I am reading James Risen’s latest book on how the military-industrial complex has morphed into the military-homeland security-intelligence complex. Risen is a New York Times reporter and has been interviewing primary sources involved with America’s “war on terror” starting with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. You have all heard about the cargo planes loaded with cash that landed in Baghdad right after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Risen gives all the details right down to how many pallets of each denomination of bills went missing.

Folks, we are screwed. I’ve tried to find a silver lining for years and truly believed the American people would wake up and demand an accounting. NOT going to happen. Half of the latest budget bill passed by Congress and signed by President Obama is going to the “defense” industry. Read Risen’s book, Pay Any Price, to find out how incompetent the agencies are that manage those billions and billions of dollars. Risen tells of one con artist who convinced the CIA that he had invented special computer software that could decipher hidden messages in Al Jazeera television news reports. It was a total fabrication, the CIA found out, hushed it up out of embarrassment, and the con guy went over to another agency and got a contract for the same nonsense.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human nature being what it is, no one wants to publicize stupid mistakes. So con artists can go from one agency to another and bring a big truck to haul away the money. E.g., the two supposed interrogation experts who were paid millions to devise new ways to torture prisoners. Thankfully, Sen. Dianne Feinstein had the guts to continue the investigation into our torture program and release a report. These are the kinds of reports, along with first account interviews by reporters like Risen, that will become the research materials for future historians.

We can blame the NRA all we want, but the enemy, as Pogo said, is ourselves. We are a violent society and always have been. From the European invasion and occupation of the Americas 500 years ago to the “war on terror” around the world today, we must love violence or we would stop it.

I took this quote from a novel by Joyce Carol Oates recently. A young woman is thinking about what happened to a dear friend wounded and disfigured during fighting in Iraq.

It came to her then: the wars were monstrous, and made monsters of those who waged them. The Iraq war, the Afghanistan war. In time, civilians too would become monsters, for this is the nature of war.

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A new documentary from the BBC (in cooperation with The Guardian newspaper) has revealed direct ties between the torture practices and death squads of the Shia militia in Iraq and an American trainer, who also is alleged to have trained Salvadoran death squads. Retired Col. James Steele was dispatched to Iraq by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and served under/with General Petraeus in Iraq. This was not the first time Petraeus and Steele cooperated.  During El Salvador’s civil war, Steele trained  special police brigades that have been linked to death squads and torture, when Petraeus visited the country to learn counter-insurgency techniques

 Col. Steele’s history

Col. Steele’s military service goes back to Vietnam, where General George Patton Jr. called him “the best small-unit leader in my command.” After Vietnam, Col. Steele worked his way through the ranks, until El Salvador’s civil war heated up, with Steele being sent to train local “special Police brigades.” The units that Steele trained quickly became linked to accusations of torture and death squad activity. Former senior DEA agent Celerino Castillo knew Steele during his time in El Salvador, and has stated that when he heard that Steele had been sent to Iraq that the US was implementing the “Salvadoran option” to battle the insurgency.

Col. Steele was lauded for his work in El Salvador because the insurgency was stopped in its tracks. The cost to the people of El Salvador was more than 30,000 dead at the hands of the death squads. and many more tortured and abused. Col Steele was nominated to become one of the youngest full generals in the US military, but he was caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal, and was forced to retire early. The connections that Steele had from El Salvador included Dick Cheney. who turned to the retired officer to organize Panama’s new police force after the US threw out Noriega. In the periods between counter-insurgencies, Steele worked for corporations such as Enron and Buchanan as an “energy consultant.”.Buchanan has been accused of shady business practices in Liberia when Steele was with them, and Enron’s history speaks for itself.

“Salvadorization” of Iraq

In 2005, Peter Maas of the New York Times broke the story of former Col Steele’s return to counterinsurgency. The US invaders had been met with an insurgency,  rather than the “flowers and candy” promised by the Bush administration. The war was becoming increasingly unpopular, and deaths among Iraqis and American troops were escalating. Steele arrived to replace efforts to train police by western policemen and turn to a more militarized option.

The insurgents were being led by those who had served under Saddam Hussein and were mostly members of the Sunni minority, which has long acted as leaders in Iraq. The Americans therefore turned to members of the Shia majority to act as the counter-insurgent forces. Steele worked alongside Col James H. Coffman, who reported directly to General David Petraeus  on their progress in training the new special police brigades. Very quickly. the new Shia special police brigades gained a fearsome reputation in the areas they operated in, with accusations of torture surfacing almost immediately. When Peter Maas was invited by Steele to visit their operations to interview a Saudi insurgent, he reported walking into an office with blood dripping off the desk and hearing screams of pain and terror in the room next door. Col. Steele walked next door to where the screams were coming from. and the screams quickly ceased, so that Maas’s interview with the insurgent could proceed uninterrupted.

The leader of the special brigades was Adnan Thabit, an Iraqi officer who had been caught plotting to overthrow Saddam Hussein but had escaped with his life. Thabit has confirmed that Steele was the American trainer of his forces and knew exactly what he was up to. Thabit has also stated that although he disapproves of torture generally, that it is necessary to get “criminals to confess.”

