[Peace-discuss] Obama's death squads

Sat Jun 6 21:40:39 CDT 2009

[When Obama speaks of leaving US troops as "trainers" in Iraq, and of having the 
US military "train" the Afghan army, this is what he means.  And it is clearly 
his policy: he has put the commander of the US Special Forces who formed this 
"dirty brigade," Gen. Stanley McChrystal, an assassin and torturer, in overall 
command of the US war in AfPak.  This is another way in which Obama resembles 
John Kennedy, who as president promoted the "Green Berets'" covert action that 
invented the Latin American death squads. (See inter alia Allan Nairn's 
reporting from the mid-1990s.)  With them the US brought a generation of murder 
and darkness to LA.  The Obama administration will apparently do the same for 
the Middle East as it "withdraws."  --CGE]

"The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special 
forces outfit ever built by the United States, and it is free of many of the 
controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces. The project 
started in the deserts of Jordan just after the Americans took Baghdad in April 
2003. There, the US Army's Special Forces, or Green Berets, trained mostly 
18-year-old Iraqis with no prior military experience. The resulting brigade was 
a Green Beret's dream come true: a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with 
American equipment, that would operate for years under US command and be 
unaccountable to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process...

"President Obama has said he plans to increase reliance on the US Special Forces 
... Obama says he will institutionalize irregular warfare capabilities, and the 
White House stresses the need to 'create a more robust capacity to train, equip 
and advise foreign security forces, so that local allies are better prepared to 
confront mutual threats.'"

	Iraq's New Death Squad
	by SHANE BAUER
	This article appeared in the June 22, 2009
	edition of The Nation - June 3, 2009

The light is fading from the dusty Baghdad sky as Hassan Mahsan re-enacts what 
happened to his family last summer. We're standing in the courtyard of his 
concrete-block house, his children are watching us quietly and his wife is 
twirling large circles of dough and slapping them against the inside walls of a 
roaring oven. He walks over to his three-foot-tall daughter and grabs her head 
like a melon. As she stands there, he gestures wildly behind her, pretending to 
tie up her hands, then pretending to point a rifle at her head. "They took the 
blindfold off me, pointed the gun at her head and cocked it, saying, 'Either you 
tell us where al-Zaydawi is, or we kill your daughter.'"

"They just marched into our house and took whatever they wanted," Hassan's 
mother says, peeking out the kitchen door. "I've never seen anyone act like this."

As Hassan tells it, it was a quiet night on June 10, 2008, in Sadr City, 
Baghdad's poor Shiite district of more than 2 million people, when the 
helicopter appeared over his house and the front door exploded, nearly burning 
his sleeping youngest son. Before Hassan knew it, he was on the ground, hands 
bound and a bag over his head, with eight men pointing rifles at him, locked and 
loaded.

At first he couldn't tell whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He says he 
identified himself as a police sergeant, offering his ID before they took his 
pistol and knocked him to the ground. The men didn't move like any Iraqi forces 
he'd ever seen. They looked and spoke like his countrymen, but they were wearing 
American-style uniforms and carrying American weapons with night-vision scopes. 
They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, 
before they dragged him off, telling his wife he was "finished." But before they 
left, they identified themselves. "We are the Special Forces. The dirty 
brigade," Hassan recalls them saying.

The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces 
outfit ever built by the United States, and it is free of many of the controls 
that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces. The project started 
in the deserts of Jordan just after the Americans took Baghdad in April 2003. 
There, the US Army's Special Forces, or Green Berets, trained mostly 18-year-old 
Iraqis with no prior military experience. The resulting brigade was a Green 
Beret's dream come true: a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with 
American equipment, that would operate for years under US command and be 
unaccountable to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process.

According to Congressional records, the ISOF has grown into nine battalions, 
which extend to four regional "commando bases" across Iraq. By December, each 
will be complete with its own "intelligence infusion cell," which will operate 
independently of Iraq's other intelligence networks. The ISOF is at least 4,564 
operatives strong, making it approximately the size of the US Army's own Special 
Forces in Iraq. Congressional records indicate that there are plans to double 
the ISOF over the next "several years."

