The best report on Washington's endeavor to create death squads in Iraq is Peter Maass's "The Way of the Commandos" (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/magazine/01ARMY.html">1 May 2005</a>):
<blockquote> General Adnan [Thabit, who was "both a general and a death-row prisoner under Saddam Hussein"], as he is known, is the leader of Iraq's most fearsome counterinsurgency force. It is called the Special Police Commandos and consists of about 5,000 troops. They have fought the insurgents in Mosul, Ramadi, Baghdad and Samarra. It was in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, where, in early March, I spent a week with Adnan, himself a Sunni, and two battalions of his commandos. Samarra is Adnan's hometown, and he had come to retake it. . . . .
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Not long ago, hard men like Adnan, especially Sunnis, were giving orders to no one. Six weeks after the fall of Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority dismissed the Sunni-led Iraqi Army, and the United States military set out to rebuild Iraq's armed forces from the ground up, training new officers and soldiers rather than calling on those who knew how to fight but had done so in the service of Saddam Hussein. By late last year, though, it had become clear that the new American-trained forces were not shaping up as an effective fighting force, and the old guard was called upon. Now people like Adnan, a former Baathist, have been given the task of defeating the insurgency. . . . .
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Before the show ["Terrorism in the Grip of Justice," aired "every day in prime time on Al Iraqiya, the American-financed national TV station," which shows "insurgents, or suspected insurgents," who have been tortured into "confessing" to "everything from contract murders to sodomy"] began that evening, Adnan's office was a hive of conversation, phone calls and tea-drinking. Along with a dozen commandos, there were several American advisers in the room, including James Steele, one of the United States military's top experts on counterinsurgency. Steele honed his tactics leading a Special Forces mission in El Salvador during that country's brutal civil war in the 1980's. Steele's presence was a sign not only of the commandos' crucial role in the American counterinsurgency strategy but also of his close relationship with Adnan. Steele admired the general. "He's obviously a natural type of commander," Steele told me. "He commands respect."
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The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, to which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high -- more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it. According to an Amnesty International report in 2001, violations committed by the army and its associated paramilitaries included ''extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, 'disappearances' and torture. . . . Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred.'' As part of President Reagan's policy of supporting anti-Communist forces, hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of 55 Special Forces advisers, led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses.
There are far more Americans in Iraq today -- some 140,000 troops in all -- than there were in El Salvador, but U.S. soldiers and officers are increasingly moving to a Salvador-style advisory role. In the process, they are backing up local forces that, like the military in El Salvador, do not shy away from violence. It is no coincidence that this new strategy is most visible in a paramilitary unit that has Steele as its main adviser; having been a key participant in the Salvador conflict, Steele knows how to organize a counterinsurgency campaign that is led by local forces. He is not the only American in Iraq with such experience: the senior U.S. adviser in the Ministry of Interior, which has operational control over the commandos, is Steve Casteel, a former top official in the Drug Enforcement Administration who spent much of his professional life immersed in the drug wars of Latin America. Casteel worked alongside local forces in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, where he was involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin cocaine cartel.
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Last summer, with the security situation deteriorating, some Iraqi and American officials began to argue that the time had passed for a ''clean hands'' policy that rejected most of the experienced people who had fought for Saddam Hussein. The first official to take action was Falah al-Naqib, interior minister under the interim government of Ayad Allawi. In September, Naqib formed his own regiment, the Special Police Commandos, drawn from veterans of Hussein's special forces and the Republican Guard. As its leader, he chose General Adnan, not only because Adnan had a useful collection of colleagues from Iraq's military and security networks, but also because Adnan is Naqib's uncle.
Naqib did not ask for permission or training or even equipment from the United States military; he formed and armed the commandos because the U.S. military would not. ''One of the biggest mistakes made by the coalition forces is that they started from zero,'' he told me in his office in the Green Zone in Baghdad. ''Our army and police are 80 years old. They have lots of experience. They know more about the country and the people, and about the way the insurgents are fighting, than any foreign forces.''
