Some see U.S.-backed Iraqi guards as death squads

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Newsday-
November 16, 2005

BAGHDAD -- Among the varied armed security men on Baghdad's streets these days, you can't miss the police commandos. In combat uniforms, bulletproof vests and wrap-around sunglasses or ski masks, they muscle through Baghdad's traffic jams in police cars or camouflage-painted pickup trucks, clearing nervous drivers from their path with shouted commands and the occasional gunshot in the air.

The commandos are part of the Iraqi security forces that the Bush administration says will gradually replace American troops in this war. But the commandos are being blamed for a wave of kidnappings and executions around Baghdad since the spring.

One such group, the Volcano Brigade, is operating as a death squad, under the influence or control of Iraq's most potent Shia factional militia, the Iranian-backed Badr Organization, said several Iraqi government officials and western Baghdad residents.

In the past six months, Badr has heavily infiltrated the Interior Ministry, under which the commandos operate, the sources said. Badr also was accused of running the secret Interior Ministry prison raided Sunday by U.S. troops.

About 2 a.m. on Aug. 23, men in Volcano Brigade uniforms and trucks rolled into the streets of Dolay, a mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhood of western Baghdad . . . report

[Kralizec]

1. There is no doubt in this with Negroponte in charge of "recontruction"

efforts.

[saigon68]

4. Negroponte = WAR CRIMINAL

Ask the families of the Nuns he killed in Central America, about Hoodlum Negroponte's tactics.

[frylock]

5. wher art thou, jello biafra?

When cowboy Ronnie comes to town
Forks out his tongue at human rights
Sit down, enjoy our ethnic meal
Dine on some charbroiled nuns
Try a medal on
Smile at the mirror as the cameras click
and make big business happy-

[SpiralHawk]

2. Death squads? Why does that sound so familiar?

Perhaps John Negroponte or Elliot Abrams can speak for the BushCo Kabal on this sensitive topic.

I certainly do hope one of our nice corporate media outlets will be so kind as to make a teensy weensie inquiry about this.

But then, I always have high hopes that INTEGRITY will break out sometime in the national "newsrooms" of America.

P.S. A tip of the hawk wing to Newsday for running this story. Thank you for running this important story.

[LostinVA]

6. Shades of my college days....

Central America and Jean Donovan...

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7. I copied it. Newsday stories sometimes get bumped off of the original page

[Vinnie From Indy]

3. It looks as if Negroponte is a one trick pony

He must have gone to the "pull out their fingernails" school of diplomacy.

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8. He's got his henchman James Steele training these squads

from a David Corn article- May 7, 2005

James Steele was recently featured in a New York Times Magazine story as a top adviser to Iraq's "most fearsome counterinsurgency force," an outfit called the Special Police Commandos that numbers about 5000 troops. The article, by Peter Maass, noted that Steele "honed his tactics leading a Special Forces mission in El Salvador during that country's brutal civil war in the 1980s." And, as Maass reminded his readers, that civil war resulted in the deaths of 70,000 people, mostly civilians, and "ost of the killing and torturing was done by the army and right-wing death squads affiliated with it." The army that did all that killing in El Salvador was supported by the United States and US military officials such as Steele, who was head of the US military assistance group in El Salvador for two years in the mid-1980s. (A 1993 UN truth commission, which examined 22,000 atrocities that occurred during the twelve-year civil war in El Salvador, attributed 85 percent of the abuses to the US-backed El Salvador military and its death-squad allies.)

Maass reported that the Special Forces advisers in El Salvador led by Steele "trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses." But he neglected to mention that Steele ran afoul of the Iran-contra investigators for not being honest about his role in the covert and illegal contra-support operation.

After the Iran-contra story broke in 1986, Steele was questioned by Iran-contra investigators, who had good reason to seek information from him. The secret contra-supply network managed by Oliver North had flown weapons and supplies to the contras out of Illopongo Air Base in El Salvador. Steele claimed that he had observed the North network in action but that he had never assisted it. The evidence didn't support this assertion. For one, North had given Steele a special coding device that allowed encrypted communications to be sent securely over telephone lines. Why did Steele need this device if he had nothing to do with the operation? And for a time Steele passed this device to Felix Rodriguez, one of North's key operatives in El Salvador. Furthermore, Congressional investigators discovered evidence indicating that aviation fuel given to El Salvador under a US military aid program that Steele supervised was illegally sold to the North network. (The Reagan administration refused to respond to congressional inquiries about this oil deal.) And according to the accounts of others, Steele had made sure that the North network's planes, used to ferry weapons to the contras, could come and go from Illopongo.

When questioned by the Iran-contra independent counsel, Steele maintained that he had limited his actions to providing humanitarian assistance to the contras--an act that would not have violated the prohibition passed by Congress on supplying the contras with weapons. But, as independent counsel Lawrence Walsh later pointed out in his book, Firewall, a lie-detector examination indicated Steel "was not being truthful." Steele's name had also turned up in the private notebooks in which North kept track of his various Iran-contra operations. As Walsh wrote, "Confronted with the results of the lie-detector test and North's notebook, Steele admitted not only his participation in the arms deliveries but also his early discussions of these activities with Donald Gregg and the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Edwin G. Corr."