{"id":29755,"date":"2013-03-07T11:54:36","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T10:54:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=29755"},"modified":"2013-03-07T12:04:20","modified_gmt":"2013-03-07T11:04:20","slug":"pentagon-implicated-in-iraq-torture-units","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/pentagon-implicated-in-iraq-torture-units\/","title":{"rendered":"Pentagon Implicated In Iraq Torture Units"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mick Meaney
\nRINF Alternative News<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"tirture\"<\/p>\n

A new investigation has revealed that the\u00a0Pentagon sent high ranking\u00a0officials to manage\u00a0secret detention and torture units in Iraq.<\/p>\n

A US veteran of the “dirty wars” in Central America,\u00a0\u00a0Colonel James Steele,\u00a0a retired special forces veteran nominated by Donald Rumsfeld, was sent to\u00a0oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq, alongside\u00a0General David Petraeus,\u00a0who was forced to resign as director of the CIA\u00a0last November after a sex scandal.<\/p>\n

It is believed that these units accelerated the country’s descent into full-scale civil war and\u00a0conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation.<\/p>\n

The investigation\u00a0conducted\u00a0by The Guardian and BBC Arabic, was\u00a0sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention centres.<\/p>\n

General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele, has spoken about\u00a0the US involvement in the\u00a0torture\u00a0units for the first time:<\/p>\n

“They knew everything that was going on there … the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture.<\/p>\n

“Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee.<\/p>\n

“Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts.<\/p>\n

“I remember a 14-year-old who was tied to one of the library’s columns. And he was tied up, with his legs above his head. Tied up. His whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he had been beaten.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Also, a press\u00a0photographer, Gilles Peress, who visited\u00a0one of the commando centres in the same library, said:<\/p>\n

“We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I’m looking around I see blood everywhere.<\/p>\n

“And while this interview was going on with a Saudi jihadi with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams, somebody shouting ‘Allah, Allah, Allah!’. But it wasn’t kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The full length documentary is online here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The investigation conducted by The Guardian and BBC Arabic, was sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention centres.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29756,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,18,1616],"tags":[51,49],"class_list":{"0":"post-29755","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-latest-news","9":"category-usa-news","10":"tag-torture","11":"tag-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}