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[Lt. Gen. David] Petraeus [who commanded the 101st Airborne during the invasion and "returned to Iraq to take charge of the sputtering training effort . . . in the wake of a major embarrassment": "when the first U.S.-trained battalion of Iraqi troops was ordered to Falluja to support an offensive by the Marines, many of them deserted or refused to fight"] decided that the commandos would receive whatever arms, ammunition and supplies they required. He also assigned Steele to work with them. In addition to his experience in El Salvador, Steele had been in charge of retraining Panama's security forces following the ousting of President Manuel Noriega. When I asked him to describe Adnan's leadership qualities, Steele drew on the vocabulary he learned in Latin America. Adnan, he said approvingly, was a caudillo -- a military strongman.
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On March 8, I went on a series of raids with the commandos, traveling in a Humvee with Maj. Robert Rooker, an artillery officer based in Tikrit who was dispatched to Samarra to serve as my escort. The leader of the American squad was Andrew Johansen, a 30-year-old lieutenant in the Wisconsin Army National Guard. The commandos led the way in a half-dozen Dodges, with Johansen's team following in three Humvees. The target was a house outside Samarra where Najim al-Takhi, thought to be the leader of an insurgent cell, was believed to be hiding.
The commandos reached an isolated farmhouse and detained al-Takhi's son, who looked to be in his early 20's. This was an excellent catch. The son of a suspect usually knows where the suspect is hiding; if not, he can be detained and used as a bargaining chip to persuade the father to surrender. With al-Takhi's son flex-cuffed in the back of one of the pickups, the commandos, excited, drove to another farmhouse less than a mile away. They believed that al-Takhi might be there, but a quick search yielded nothing. The leader of this raid was a short, chubby captain who was enthusiastic and, as I noticed on previous raids, effective at leading his men. (When I later asked his name, he refused to give it.) The captain was convinced that al-Takhi was nearby, but the son was telling him he didn't know where his father was. Was he lying?
The captain's methods were swift and extreme. He yelled at the son, who was wearing a loose tunic; in the tussle of the arrest the young man had lost one of his sandals. The captain pushed him against a mud wall and told everyone else to move away. Standing less than 10 feet from the young man, the captain aimed his AK-47 at him and clicked off the safety latch. He was threatening to kill him.
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That evening, as I was eating dinner in the mess hall at Olsen base, I overheard a G.I. saying that he had seen the Syrian at the detention center [that the commandos established at the public library], hanging from the ceiling by his arms and legs like an animal being hauled back from a hunt. When I struck up a conversation with the soldier, he refused to say anything more. Later, I spoke with an Iraqi interpreter who works for the U.S. military and has access to the detention center; when I asked whether the Syrian, like the Saudi, was cooperating, the interpreter smiled and said, ''Not yet, but he will.''
One afternoon as I was standing near City Hall, I heard a gunshot from within or behind the detention center. In previous days, I saw or heard, on several occasions, accidental shots by commandos -- their weapons discipline was far from perfect -- so I assumed it was another negligent discharge. But within a minute or so, there was another shot from the same place -- inside or behind the detention center.
It was impossible to determine what was happening at the detention center, but there was certainly cause to worry. A State Department report released last month noted that Iraqi authorities have been accused of "arbitrary deprivation of life, torture, impunity, poor prison conditions -- particularly in pretrial detention facilities -- and arbitrary arrest and detention." A report by Human Rights Watch in January went further, claiming that "unlawful arrest, long-term incommunicado detention, torture and other ill treatment of detainees (including children) by Iraqi authorities have become routine and commonplace."
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The commandos and their leaders insist that they are loyal to the government rather than to any political or religious group. "There is no Sunni or Shia," Adnan told me, meaning that he does not pay attention to the religious origins of his men or the insurgents they hunt. "Anyone who tries to stop Iraq from moving forward, I will fight them." Adnan's statement is predictable, but is it convincing? The commando chain of command is largely Sunni -- they were set up by a Sunni minister (Naqib) and are led by a Sunni general (Adnan). At this point, the commandos consist mainly of two brigades. The commander of one brigade is Rashid al-Halafi, who is Shiite but is regarded warily by other Shiites because he held senior intelligence posts under Saddam Hussein. The other brigade was founded by Gen. Muhammed Muther, a Sunni who commanded a tank regiment under Hussein.</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>