Iraqi former general and government minister during Steele’s time in Iraq, Muntadher al-Samari, has also confirmed Steele’s knowledge of torture in Iraq. Al-Samari describes Steele seeing a prisoner suspended from the ceiling with bruising so severe that it would have been difficult to identify the individual. Describing Steele, al-Samari indicated his belief that Steele had been exposed to so much war and torture that he was incapable of “human feelings” and felt no empathy for the tortured prisoners he saw. After resigning his post from the gGovernment due to the abuse he witnessed, al-Samari was visited by Steele in Jordan. Steele questioned al-Samari about what he had witnessed and particularly asked if he had any physical proof of Steele’s actions such as documents or photos. Al-Samari now says he would be willing to testify about Steele’s knowledge of torture before a human rights court.

Torture was only a part of the special police brigade’s activity – they have also been accused in the deaths of thousands of opponents. At one point, 3,000 bodies were turning up in the streets of Iraq every month, with the majority attributed to the sectarian violence practiced by the Shia police brigades. So many bodies were being found that they were buried in local dumps. Most were not identifiable due to the extent of abuse and were buried with only tin cans to mark their locations.

 Bradley Manning and Wikileaks

The BBC and The Guardian have attributed the genesis of their investigation into the abuses to documents released by Wikileaks in 2010. As of this writing, Bradley Manning has confessed to supplying these documents to Wikileaks.  Manning has described the torture that he himself underwent as a result of revealing to the world the actions of the U.S. government involving torture and the deaths of innocent civilians. It is known that Steele reported directly not just to Petraeus, but wrote memos to Donald Rumsfeld, which were passed on to Dick Cheney and the White House. Meanwhile, retired Col. Steele lives quietly in Texas and earns large sums of money in return for speaking engagements on the subject of counter-insurgency.

Further reading:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13558.htm

http://www.thenation.com/article/173246/why-invasion-iraq-was-single-worst-foreign-policy-decision-american-history?rel=emailNation#

http://www.stripes.com/mobile/news/middle-east/iraq/report-us-advisers-in-iraq-linked-to-torture-centers-1.210834

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Some may call it a dead topic that should stay dead, but I think that a national discussion of torture needs to continue. Andy Worthington’s March 13 posting on Truthout offers an excellent summary of the issue.

As for me, I think American citizens need to know if their government is living up to its stated ideals or violating the same standards to which it holds other nations. When the U.S. government touts its Army Field Manual,  or signs on to the Geneva Conventions or other international treaties—do we mean it, or do we reserve the right—via American exceptionalism—to change the rules when it’s convenient for us?

The recent ruling by Justice Department official David Margolis—effectively absolving Bush Administration lawyers from responsibility in enabling “enhanced interrogation techniques” in Iraq and Guantanamo—makes this dialogue even more imperative.

I don’t know what Margolis’ motivation was, and he’s not talking. His ruling overturned four years of investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. Perhaps he’s protecting his own, circling the wagons around the fraternity/sorority of  lawyers. Perhaps he’s been instructed—as the Obama administration has emphasized many times—to focus on the future, not on the past. After all, if the Obama administration prosecutes, or censures, or even criticizes the previous administration, it could set in motion—horror of horrors—future efforts at holding government officials accountable for their actions.

I can’t say for sure why they’re doing what they’re doing. But we do know that the UN Convention Against Torture, signed by President Reagan in 1988 and incorporated into US federal law, defines torture as:

any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person …

In the infamous “torture memo,” John Yoo and Jay Bybee  tortured that definition into submission—probably at the behest of the Bush administration—and now, they’ve gotten away with it.

When I watched portions of the Congressional hearings on torture in 2009, it occurred to me that one sure way to define torture would be to ask the defenders of “harsh interrogation techniques” a simple question: “If someone did that to you, or to your friend or family member, would you call it torture?”

Thankfully, President Obama took action, shortly after being inaugurated, to reverse the most egregious interrogation policies of the Bush Administration, announcing, in January 2009, that America was reverting to the Army Field Manual’s rules.

But President Obama’s welcome policy shift is not the end of the story.  A terrible precedent has been set, both by the original torture memos and by David Margolis’ recent ruling. Even if we follow the Obama administration’s apparent predilection for not looking backward or placing blame, we will face these issues again in the future. This administration’s unwillingness to establish accountability will undoubtedly come back to haunt us. The Justice Department’s ruling effectively gives cover to future foes to torture our soldiers with impunity.

Blame and punishment for the perpetrators of the Bush Administration’s foolhardy and inhumane policy is probably not the answer. Particularly in today’s political climate, such a strategy would most likely be counterproductive, resulting in endless political warfare.

There is, however, an alternative. It’s called “truth and reconciliation,” and the process–though sometimes painful and complicated–has had good results in post-apartheid South Africa and other regions where conflict and alleged war crimes have divided the community. There’s even a precedent for this process here in the U.S., in Greensboro, North Carolina, where a local Truth & Reconciliation Commission was organized in 2004 to examine and learn from a divisive event in Greensboro’s past, in order to build the foundation for a more unified future.

I acknowledge that getting a truth and reconciliation process in place to examine what happened during the Bush Administration, and to try to promote national healing, is a long shot.  But if we don’t address this issue now, then when will we?

-Photo credit: Bill Concannon, Burning Images

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