According to retired Lt. Col. Roger Carstens, US Special Forces are "building 
the most powerful force in the region." In 2008 Carstens, then a senior fellow 
at the Center for a New American Security, was an adviser to the Iraqi National 
Counter-Terror Force, where he helped set up the Iraqi counterterrorism laws 
that govern the ISOF.

"All these guys want to do is go out and kill bad guys all day," he says, 
laughing. "These guys are shit hot. They are just as good as we are. We trained 
'em. They are just like us. They use the same weapons. They walk like Americans."

When the US Special Forces began the slow transfer of the ISOF to Iraqi control 
in April 2007, they didn't put it under the command of the Defense Ministry or 
the Interior Ministry, bodies that normally control similar special forces the 
world over. Instead, the Americans pressured the Iraqi government to create a 
new minister-level office called the Counter-Terrorism Bureau. Established by a 
directive from Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, the CTB answers directly 
to him and commands the ISOF independently of the police and army. According to 
Maliki's directive, the Iraqi Parliament has no influence over the ISOF and 
knows little about its mission. US Special Forces operatives like Carstens have 
largely overseen the bureau. Carstens says this independent chain of command 
"might be the perfect structure" for counterterrorism worldwide.

Although the force is officially controlled by the Iraqi government, popular 
perception in Baghdad is that the ISOF--the dirty brigade--is a covert, 
all-Iraqi branch of the US military. That reading isn't far from the truth. The 
US Special Forces are still closely involved with every level of the ISOF, from 
planning and carrying out missions to deciding tactics and creating policy. 
According to Brig. Gen. Simeon Trombitas, commander of the Iraq National 
Counter-Terror Force Transition Team, part of the multinational command 
responsible for turning control of the ISOF over to the Iraqi government, the US 
Special Forces continue to "have advisers at every level of the chain of command."

In January 2008 the US Special Forces started allowing ISOF commanders to join 
missions with them and the ISOF rank and file. Starting last summer--when 
Hassan's family was attacked--ISOF battalions began launching missions on their 
own, without American advisers, in Sadr City, where political agreements forbid 
the Americans from entering. Accusations of human rights abuses, killings and 
politically motivated arrests have surfaced, including assaults on a university 
president and arrests of opposition politicians.

The US government has been focused on turning out "as many men in arms as 
possible, as quickly as possible," says Peter Harling, senior Middle East 
analyst at the International Crisis Group. "There has been very little impetus 
to build checks and controls to prevent abuse. It's been very much about 
building up capability without the oversight that could prevent some of the 
units [from] turning into proxies working for some politician."

In Sadr City opposition to the Iraqi government and the US occupation is strong. 
There is no longer any visible militia presence, but pictures of anti-American 
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr still stick to the US-built concrete walls that enclose 
the city, and calls to prayer end with a demand for the hastened exit of "the 
enemy." There, the ISOF uses a policy of collective punishment, aimed at 
intimidating civilians, charges Hassan al-Rubaie, Sadrist member of the 
parliamentary Security and Defense Committee. "They terrorize entire 
neighborhoods just to arrest one person they think is a terrorist," he says. 
"This needs to stop."

US Special Forces advisers have done little to respond to allegations of abuse. 
Civilian pleas, public protests, complaints by Iraqi Army commanders about the 
ISOF's actions and calls for disbanding it by members of Parliament have not 
pushed the US government to take a hard look at the force they are creating. 
Instead, US advisers dismiss such claims as politically motivated. "The enemy is 
trying to discredit them," says Carstens. "It's not because they are doing 
anything dirty."

On the same night Hassan Mahsan's house was raided, 26-year-old Haidar al-Aibi 
was killed with a bullet to the forehead. His family says there was no warning. 
They tell me how it happened as we drink tea on the floor of their living room, 
furnished only with thick foam cushions and mournful depictions of the Shiite 
martyr Hussein. A woman weeps loudly in the corner, the sleeping child of her 
dead son almost obscured by the folds of her black garments.

