is that we’re very—we’re very easy with words like "human intelligence," "counterinsurgency," and that we don’t really understand that this is about systematic and brutal torture that has repercussions among the civilian population.

And also that there was one man whose history goes back through so many of America’s wars. And I think it’s indicative of a very dysfunctional, brutal time, that I hope this film will be a legacy that actually says, if you want to go to war, this is what war means. It means 14-year-old boys being hung up and tortured. It means men being turned on spits. And that’s called "counterinsurgency." So I just feel it’s important that this information comes out, and I’m shocked, in a way, that we want to forget it.

AMY GOODMAN: And as we wrap up, I wanted to turn to Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private who has admitted to leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. I want to ask about the chilling effect his case has had among soldiers who may otherwise speak out against abuses. Let’s go to just an excerpt of a leaked audio recording of Bradley Manning, first time we hear him speaking in his own words in custody. This is from his hearing last month. Listen very carefully.

BRADLEY MANNING: I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained within the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A tables, this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general, as well as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.

AMY GOODMAN: Bradley Manning says he released these documents to open up a debate. Very interesting, as he remains behind bars facing decades in prison. Maggie O’Kane, you were talking about the information that was released, on which you built your report, having so much difficulty getting into the United States corporate media, though you’re getting it everywhere else all over the world.

MAGGIE O’KANE: Yes, indeed. There hasn’t been the response we expected in America. But I do want to go back to the point which I made before. Really, this would not be coming out, if it hadn’t been for Bradley Manning. This information, the basic information, has been very key.

And I’ll tell you something else that’s very, very chilling. We spent maybe six months trying to track down young American soldiers who served in Samarra. Many of them knew what was

going on there. In the end, we found one guy, called Neil Smith, in Detroit, who was 21 when he was there, who spoke out.

AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds.

MAGGIE O’KANE: He spoke out because, he said, "I’m a born-again—I’m born-again Christian." But many were too frightened because of what happened to Bradley Manning.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for the documentary and your time, Maggie O’Kane, multimedia investigations editor at The Guardian, executive producer of the new documentary, James Steele: America’s Mystery Man in Iraq , a BBC Arabic/Guardian investigation. We’ll link to the complete film at democracynow.org.

You can also go online to see our interactive timeline featuring highlights of Democracy Now!’s decade of coverage of the Iraq War.

And on Sunday, I’ll be speaking at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, at 8 p.m. in Park Hall Auditorium. You can go to our website for details.

Jim Steele Counselor to US Ambassador for Iraqi Security Forces

Biography

Jim Steele is an expert in the areas of security and counterterrorism. He is the president of J&D International, a consulting firm specializing in corporate and personal security with offices in Houston and The Woodlands, Texas. In addition, Jim serves as the chairman of the executive committee of the RC Group, a business development firm in Washington, D.C. Jim Steele continues to work periodically in Iraq with the U.S. Department of Defense to assist in building effective Iraqi security forces.

Jim returned from Iraq in September 2005, having served over two years there. From May 2003 until assuming the position of senior counselor to Ambassador Bremer for Iraqi security forces in November 2003, Jim Steele was the senior police advisor with the Iraqi police SWAT unit in Baghdad. He headed the advisory team that organized, trained and operated with this special unit. He personally led the unit on a series of highly successful operations that netted former high-ranking members of the Saddam regime as well as numerous other criminal and terrorist elements. During one such operation, despite intense fire, Jim Steele and his team successful overpowered the terrorists and rescued two hostages that had been kidnapped, brutally beaten and tortured by their captors. In March 2004, he participated in the raid that resulted in the capture of Saddam’s former Minister of Interior, General Mohammed Zimam Abdul Al-Razzaq, the four of spades with a bounty of one million dollars on his head. In April 2004, prior to the Marine offensive in Fallujah, Jim Steele led a small group of Iraqi police and U.S. advisors on an undercover operation into the city to recover the remains of the Blackwater contractors that had been ambushed and killed there, determine exactly what had occurred and assess the enemy situation. Because of an increasing threat throughout the country, Jim Steele also assumed responsibility for the security of Iraq’s most senior government officials, the members of the Governing Council. In the execution of this mission, he organized and supervised the training and equipping of over 300 members of the personal security details for members of the Governing Council and key ministries. The success of this mission was repeatedly demonstrated by the superb performance of these protective security details under fire. In November 2004, the Iraqi commando unit that he was advising came under attack by a large insurgent force in Mosul. Jim Steele’s actions during the battle were instrumental in defeating the enemy and saving the lives of both Iraqi commandos and U.S. soldiers. For his heroic actions, he was awarded the Special Forces Gold Medal by the Government of Iraq. During the Iraqi elections in January 2005, the Iraqi commandos with which Jim Steele was operating were a key force in protecting

the polling sites in Baghdad and pivotal in the overall success of the election process. His efforts in Iraq received substantial press coverage and favorable mention in Congressional testimony. During hearings by the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, the Deputy Secretary of Defense described Jim Steele as having “incredible bravery and also incredible expertise about police forces in third world countries.” He characterized his work with the Iraqi police as “heroic.” In December 2004, Secretary Rumsfeld presented Jim the Department of Defense Medal of Valor for his actions under fire and the Distinguished Public Service Medal for his extraordinary service in Iraq. In a recent article in The New York Times Magazine, he was described as “one of the United States military’s top experts on counterinsurgency.”

