(1)
Echoes of El Salvador in Tales of US-Approved Death
Squads
Patrick Cockburn
The Independent - Analysis
23 October 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/patrick-cockburn-echoes-of-el-salvador-in-tales-of-usapproved-death-squads-2114410.html

The Iraqi documents released by Wikileaks produce
significantly more detail on US actions in the war in
Iraq , but do they produce anything that we did not know
already?

The Pentagon will huff and puff with rage as it did over
the Wikileaks release of US military documents about
Afghanistan, when it took the contradictory position
that there was little new in what has been leaked, but
important sources of intelligence had somehow still been
compromised. 

The leaks are important because they prove much of what
was previously only suspected but never admitted by the
US army or explained in detail. It was obvious from 2004
that US forces almost always ignored cases of torture by
Iraqi government forces, but this is now shown to have
been official policy. Of particular interest to Iraqis,
when Wikileaks releases the rest of its hoard of
documents, will be to see if there is any sign of how
far US forces were involved in death squad activities
from 2004.

From the summer of 2004 Iraq slipped into a sectarian
civil war of great savagery as al-Qa'ida launched
attacks on the Shia who increasingly dominated the
government. From late in 2004 Interior Ministry troops
trained by the Americans were taking part in savage
raids on Sunni or suspected Baathist districts. People
prominent in Saddam Hussein's regime were arrested and
disappeared for few days until their tortured bodies
were dumped beside the roads.

Iraqi leaders whispered that the Americans were involved
in the training of what were in fact death squads in
official guise. It was said that US actions were
modelled on counter-insurgency methods pioneered in El
Salvador by US-trained Salvadoran government units.

It was no secret that torture of prisoners had become
the norm in Iraqi government prisons as it established
its own security services from 2004. Men who were
clearly the victims of torture were often put on
television where they would confess to murder, torture
and rape. But after a time it was noticed that many of
those whom they claimed to have killed were still alive.

The Sunni community at this time were terrified of mass
sweeps by the US forces, sometimes accompanied by Iraqi
government units, in which all young men of military age
were arrested. Tribal elders would often rush to the
American to demand that the prisoners not be handed over
to the Iraqi army or police who were likely to torture
or murder them. The power drill was a favourite measure
of torture. It is clear that the US military knew all
about this.

From the end of 2007 the war began to change as the
Americans began to appear as the defenders of the Sunni
community. The US military offensives against al-Qa'ida
and the Mehdi Army Shiah militia were accompanied by a
rash of assassinations. Again it would be interesting to
know more detail about how far the US military was
involved in these killings, particularly against the
followers of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

There were a series of interconnected conflicts going on
in in Iraq during the American occupation in 2004-9. One
that the seldom made headlines involved a series of tit-
for-tat killings and kidnappings against each other by
the Americans and Iranians. This reached its peak in
2007 when the Americans tried to seize Iranian
intelligence leaders visiting Kurdistan and US soldiers
were killed in an abortive raid in Kerbala. The capture
of British naval personnel by Iranian Revolutionary
Guards may have been part of this shadowy conflict.

Information about Iraq leaked, like that about
Afghanistan, should come with a health warning. The
Americans were often told by Iraqis, low level agents or
high level ministers, what they supposed the Americans
wanted to hear, notably that an Iranian hand was behind
many anti-American actions. Much of this is likely to be
nonsense.

Information given to the Americans by Afghan
intelligence implicating Pakistan and ISI military
intelligence in aiding the Taliban was obviously
concocted. It is not that the Pakistan military do not
help the Taliban but they do so subtly and with care to
make sure their involvement cannot be traced. Iraqi
intelligence passed to the Americans is likely to be
equally biased.

(2)
Could Wikileaks Leave Iraq Without A Government?
by Juan Cole
Informed Comment
October 24, 2010 
http://www.juancole.com/

The wikileaks document dump from the Iraq War may well
derail the formation of a government by implicating
caretaker prime minister Nuri al-Maliki in running death
squads. We are in our seventh month since the March 7
elections, but no new prime minister has been named
because no party or coalition has the 163 seats needed
for a majority in Parliament.

