PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay.
Maggie O’Kane, Executive Producer, tells the story revealed by the Guardian documentary about the role of Col. James Steele in supporting torture, death squads and brutal sectarian conflict during the height of the Iraq war. Steel’s reports went directly to Rumsfeld and Cheney. –
A new investigative documentary by The Guardian and BBC tells a story of one Colonel James Steele, a veteran of the Latin American Dirty War and the Vietnam War and his involvement in the Iraq War. Apparently, Colonel Steele was involved in helping organize and finance Shia death squads, torture, helping to instigate, perhaps, the civil war in Iraq. His reports went directly to the desks of Rumsfeld and Cheney.
Now here’s a trailer, five-minute trailer from the documentary film. And after that, we’ll meet the executive producer of the project.
~~~
SOLDIER (SINGING): First to fight for the right and to build a nation right, 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 1�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 Kaufmann. 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, PHOTOJOURNALIST: He hears the scream of the other guy who’s being tortured, you know, as we speak. There is the blood stains in, you know, the corner of the desk in front of him.
GENERAL MUNTADHER AL-SAMARI, IRAQI MINISTRY OF INTERIOR, 2003-2005 (VOICEOVER TRANSL.): The things that went on there–drilling, murder, torture, the ugliest sorts of torture I’ve ever seen.
VOICEOVER: 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, U.S. EMBASSY OFFICIAL, EL SALVADOR, 1980-1984: 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 Samarrah, his commandos and their American advisers turned the main library into a detention center, where torture was a routine occurrence.
PERESS: We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele, and I was looking around. I see blood everywhere. You know.
PETER MAASS, NEW YORK TIMES JOURNALIST: 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.
GENERAL ADNAN THABIT, COMMANDER OF SPECIAL POLICE COMMANDOS, 2004-2006 (VOICEOVER TRANSL.): The prisoners do start shouting. They are a bit like whirling dervishes. They love to scream Allah, Allah.
JERRY BURKE, CHIEF POLICY ADVISER TO IRAQI MINISTRY OF INTERIOR, 2003-2004: 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.
VOICEOVER: The commandos quickly grew into a powerful 12,000-strong force with a national network of torture centers. They became involved in death squad activities. They were completely infiltrated by the Shia militias. But General Petraeus claimed not to see that coming.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS, MULTINATIONAL SECURITY TRANSITION COMMAND, IRAQ, 2003-2005: We kept hearing this all the time, Martin, that–this or that. To find the absolute evidence of this has actually been quite difficult.
BURKE: Pretty much the whole world in Iraq knew that the police commandos were Badr Brigade. He must have known about the death squad activities. It was common knowledge across Baghdad.
VOICEOVER: The Bush administration also denied any knowledge of these death squad activities.
DONALD RUMSFELD, U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: I’ve not seen reports that hundreds are being killed by roving death squads at all. I’m not going to get into speculation like that.
VOICEOVER: But the bodies were turning up every day on the streets of Baghdad. Many of the victims were so badly tortured they could not be identified. Those who couldn’t be named found a final resting place in desolate town dumps like this one. A rusty tin can marks each grave.
James Steele was decorated by Donald Rumsfeld for his work in Iraq. He lives in Texas. He is registered with the Motivational Speakers Bureau to give speeches about counterinsurgency and his experience in conflict zones.
~~~
JAY: Now joining us to talk about this investigative piece is the executive producer and a member of the investigative journalist team, Maggie O’Kane. She joins us from London. She’s the multimedia editor of investigations at The Guardian. As a former correspondent, she’s covered the world’s major conflicts over the last decade. She’s a former British journalist of the year and a former foreign correspondent of the year–awards given by British journalists.
Thanks very much for joining us, Maggie.
MAGGIE O’KANE, MULTIMEDIA EDITOR, THE GUARDIAN: Thank you.
JAY: It seems to me there’s many–the film’s very rich, and there’s many things we could talk about here, but people will watch the film, and much of the detail they will get from that, from watching the film. But one of the things that emerges for me is that in the United States especially, the narrative here is that the primary role of the American forces after overthrowing Saddam Hussein was to try to prevent civil war, not add fuel to it. And at the very least, it seems to me, your investigation makes the case that through the activities of Colonel Steele, fuel was added, if not more than that.
O’KANE: Well, I think what our investigation is saying–and I think it shows quite clearly that a decision was made, not by retired colonel Steele, but very much by the political hierarchy in the United States, by Donald Rumsfeld, by General Petraeus, that actually in order to combat the insurgency that was rising up unexpectedly against the Americans, in order to combat that insurgency, which was mainly Sunni, you would–they decided to arm what was essentially a Shia force called the special police commandos.
Now, when you make a decision that you’re going to take a sectarian force in a country that has been rife with sectarian conflict and you decide to pour arms and ammunition and support into a group that is clearly on one side, then you’re opening up a very, very dangerous tinderbox. Now, whether or not that was the intention or whether or not that was a byproduct that the United States didn’t think about, then their main aim, as we understand it, was to stop the attacks on American soldiers at whatever the price.
So I would not say that we could eliminate the possibility that there would have been a civil war in Iraq anyway, but certainly the actions in arming a sectarian force by Rumsfeld using people like Steele and General Petraeus had catastrophic effects on Iraqi society. And the height of the civil war in 2006, you know, you had 3,000 bodies a month turning up a month from sectarian killings. It unleashed a hell, really, on the country.
READ MORE HERE: AND WATCH VIDEO:
Categories: Americas, Arab World, Asia, Iraq, United States
Please do take the time to watch this important video!
When I was in Iraq it was ‘common knowledge’ that these ‘Sectarian Death Squads’ could not exist without the permission of the (US) occupation authorities. What this research showed was that it was not only ‘permission’ of the occupation authorities, but more than that.
When will US war criminals be taken to justice?