Atrocities Committed
by U.S.-Trained Iraqi Forces — Again
By Peter Maass
March 15, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Intercept" -
Investigative reporter James Gordon Meek
broke an important story this week: He
revealed that U.S.-backed forces in Iraq
are committing the same type of horrific
war crimes — wanton killings of
prisoners, beheadings, torture — as the
Islamic State fighters on the other side
of the front line.
Meek’s
report, broadcast by ABC News and
based on photos and cell phone videos
that Iraqi fighters had proudly shared
on social media, shows the Humvees and
M4A1 assault rifles that the U.S.
government has supplied in abundance to
Iraq’s armed forces. In its effort to
push the Islamic State out of Iraq, the
U.S. is providing Baghdad with nearly $1
billion a year in weapons, in addition
to training by
several thousand American advisers.
U.S. and Iraqi
officials professed surprise at what is
happening, and told ABC that
investigations would be launched to get
to the bottom of it. If this sounds
familiar in a “Casablanca” way —
gambling in the casino, stop the presses
— it should. Back in 2005, when Facebook
was a curiousity used by just a few
thousand students and Instagram was
years away from being invented, the
sorts of abuses that Meek recently found
on social media sites were well
underway.
Back then, I visited
Samarra, a contested town in the heart
of what was known as the Sunni Triangle,
and
wrote about the abuses I saw while
accompanying Iraqi and U.S. forces on
joint raids. I saw beatings, witnessed a
mock execution, and heard, inside an
Iraqi detention center, the terrible
screams of a man being tortured. I
received the same sorts of reactions
that greeted Meek’s story: U.S. and
Iraqi officials expressed surprise and
promised to punish any wrongdoers.
Nothing changed.
That’s because
torture, rather than being an
aberration, was embedded in a strategy
that was described, at the time, as the
Salvadorization of Iraq—the use of
dirty-war tactics to defeat an
insurgency. It is more than a footnote
of history that the origins of this
policy appear to date to 2004, when the
effort to train and equip Iraqi
forces got underway in earnest under the
leadership of Gen. David Petraeus, who
went on to command all U.S. forces in
Iraq, then in Afghanistan, then became
director of the CIA, then resigned and
pleaded guilty to disclosing a trove
of highly-classified information to his
lover and biographer, Paula Broadwell,
and lying to the FBI about it.
I was hardly the first
to witness the abuses and hypocrisy that
were the hammer and anvil of the
American program to build up Iraqi
forces. In 2004, Oregon National Guard
troops in Baghdad observed officers
inside a Ministry of Interior compound
beating and torturing prisoners;
they entered the compound and found
dozens of abused detainees, including
one who had just been shot. The Oregon
soldiers reported what they had found
and received an incredible order from
their commanders — leave the compound
now.
In 2010, the deluge of
military and diplomatic files that were
released by WikiLeaks included a
document that explained why the Oregon
soldiers had been told to forget about
what they had seen — FRAGO
242, as the order was called,
required U.S. troops to not investigate
any abuses committed by Iraqi forces
unless U.S. troops were involved. In
other words, so long as Iraqis were
doing the torturing rather than
Americans, it was none of our business.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Then, as now, the
reason these abuses were tolerated was a
battlefield version of expediency — this
is the way insurgencies are confronted,
they all tend to be dirty, there’s
nothing we can do about it because
angels don’t win wars. The problem with
this thinking is not just moral — we
shouldn’t support forces that we fully
know are committing war crimes — it is
also practical. What has turning a blind
eye gotten us since the effort to equip
Iraqi forces got underway in the
aftermath of the toppling of the statue
of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in
2003?
Expediency is not our
friend. It is our enemy.
Email the author:
peter.maass@theintercept.com
© First Look
Media. All Rights Reserved
