The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city. This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself. … Read More
‘US-trained death squads’ organized torture sites across Iraq
Just over year into the Iraq War a desperate US government secretly organized and funded small militia groups to set up torture camps across the Middle Eastern country under the direction of a retired US Special Forces commander, according to a new report. James Steele, who came out of retirement in 2003 after guiding US-backed commandos in El Salvador in the 1980s, was deployed to Iraq as an “energy consultant” not long after the invasion began. A member of General David Petraeus’ inner circle, Steele quietly trained a Iraqi paramilitary force numbering in the thousands. With the help of Col. James Coffman, another Special Forces operative, he freely dispatched Shia militias to torture Saddam Hussein’s Sunni soldiers in order to learn the details of the insurgency. The subject is the focus of a new documentary by The Guardian in collaboration with BBC Arabic entitled “James Steele: America’s Mystery Man in Iraq,” which is viewable online. The Pentagon has denied participation in any war crimes but, upon being questioned, said the military would “investigate” the matter. Steele has rebuffed interview requests from his home in Texas. “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 [Sunni] insurgency,” the film begins. “This is also the story of James Steele, the veteran of America’s dirty war in El Salvador. He was in charge of the US advisers who trained notorious Salvadorian 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’s role in the Middle East has been blamed with fueling the Iraqi civil war between Sunnis and Shias, the peak of which saw 3,000 people killed every month. At the behest of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Steele and Coffman committed various human rights violations but were never implicated by subordinates, in part because they never tortured prisoners themselves. “They worked hand in hand,” Gen. Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for over a year, told The Guardian in March. “I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centers. They knew everything that was going on there…the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture.” The new report is the first time Gen. Petraeus has been mentioned in connection with US-sanctioned torture sites in Iraq. Both Steele and Coffman worked directly under Petraeus during the counter-insurgency in the initial years of the Iraq conflict. The Guardian/BBC Arabic report describes how, during that time, each torture site was under the bureaucratic command of its own interrogation committee. “Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators,” Samari said. “This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainees confess, like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts.” The hour-long documentary about Steele is the result of a 15-month investigation by the British media giants sparked by the release of the same classified military documents leaked by Private Bradley Manning. Manning, 25, could be sentenced to 20 years in prison if convicted of exposing the torture routines. Maggie O’Kane, a multimedia editor and director of investigations at The Guardian, told Democracy Now why the report on Steele needed to be released. “When the WikiLeaks documents came out in December of 2011…there was a reference to Frago 242, which was a US military order instructing US soldiers to ignore Iraqi-on-Iraqi torture,” she said. “This incidence, this Frago 242, came up over 1,000 times in the documents as we looked at it and we wondered why this order was issued and what was the story behind it…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.” … Read More
CIA Drone Campaign in Pakistan Started With Two Dead Children and a Favor
An article in yesterday’s New
York Times, adapted from an excerpt of the Times
national security correspondent Mark Mazzetti’s new book on the CIA
drone campaign in Pakistan,
“The Way of the Knife”, provides details on how the campaign
started. With one targeted killing and at least three other
simultaneous kills, including two boys, aged 10 and 16.
From the Times:
The target was not a top operative of Al Qaeda, but
[Nek Muhammad,] a Pakistani ally of theTaliban ;who led a
tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the
state. ;In a secret deal, the C.I.A. had agreed to kill him in
exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use
drones to hunt down its own enemies.
That back-room bargain, described in detail for the first time in
interviews with more than a dozen officials in Pakistan and the
United States, is critical to understanding the origins of a covert
drone war that began under the Bush administration, was embraced
and expanded by President Obama, and is now the subject of fierce
debate. The deal, a month after a blistering internal report about
abuses in the C.I.A.’s network of secret prisons, paved the way for
the C.I.A. to change its focus from capturing terrorists to killing
them, and helped transform an agency that began as a cold war
espionage service into a paramilitary organization.
The deal with Pakistan, struck in 2004, limited CIA drones to
the tribal regions, along the Afghan borders,
away from its own terror training camps. Since then, the CIA
has conducted at
least 366 strikes, killing at least 2,537 people, including 168
children. While the program began under George W. Bush, the vast
majority of strikes (314 and counting) have occurred since
President Obama took office in 2009. Mazzetti reports that George
Tenet, the CIA director from 1997 to 2004, told the 9/11 commission
he wasn’t even sure the CIA should be operating weaponized drones.
A decade later, the
nominally secret program is the most prominent activity
conducted by the CIA. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration’s
proposed rules for the use of drones,
brought up only after his entire first term had passed, exempts
the CIA’s operations in Pakistan. ; … Read More
Bosnia’s ‘Monster of Grbavica’ gets 45 years for war crimes
A former member of the Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces was jailed Friday for 45 years for carrying out a reign of terror against Sarajevo civilians during the 1992-1995 war. Veselin Vlahovic, dubbed the “Monster of Grbavica”, was “found guilty of crimes against humanity and this…
Is “Olympus Has Fallen” anti-Obama?
In the new film “Olympus Has Fallen,” a black man is acting president, Ashley Judd is (for a time) the first lady and paramilitary forces with North Korean ties overwhelm the White House defenses. The president, vice president and secretary of defense barricade themselves in a bunker deep underneath 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — good thing, because the White House is a burning shambles.Get used to seeing the president’s home under attack. This summer brings “White House Down,” a film starring Jamie Foxx as the president in a seat of power under siege. Later this month, the ”G.I. Joe” sequel is to feature black flags flown over the White House as a mysterious supervillain impersonates the president and takes over the country. The “Iron Man 3″ trailer reaches its climax at a shot of Air Force One getting shot out of the sky.So what is it we thrill to about watching our national landmarks destroyed on the big screen? And at a time when real North Korea nuclear threats are in the news, what’s so entertaining about watching them score a direct hit on Washington?Continue Reading… … Read More
Women join ranks of Assad’s new paramilitary force in Syria
At 40 years of age, Abir Ramadan joined the all-female unit of Syria’s new paramilitary force, pledging loyalty to Bashar al-Assad in the armed struggle against those seeking to topple the president. Dressed in camouflage, she marches at a stadium in the central city of Homs, raising her fist…
Blast kills 11 in Pakistani city
A bomb that appeared to be targeting paramilitary soldiers has exploded in the Pakistani city of Quetta, killing 11 people, police say.
… Read More