Prior to April 2003, Jim Steele was the president and CEO of TM Power Ventures, an independent power company with operating power plants in North America and Europe. He also served as chairman of the board of Commonwealth Chesapeake Company, which built the largest power plant on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. He was also the chairman of the advisory board of RPM, an international security company headquartered in Pinehurst, Texas.

Jim Steele retired from the U.S. Army after 24 years of distinguished service. He was consistently promoted ahead of his peers culminating in his selection for promotion to brigadier general, the youngest officer of his branch to be selected at that time. His promotion was pending Senate confirmation at the time he left the Army to join the private sector. Jim Steele served briefly as a vice president in Enron Power Corp. and later as a managing director in Enron Development Corp. In early 1995, he was asked by Texas oilman and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Robert Mosbacher, to join the Mosbacher family of companies and form a new independent power company. In May 1995, Jim Steele became President and CEO of Mosbacher Power Group. In 1998, he also became President and CEO of TM Power Ventures, a joint venture between TECO Power Services and Mosbacher Power Group.

During his military career, Jim served in a series of leadership positions ranging from a recon platoon leader in Vietnam to the deputy commander of U.S. Army South. His regimental commander in Vietnam, General George Patton Jr., described Jim Steele as the best small unit combat leader he had witnessed during two wars. In November, 1968, Jim’s small recon patrol came under fire from a large North Vietnamese force. During the ensuing battle, Jim was shot twice attempting to aid a fallen comrade. After being evacuated to Japan to recover, Jim Steele returned to Vietnam to command another recon unit in combat. As a colonel, he commanded the U.S. Military Group in El Salvador during the height of the guerrilla war. In addition to administering one of the largest US military assistance programs in the world, Jim Steele was credited with training and equipping what was acknowledged to be the best counter-terrorist force in the region. He was instrumental in the rapid response and negotiations that resulted in the safe return of President Duarte’s daughter after she was kidnapped by FMLN guerillas. Upon his departure, the Salvadoran Government awarded Jim Steele the Gold Medal of El Salvador for his extraordinary service. During the Cold War, he also commanded the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment stationed along the Czech and East-West German borders. During “Operation Just Cause” in Panama, with operational control of U.S. Army Special Forces, U.S. Navy SEALs, military police and civilian police advisors, Jim Steele was the primary military interface with the new government and responsible for establishing a new professional police force. During an attempted coup in 1990, rebels comprised of former members of Noriega’s military

attempted to take him and his small team of advisors hostage. After an all-night standoff, Jim Steele led the force that thwarted the coup and captured the rebels. For his exceptional efforts, President Endara awarded him the nation’s highest award granted to a foreigner, the Order of Vasco Nunez de Balboa.

Jim’s military decorations include the Silver Star, the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, four Legions of Merit, three Bronze Stars, the Purple Heart, and various other service and campaign medals. Jim Steele earned the Combat Infantryman Badge, Ranger Tab, Senior Parachutist Badge, as well as the Salvadoran Parachutist Badge, Special Operations Badge and Aviator Wings. In addition, he is a commercial pilot with helicopter, multi-engine and jet aircraft ratings. He is a martial arts expert with a Black Belt in the Korean art of Hopkido.

Jim Steele earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from the University of Dayton and a Masters degree in International Affairs from the University of Florida. He is a graduate of the Army and Naval War Colleges, and the Defense Language Institute. He is certified in law enforcement operations by the International Institute for Counterterrorism Studies and is a Charter Member of the International Society of Counterterrorists. He speaks Spanish, conversational German and limited Arabic.

http://premierespeakers.com/jim_steele/bio

General Abul Waleed, Head of Command for the Wolf Brigade, and Col. James Steele, Samarra, Iraq. Gilles

Peress/Magnum, for The New York Times.

Published on Saturday, May 7, 2005 by The Nation

From Iran-Contra To Iraq by David Corn The George W. Bush presidency has been one long rehab session for the Iran-contra scoundrels of the Reagan-Bush administration. Many infamous veterans of the foreign policy connivance of the Reagan days have found a home in Bush II. Elliott Abrams--who pleaded guilty to misleading Congress regarding the Reagan administration's secret support of the contra rebels fighting the Sandinista government of Nicaragua--was hired as a staffmember of George W. Bush's National Security Council and placed in charge of democracy promotion. Retired Admiral John Poindexter--who was Reagan's national security adviser, who supervised Oliver North during the Iran-contra days, and who was convicted of several Iran-contra crimes before the convictions were overturned on a legal technicality--was retained by the Pentagon to search for terrorists using computerized Big Brother technology. John Negroponte--who as ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s was the on-the-ground overseer of pro-contra operations there--was recruited by Bush to be UN ambassador, then ambassador to Iraq, and, most recently, the first director of national intelligence. Otto Reich--who mounted an arguably illegal pro-contra propaganda effort when he was a Reagan official--was appointed by Bush to be in charge of Latin American policy at the State Department. Now comes the news that another Iran-contra alum--a fellow who failed a polygraph test during the Iran-contra investigation--is playing a critical role in Bush's war in terrorism.

