William Boardman: America's Hired Death Squads and Torture Teams

are still operating in Iraq: Death squads, torture, secret prisons in Iraq, and General David Petraeus, are among the featured atrocities, in a recently released new British documentary. James Steele: America's Mystery Man in Iraq, the result of a 15 month investigation by Guardian Films and BBC Arabic, exploring war crimes long denied by the Pentagon, but confirmed by thousands of military field reports, made public by Wiki-leaks. The hour long film explores the arc of American counter insurgency brutality from Vietnam to Iraq, with stops along the way in El Salvador and Nicaragua. James Steele is now a retired US colonel, who first served in Vietnam as a company commander in 1968-69. He later made his reputation as a military adviser in El Salvador, where he guided ruthless Salvadorian death squads in the 1980s. When his country called again in 2003, he came out of retirement to train Iraqi police commandos in the bloodiest techniques of counter insurgency, that evolved into that country's Shia-Sunni civil war, that at its peak killed 3,000 people a month. Steele now lives in a gated golf community in Brian, Texas, and did not respond to requests for an interview, for the documentary bearing his name. News coverage of this documentary has been largely absent in the mainstream media. The Guardian had a report, naturally, at the time of release, and Democracy NOW had a long segment on March 22, that includes an interview with veteran, award winning reporter Maggie O'Kane, as well as several excerpts from the movie she directed. The documentary is available on line at the Guardian and several other websites. James Steele opens with a montage of soldiers, some masked, taking prisoners, some hooded, as the woman narrator sets the stage: This is one of the great untold stories of the Iraq War, how just over a year after the invasion, the United States funded a sectarian police commando force, that set up a network of torture centers to fight the Sunni insurgency. This is also the story of James Steele, the veteran of America's dirty war in El Salvador. He was in charge of the US advisers, who trained notorious Salvadorian paramilitary units to fight left wing guerrillas. In the course of that civil war, 75,000 people died, and over a million people became refugees. Steele was chosen by the Bush administration to work with General Petraeus to organize these paramilitary police commandos.