Fathil al-Aibi says the family was awakened around midnight by a nearby 
explosion. His brother Haidar ran up to the roof to see what had happened and 
was immediately shot from a nearby rooftop. When Fathil, his brother Hussein and 
his father, Abbas, tried to bring Haidar downstairs, they were shot at, too. For 
about two hours he lay lifeless on the roof while his family panicked as red 
laser beams from rifle scopes danced on their windows. "We had tests the next 
day at the university," Hussein says. "We didn't think he would go like this."

Down the road, around the same time that night, police commando Ahmed Shibli 
says he was also being fired on. He illuminates two bullet holes in his house 
with a kerosene lamp as we talk. The men who busted open his front door called 
themselves the dirty brigade, he says, and they were carrying American weapons, 
not the AK-47s or PKCs the National Police use. When they entered, they fired 
immediately. "It wasn't a warning shot. They shot at me like they wanted to kill 
me as I was getting down on the ground. It was like we were first-degree 
terrorists." They fired again, he says, fatally shooting his ailing 63-year-old 
father. As blood poured from the old man's hip, Ahmed says the men held a gun to 
his little boy's head and forced his wife to search the room for the 
police-issued weapon he had left at work.

Ahmed and his brother were hauled to the outskirts of the city, along with 
Hassan, where they were lined up with other men in the dark. Hassan insists on 
substantiating his story by showing me an official complaint issued by a local 
army commander named Mustafa Sabah Yunis, alleging that an "unknown armed 
squadron" entered the area and arrested him.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Army was rushing in to respond to the gunfire, and 
according to Hussein al-Aibi, these soldiers were shot at as well. He tells me 
the army got Haidar off the roof and drove him to the hospital. On the way, 
Fathil says, the vehicle was stopped by a dirty brigade operative, who asked 
Iraqi Army Major Abu Rajdi where they were going. According to Fathil, Rajdi 
told the operative, "This is a college student who has nothing to do with 
anything, and you shot him recklessly." The operative responded by hitting Rajdi 
and saying, "Turn around and go back, or we'll shoot him and we'll shoot you too."

At Haidar's funeral, Fathil asked Rajdi to testify. "You are a representative of 
the government, and you saw it all happen," he told the major. "You saw that he 
didn't have a weapon in his hand." Fathil says the major declined. "This is the 
dirty brigade," he recalls Rajdi saying. "We are afraid of them. When we see 
them, we retreat. If I testify against them, I'll be killed the next day. They 
kill and no one will hold them accountable, because they belong to the Americans."

Major Rajdi's fear and distrust of the ISOF are echoed by other members of the 
regular Iraqi Army. "Sometimes we are surprised when the Special Forces enter," 
says Lt. Colonel Yahya Rasoul Abdullah, commander of the Third Battalion of the 
Forty-second Brigade in Sadr City. "Bad things happen. Some people steal, and 
some abuse women. They don't know the people on the streets like us. They just 
go after their target. We have suffered from this problem."

Accounts of older ISOF operations I heard around Baghdad suggest that the 
Americans may have knowingly allowed violence against civilians. In Adhamiya, 
long the stronghold of the Sunni insurgency in Baghdad, two hospital employees 
described their 2006 run-in with the ISOF to me. According to both witnesses, a 
self-identified ISOF operative named "Captain Hussam" unloaded his machine gun 
in the Al Numan Hospital after seeing the body of his superior, who had died 
under the hospital's care. An American operative with a red beard stood by 
silently watching. According to one witness, the Iraqi operative demanded his 
commander's death certificate, threatening to "torture you, kill you and kill 
the people of Adhamiya" if they didn't comply. The witnesses said the eight 
operatives who entered the hospital were driving Humvees, vehicles that only the 
Americans and the ISOF use. The next day, Captain Hussam returned, a witness 
said, offering a box of bullets as an apology.