In recent weeks caretaker prime minister Nuri al-Maliki
has finally put together some 138 seats, needing only 25
to form a government.

But the Wikileak allegations about the government
running Shiite death squads during al-Maliki's term as
prime minister may have derailed that process.

Al-Maliki's rival, the largely secular Iraqiya List of
Iyad Allawi, has slammed him in the aftermath of the
leaks and has demanded an investigation of him. He says
he is suspicious of the timing of the leaks. (Likely he
means that it is odd that this information surfaced just
as he closed in on nailing down a second term as prime
minister, a development not welcome to Washington
because it was fostered by Iran.) But it is silly to
allege that Julian Assange is secretly working for the
US government.

Jordanian t.v., which probably backs Allawi because he
now heads a party popular with the Sunni Arabs, had this
report, according to the USG open source center :

    ` Within its 1700 GMT newscast on 23 October, the
    Jordan Television carries as its 12th news item a
    report on the classified documents posted on
    WikiLeaks.

    The channel says: "Iraqi officials have vowed to
    investigate any claims about crimes committed by the
    police and the army during the war in Iraq after
    WikiLeaks has published on its website classified US
    files that included the details of violations
    committed against prisoners at the hands of Iraqi
    forces."

    The channel then carries a video report by its
    reporter Sami al-Harbi in which he says: "As
    expected, WikiLeaks has set off d a big bomb through
    publishing documents on violations committed by the
    US forces against Iraqis, which included killing and
    torture.

    Reactions by many parties denounced what has been
    published. The United Nations called on Washington
    to investigate the information published on this
    website and to quickly verify he cases of torture
    mentioned in the US Army's documents.

    The Iraqi side through the interior minister
    denounced such violations, affirming that the
    government will begin an investigation to verify the
    published information."

    The report adds: "The Iraqi street that was not
    surprised at these documents stressed the importance
    of these documents in revealing the violations
    against Iraqis during the war."

    The report notes: "The documents that referred to
    the role of Al-Maliki in these violations are
    expected to diminish his chances in the upcoming
    battle for prime minister's post.

    Iraqi officials pledged to investigate any claims on
    crimes committed by the police or the army during
    the sectarian war in Iraq.

    This was confirmed by Major General Husayn Kamal,
    one of the deputies of the Iraqi interior minister,
    who said that the Iraqi officials will not turn a
    blind eye to these acts and any person involved in
    the violations."

    The channel goes on to report: "WikiLeaks website
    published some 400,000 US classified documents on
    the war on Iraq, some of which mentioned in detail
    horrible cases of abuse of prisoners by the Iraqi
    forces, which the United States was aware of but did
    not launch an investigation into them, according to
    the website."

    The channel adds: "These files indicate that the US
    military command in Iraq was aware of the violations
    of human rights and the cases of torture against the
    detainees in the Iraqi prisons, but failed to launch
    investigations into these cases."

    The report adds: "The documents disclosed that
    hundreds of Iraqi civilians were killed at the
    checkpoints set up by the US forces following the
    invasion of Iraq in 2003 and that hundreds of Iraqi
    detainees were tortured at the hands of the
    coalition forces.

    The documents revealed that the US soldiers blew up
    complete civilian buildings because of the presence
    of only one insurgent on the roof. The documents
    disclosed in detail the killing of more than 66,000
    civilians in the Iraqi war.

    The New York Times published excerpts of the
    documents indicating the role of the Iranian
    Revolutionary Guard in assassinations and bombings
    in Iraq.

    The documents also reveal the confessions of
    detainees who received training in Iran and that
    they used Iranian-made weapons that were discovered
    by the US forces.'

A member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq,
Jalaluddin Saghir was blistering in his criticism of the
Iraqi government because of the new revelations. ISCI
(which Iranian official news calls SIIC) is for the
moment declining to join al-Maliki's coalition. Its
leaders thus have a vested interest in al-Maliki fading
away.

_____________________________________________

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