James Steele was recently featured in a New York Times Magazine story as a top adviser to Iraq's "most fearsome counterinsurgency force," an outfit called the Special Police Commandos that numbers about 5000 troops. The article, by Peter Maass, noted that Steele "honed his tactics leading a Special Forces mission in El Salvador during that country's brutal civil war in the 1980s." And, as Maass reminded his readers, that civil war resulted in the deaths of 70,000 people, mostly civilians, and "[m]ost of the killing and torturing was done by the army and right-wing death squads affiliated with it." The army that did all

that killing in El Salvador was supported by the United States and US military officials such as Steele, who was head of the US military assistance group in El Salvador for two years in the mid-1980s. (A 1993 UN truth commission, which examined 22,000 atrocities that occurred during the twelve-year civil war in El Salvador, attributed 85 percent of the abuses to the US-backed El Salvador military and its death-squad allies.)

Maass reported that the Special Forces advisers in El Salvador led by Steele "trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses." But he neglected to mention that Steele ran afoul of the Iran-contra investigators for not being honest about his role in the covert and illegal contra-support operation.

After the Iran-contra story broke in 1986, Steele was questioned by Iran-contra investigators, who had good reason to seek information from him. The secret contra-supply network managed by Oliver North had flown weapons and supplies to the contras out of Illopongo Air Base in El Salvador. Steele claimed that he had observed the North network in action but that he had never assisted it. The evidence didn't support this assertion. For one, North had given Steele a special coding device that allowed encrypted communications to be sent securely over telephone lines. Why did Steele need this device if he had nothing to do with the operation? And for a time Steele passed this device to Felix Rodriguez, one of North's key operatives in El Salvador. Furthermore, Congressional investigators discovered evidence indicating that aviation fuel given to El Salvador under a US military aid program that Steele supervised was illegally sold to the North network. (The Reagan administration refused to respond to congressional inquiries about this oil deal.) And according to the accounts of others, Steele had made sure that the North network's planes, used to ferry weapons to the contras, could come and go from Illopongo.

When questioned by the Iran-contra independent counsel, Steele maintained that he had limited his actions to providing humanitarian assistance to the contras--an act that would not have violated the prohibition passed by Congress on supplying the contras with weapons. But, as independent counsel Lawrence Walsh later pointed out in his book, Firewall, a lie-detector examination indicated Steel "was not being truthful." Steele's name had also turned up in the private notebooks in which North kept track of his various Iran-contra operations. As Walsh wrote, "Confronted with the results of the lie-detector test and North's notebook, Steele admitted not only his participation in the [clandestine] arms deliveries [to the contras] but also his early discussions of these activities with Donald Gregg [the national security adviser to Vice President George Bush] and the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Edwin G. Corr."

Walsh's description suggested that Steele tried to lie his way past investigators as part of a larger cover-up. At the time of the scandal, a significant question was how much Donald Gregg knew about the operation in El Salvador, for Gregg's connection to the secret, law-skirting contra-support network implicated Vice President Bush, who was running for president and claiming he had been out of the loop on the Iran-contra affair. (George H.W. Bush's own diaries--which he withheld for several years and did not release until after he had lost his 1992 bid for reelection as president--prove that despite his claim of ignorance he knew about the Iran-contra affair before it became public.) Steele had played the good soldier--that is, he did not tell the truth and kept his mouth shut as long as he could.

Steele escaped indictment and his flunking of the polygraph exam was not revealed until Walsh's book came out in 1997. But he did have to pay for his participation in the North's contra scheme. In 1988, the Pentagon sent to the Senate a list of 50 Army colonels who were up for promotion to brigadier general. An a list of proposed promotions to full colonel submitted at the same time included Lt. Colonel Robert Earl, a North deputy who assisted the contra supply effort and participated in the destruction of records after the Iran-contra scandal exploded. Usually such promotions fly though the Senate with no debate. But aides working for Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, noticed Steele's and Earl's names on these lists, and Harkin blocked these two promotions. "There is no way any of these people is going to get a promotion" without a congressional inquiry, Harkin told The Washington Post. The Army claimed that it had found that Steele had committed nothing wrong. Obviously, it had not looked hard enough, for, as Walsh later determined, Steele had not told the truth.

But misleading congressional and independent investigators didn't fully derail Steele's career. He is once more advising a military unit with a questionable human rights record. Let's hope that if his actions this time around become of interest to government investigators he is truthful when they come knocking.

Copyright © 2005 The Nation