Last week's Law and Disorder Radio, an hour long program that airs Monday mornings at 9:00 a.m. EST on WBAI and around the country throughout the week, hosted by attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Michael S. Smith and Michael Ratner (Center for Constitutional Rights), explored counter-insurgency with journalist Patrick Farrelly who was part of the BBC Arabic and the Guardian newspaper investigative team behind the recent documentary entitled James Steele: America's Mystery Man In Iraq. Excerpt.
Patrick Farrelly: He's retired not part of the administration. But Col James Coffman is, he is a US army colonel and he reports directly to General [David] Petraeus in the army chain of command. Steele is a consultant or an advisor but Coffman actually is in the chain of command. So therefore when this paramilitary force, when they need money or they need equipment or whatever, Coffman is the guy who takes it upstairs to Petraeus and Petraeus is the one who provides the money, provides the weapons, provides whatever. So these guys are in these detention centers, you have this torture going on and the torture is widespread. And this is where Bradley Manning comes in. 'Cause I know you guys have been talking about him. Part of the WikiLeaks discovery in terms of the War Logs which was released by Bradly Manning to WikiLeaks shows this entire pattern of US soldiers coming across these detention centers or working with these detention centers because they're involved with these special police commandos, they're providing them with guys to interrogate, they're taking guys from them for further interrogation. And what they're seeing is -- consistently, they're giving reports of seeing torture, of seeing abuse. The Guardian went through these War Logs and started looking at this stuff and started seeing patterns of hundreds and hundreds of reports by US soldiers on the ground of this going on and that's really what actually launched the inquiry and that's what brought us to Col James Steele and Col James Coffman and actually General David Petraeus.
Michael Ratner: It's interesting, Patrick, because these are what they call the Iraq War Logs which Bradley Manning talks about when he made his guilty plea the other day as to why he wanted to reveal them because they were revealing all of this criminality really and the counter-insurgency and which he didn't like. Now can you give us a sense of two things. One is, why didn't any of this come out before? I mean these War Logs have been out for a couple of years now and, secondly, what kind of torture is described?
Patrick Farrelly: I mean the interesting thing for me about the War Logs is that an enormous amount was made of WikiLeaks and an enormous amount was made of these to stuff that the Times and the Guardian, El Pais and the other newspapers actually brought to light. But I have to say that from that point onwards, the ball was dropped in many ways in the sense of like journalists really getting into the detail of what these things reveal and actually following them up. And I think this documentary the Guardian and BBC Arabic produced is an example of the kind of material which actually lies within these and which journalists actually should be taking up. But going back to the issue of these special police commandos, their existence was well known. General David Petreaus was interviewed by this very find Frontline documentary called The Gangs of Iraq that Martin Smith made for PBS Frontline in which he interviews General Petraeus. Petraeus is very proud of these, he's very proud of the commandos but the way that it was being posed in terms of our understanding of the situation was that after Petraeus left Iraq in September of 2005 -- he'd been there since June 2004 dealing with setting up this new police force. It's only really after that, according to them that these abuses happened -- when these Shia political parties really took over and when these Shia militias started getting into great. In other words it's another one of these situation swhere the US army and the US government sets up these police commandos which the locals invariably corrupt at a certain point and then because they don't have the same standards as we do start abusing people and start torturing people. What this investigation has found is that from the very, very beginning, Col James Steele and Col James Coffman who answer to Petraeus and who answer to Rumsfeld had, you know, worked with these guys in these detention centers and were witnesses to and knew this stuff was going on because you've got to -- It's a production line because these young men come in, they were tortured --
Michael Ratner: How were they tortured?
Patrick Farrelly: They were tortured by the worst kind of methods. I mean these people were being hung up, off ceilings. These people were having like, you know, their nails pulled out with pliers, it was waterboarding. It was every concievable kind of torture that you can think of.
Michael Smith: And how do we know that? That's in the documents?
Heidi Boghosian: Is it documented?
Patrick Farrelly: Because we had a very important invidiual spoke to the Guardian about the US involvement for the first time. He's a man by the name of General Muntadher al-Samari and he had been a general in -- he's a Sunni -- and he had been a general in Saddam's regime. And when the United States came in, he -- actually along with a number of other Sunnis took the United States at their word that they were going to frame and bring about a pretty regular democratic society so they actually became involved with helping the United States actually put together this police force. So Muntadher was there. He worked for the Ministery of the Interior, he worked for the police, he worked directly with Steele and he worked with Coffman. He'd meet Coffman, he had meetings with Petraeus.
Michael Ratner: How many people were tortured? Ten? A hundred? A thousand?
Patrick Farrelly: We don't have exact numbers but I think we're talking tens of thousands of people were actually brought in. You're dealing with, for example, if you take the ancient city of Samarra -- a very, very important city in terms of the religion and the culture and the history of that area -- which was also a place where there was enormous opposition to the occupation. They went in there. They turned the city library into a torture center. They turfed everything out that was there and there was all these books, all these manuscripts and they turned it into a torture center. They would then go out at night -- they were there for months on end in the fall and winter of 2004. They would go out with trucks at night. They would pull in hundreds of people who were then being processed. This went on for months. So I mean the numbers in that place alone run into the thousands. And there was a network of approximately 14 of these centers that we were aware of throughout Iraq. So this was a fairly -- this was a large scale operation which produced a lot of results. I mean that's one thing that we have to be sure of, this was a thing which terrorized Sunni community. There was no two ways, it was incredibly effective in terms of scaring the living daylights out of people because this force that they put on the ground and which started to work was a feared force. If they're right in your neighborhood in their Dodge trucks because this was one thing these guys were very, very happy with because Petraeus gave them 150 Dodge trucks. They were then provided with other American pick up trucks. I know in this country, it's a great thing to see if you're out there in the farmlands but if you are living in a Sunni neighborhood and you saw one of these trucks arriving, this was not a good thing.
Heidi Boghosian: Well the result was a mass intimidation.