The effective head of the American ISOF project is General Trombitas of the Iraq 
National Counter-Terror Transition Team. A towering man with a gray mustache and 
a wrinkled brow, Trombitas spent nearly seven of his over thirty years in the 
military training special forces in Colombia, El Salvador and other countries. 
On February 23 he gave me a tour of Area IV, a joint American-Iraqi base near 
the Baghdad International Airport, where US Special Forces train the ISOF. As we 
walk away from the helicopter, he cracks a boyish smile. Though he's worked with 
special forces all over the world, he tells me the men we are about to meet are 
"the best."

Trombitas says he is "very proud of what was done in El Salvador" but avoids the 
fact that special forces trained there by the United States in the early 1980s 
were responsible for the formation of death squads that killed more than 50,000 
civilians thought to be sympathetic with leftist guerrillas. Guatemala was a 
similar case. Some Guatemalan special forces that had been trained in 
anti-terrorism tactics by the United States during the mid-1960s subsequently 
became death squads that took part in the killing of around 140,000 people. In 
the early 1990s, US Special Forces trained and worked closely with an elite 
Colombian police unit strongly suspected of carrying out some of the murders 
attributed to Los Pepes, a death squad that became the backbone of the country's 
current paramilitary organization. (Trombitas served in El Salvador from 1989-90 
and in Colombia from 2003-2005, after these incidents took place.)

"The standards get looser when the Americans aren't with [the local special 
forces], and they can eventually become death squads, which I believe actually 
happened in Colombia," says Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and Killing 
Pablo, a book about the hunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar by CIA and US 
Special Forces. The tactics taught in each country are the same, Bowden says. 
"They teach the same kind of skills. They use the same equipment."

Trombitas told the official blog of the Defense Department that the training 
missions used in Latin America are "extremely transferable" to Iraq. Salvadoran 
Special Forces even helped train the ISOF, he tells me. "It's a world of 
coalitions," he says. "The longer we work together, the more alike we are. When 
we share our values and our experiences with other armies, we make them the same."

Trombitas guides me into a warehouse where ISOF operatives, most of them in 
black masks, have been preparing for our arrival. He walks me through a special 
display of their American equipment -- machine guns, sniper rifles, 
state-of-the-art night-vision equipment and fluffy desert camo that makes 
soldiers look like teddy bears. He takes me up a catwalk overlooking a fake 
house stocked with cartoonish posters of big-breasted women pointing pistols, a 
couple of real men dressed as "terrorists" with kaffiyehs wrapped around their 
faces and a 10-year-old boy playing hostage.

As we stand in the observation area, the door explodes. After a minute of 
constant shooting, the operatives march out with the "terrorists," the boy and a 
poster of an '80s-style villain, wearing a jean jacket and holding a woman 
hostage. More than twenty bullet holes are centered on his forehead. "Look at 
that marksmanship," Trombitas says, smiling proudly.

Trombitas gets to the issue of human rights before I do. He assures me that US 
Special Forces take allegations of human rights abuses very seriously -- two 
Iraqi men were let go for prisoner abuse since he took over in August last year, 
he says -- but he won't comment on specific cases. I raise the issue of 
accountability and bring up one well-documented mission that caused waves in the 
Iraqi Parliament: in August the ISOF raided Diyala's provincial government 
compound, reportedly with the support of US Apache helicopters. They arrested a 
member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, Iraq's main Sunni Arab party. They also 
arrested the president of the university, also a Sunni, and killed a secretary 
and wounded four armed guards during the night.

I barely get the word "Diyala" out of my mouth before the American operatives 
standing around us start to grumble nervously and a translator jumps in. "For 
the reputation of the ISOF, please, let's cut that off," he says.

Abdul-Karim al-Samarrai, a member of the ruling United Iraqi Alliance and the 
parliamentary Security and Defense Committee, says that what happened in Diyala 
was one of many signs of the prime minister's bad intentions for the ISOF. 
"Politicians are afraid because this force can be used for political ends," he 
says. In response to outrage from members of Parliament over the arrest of 
politicians by the ISOF, Maliki, who is officially required to approve every 
ISOF target, denied any knowledge of the Diyala mission. His claim of innocence 
raises important questions. If the man who is supposed to be in charge of the 
ISOF has no knowledge of its missions, then who is ultimately responsible for 
the force? Was Maliki lying to cover up the fact that he is using the force for 
political purposes? Or was someone else -- namely the Americans -- calling the 
shots?

