The Guardian has published a new documentary which clearly indicates that torture of Iraqi citizens was ordered from the top.
Who is James Steele? According to a 1988 New York Times article,
Lieut. Col. James Steele was head of the military group at the United States Embassy in El Salvador and testimony taken by the Congressional committees showed that he worked closely with the supply effort.
and, according to
James Maass' 2005 article for the New York Times Magazine:
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.
This is the man who trained and supplied the El Salvadoran Death Squads, and in fact, lost his commission over his involvement in the Iran-Contra scanda. Rumsfeld
knew he was dirty: that's
why he sent him into Iraq. But now, on with the show:
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.
...
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.
James Steele is now retired in comfort in Bryan/College Station, Texas -- home of Texas A & M, Texas World Speedway, and The George Bush Library and Foundation
Please contrast this, if you will, with the treatment Bradley Manning, the man who released the information on what was going on in Iraq to WikiLeaks:
And now ask yourself: who is the real hero?
11:01 AM PT: And now for the El Salvadorization of the US
Private Prisons In the US, now with more Torture!
http://www.truthdig.com/...
Kerness says the for-profit prison companies have created an entrepreneurial class like that of the Southern slaveholders, one “dependent on the poor, and on bodies of color as a source for income,” and she describes federal and state departments of corrections as “a state of mind.” This state of mind, she said in the interview, “led to Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo and what is going on in U.S. prisons right this moment.”