Diyala was only the first publicized case of possibly politically motivated 
arrests. In December the ISOF arrested as many as thirty-five officials in the 
Interior Ministry who were thought to be in opposition to Maliki's Islamic Dawa 
Party. This past March the ISOF arrested at least one leader of the Awakening 
Councils, semiofficial Sunni neighborhood militias that have been increasingly 
at odds with Maliki over his failure to keep a promise to incorporate the 
councils into the military or give them other employment.

The Maliki government has developed a "culture of direct control," says Michael 
Knights, a Lafer Fellow at the Washington Institute and the head of its Iraq 
program. Knights visits Iraq regularly and has close contact with the country's 
security services. He says the people in charge of the ISOF at the regional 
levels are "personally chosen loyalists or relatives of Maliki. It reminds me of 
Saddam." Knights says that Maliki is only supposed to approve or reject missions 
that come to him, but occasionally he will "assert his prerogative as the 
commander in chief and tell the ISOF to do something or not to do something." 
Knights raises the possibility that the ISOF will become Maliki's personal death 
squad. "The prime minister is looking for re-election, and there are not that 
many restraints on his ability to target political opponents, as [his 
government] has been doing with the Sadrists for years now."

Samarrai, along with other members of Parliament, is calling for disbanding the 
Counter-Terrorism Bureau. He says there is no legal basis for an armed brigade 
to exist outside the control of the Interior or Defense ministry. "People are 
afraid of the existence of an organization with such dreadful capabilities that 
reports directly to the prime minister," he says.

Member of Parliament Hassan al-Rubaie is concerned about the close relationship 
between the ISOF and the Americans. "If the US leaves Iraq, this will be the 
last force they will leave behind," he insists. He is worried that such a 
powerful and secretive force that is closely tied to the Americans could turn 
Iraq into a "military base in the region" by allowing the United States to 
continue to conduct missions in Iraq with the cover of the ISOF. "They have 
become a replacement" for the Americans, he says.

President Obama has said he plans to increase reliance on the US Special Forces; 
Defense Secretary Robert Gates's recent appointment of Stanley McChrystal as 
commander of Afghanistan suggests that he is keeping his word. From 2003 to 
2008, McChrystal was the head of the Joint Special Operations Command, which 
oversees the Army's most secretive forces and is responsible for the training of 
special forces abroad. McChrystal was also commander of US Special Operations 
Forces in Iraq for five years, during which time, according to the Wall Street 
Journal, he commanded "units that specialize in guerrilla warfare, including the 
training of indigenous armies."

"The eventual drawdown in Iraq is not the end of the mission for our elite 
forces," Gates said in May 2008. Gates hasn't spoken on the issue since Obama 
took office; but Obama says he will institutionalize irregular warfare 
capabilities, and the White House stresses the need to "create a more robust 
capacity to train, equip and advise foreign security forces, so that local 
allies are better prepared to confront mutual threats."

Bowden says those "local allies" are often used for covert operations. "The 
United States Special Operations Command cultivates relationships with special 
forces in other countries because it gives the United States the opportunity of 
intervening militarily in a covert way," he says. "The ideal covert op is one 
that is actually carried out by local forces."

As I stand on the tarmac with Trombitas in Area IV, waiting for our helicopter 
to return and fly us back to the Green Zone, I ask him how long the United 
States will be involved with the ISOF. "Special forces are special because we do 
maintain a relationship with foreign forces," he says. "Part of our 
theater-engagement strategy is to maintain a relationship with those units that 
are important to the security of the region and to the world." As our helicopter 
appears in the lightly clouded sky, he chooses his next words carefully: "We are 
going to have a working relationship for a while," he says.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090622/bauer/single