06/09/09 – Shane Bauer – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, it's good to be back on 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
I urge you to check out the front page of antiwar.com today for all the bad news in the world.
And that's all I've got to say about that because we've got nothing but interviews back to back lined up for the whole show today, beginning with Shane Bauer.
He is a freelance journalist who's got an article in The Nation, which we ran in the viewpoint section on antiwar.com over the weekend.
It's called Iraq's New Death Squad.
He joins us on the phone from Syria right now.
Hi Shane, welcome to the show.
Really appreciate you joining us today.
Yeah, thanks a lot.
Me too.
Okay, so Iraq's New Death Squad is certainly new to me, and yet I guess I'm not quite sure as I read this article how far back this project goes.
The Iraqi Special Operations Forces.
Who are they?
When was this program first instituted, do you know?
Yeah, it started shortly after the invasion of Iraq, actually.
The U.S. Special Forces trained young Iraqis in Jordan, actually.
And basically the goal was to turn them into a force that was the equivalent of the U.S.
Special Forces in equipment and training to do counterterrorism operations in Iraq.
So they've been basically active this whole time, and yet your article is the first time we're really hearing about this group, is that right?
Yeah, that is.
It's a highly secretive force, I mean the U.S. Special Forces themselves are known for being a highly secretive group.
And within Iraq, this group has been operating under U.S. command completely up until 2007, at which point it was actually turned over to the Iraqi government, but it was not turned over to the ministries that typically run armed forces, like the Ministry of Defense or the Ministry of the Interior, it was instead given to the command of the Prime Minister directly.
So at this point it is jointly commanded by the Prime Minister and U.S. advisers.
So that's interesting.
It's not under any of the other departments, it's basically just run out of Prime Minister Maliki's office, in I guess it's his private army that he shares with Odierno?
Yeah, it's something like that, there's an office that oversees it called the Counterterrorism Bureau, but that office is not actually a ministry and it answers directly to the Prime Minister.
Now importantly, you say at the beginning of this article that the U.S. Special Forces, they took all just 18 year olds, basically kids, and they built this thing from the ground up and I guess the point there is that these guys are supposed to have no other loyalty other than to their American Special Forces commanders, is that right?
Exactly, the commanders that I spoke to really stressed that point, both the Iraqi and the American commanders, that most of them started when they were 18, they were not an army in the past, and for them that was illustrating the point that they don't have other loyalties and that they're a brand new force.
I'm talking with Shane Bauer, he's a freelance writer, has an article in The Nation, the June 22nd issue I think it is, it's called Iraq's New Death Squad.
I'm not sure Shane, when you learned about this, did you sit there and spend a few hours thinking back over the history of this war and have you had to revise your view about maybe how some things have gone down so far?
As far as death squads go, on this show we've covered over the years the Wolf Brigades and different factions of the Badr Corps and even the Mahdi Army in service of the government fighting the war against the Sunni insurgency, and yet it seems like I'm going to have to go back and revise my understanding of the years 2003, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and maybe even 9 by plugging in this information to what I thought I already knew.
Yeah, I mean it's definitely not something that's brand new to Iraq, I mean it's certainly a unique force, it's not the same as any of these other groups, but there's definitely been a history in Iraq since the U.S. invasion of government units like police and military becoming death squads, and that's the concern right now with this force.
And right now the issue that's coming to the fore is that as the Iraqi Special Operations Force starts to operate independently of the U.S. that there's been more instances of abuse and that follows a pattern of other U.S.
-trained Special Operations groups in other countries around the world.
Well, you know, I think it was in 2000, it was either late 2004 or early 2005 where they announced in Newsweek the beginning of the El Salvador option, they called it, because apparently it worked really well in El Salvador, they set up the School of the Americas and trained people how to be torturers and so forth, and then they let them loose on the people of that country, and it worked great, right?
And so it's time to redo that here.
Yeah, and there's the commander of the Counterterrorism Transition Team, which is the U.S. body that kind of oversees the ISAF, he used El Salvador as an example of what the U.S. has been able to accomplish with training Special Forces in a very positive light, and also told me that El Salvadoran Special Forces actually came to Iraq and trained Iraqi Special Forces as well.
They actually used some of the old leftover death squads from El Salvador and brought them to Iraq to train these guys?
Yeah, they used the Special Forces that, you know, a lot of the El Salvadoran Special Forces were, you know, big chunks of them became death squads in El Salvador, and some of those Special Forces came and trained in Iraq the same guys that I wrote this article about.
Hmm.
Well, you know, I'm doing a little bit of Iraq War revisionism right now in the back of my head.
I'm thinking about the narrative, you know, not so much the official government narrative where the Civil War all started when some Sunni insurgents bombed the Golden Mosque in Samarra, but my narrative about how the Civil War started in Iraq was basically that the El Salvador option used Shiite militias, like the Bader Brigades and so forth, in order to hunt down and kill the leadership of the Sunni insurgency.
And then, of course, you had the Al-Qaeda and Iraq guys had their own thing going on there, but the back and forth between, because the insurgency basically was a Sunni insurgency but there wasn't really a Civil War going on.
I mean, it was predominantly a Sunni thing, it was run by former Baathists and so forth, but it turned into a Civil War, I thought, because America kept using the Bader Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council to be the death squads, and that that's what really put such a sectarian character to the fight.
And yet, well, I wondered, does the idea that this group of Special Forces guys, separate from the Bader Corps, that they were being used, perhaps even more than the Bader Corps, does that really change that argument at all?
I guess they were still just hunting leaders of the Sunni insurgency.
Yeah, I mean, I think that in some ways this group has a different aim.
I mean, it's not explicitly Sunni or Shiite, but it's clearly a tool, can be used as a tool of the Prime Minister, and there's been many examples of political politicians that are part of the government, not insurgents, that have been arrested by this force.
So it's kind of becoming a way for Maliki to consolidate power against insurgent groups and non-insurgent groups.
Well, and you know, I was meaning to get to some of that, too, it looks like.
I think you say in your article that some of these arrests of the leaders of the so-called Sunni awakening, perhaps, have been done by this group.
Back to the leading up to the Civil War there, when Rumsfeld was saying, alright, let's do these sweeps, let's just get every fighting-aged male in Anbar province and put them in Abu Ghraib or whatever, and let's use the Badr Corps and the Wolf Brigade and so forth to hunt down leaders of the Sunni insurgency, was this group involved in all of that, or do you know?
Well, they have been since the first siege of Fallujah, they've been involved in hunting down insurgent leaders with American special forces.
So that would be April 2004?
Yeah, yeah.
That's basically when they started becoming active.
They were being trained in 2003 and started becoming active around that time, and they operated completely with American special forces.
So they were certainly a part of hunting down the Sunni insurgency and later the Shia groups, like the Mahdi Army, which is a big focus of theirs now.
So let's talk about that.
I guess Maliki kind of depended on Muqtada al-Sadr to get his power in the first place, but he's been trying to consolidate his position more and more so that he doesn't have to rely on the goodwill of Muqtada al-Sadr, and as you just mentioned and as it's in your report, this group, this Iraqi Special Operations Forces group, was used, I guess about a year ago, the big battle between Maliki's forces and the Mahdi Army where they made a deal, the Americans won't go into Sadr City, they sent these guys instead.
Is that right?
Right.
Yeah, after that battle there was an agreement made between the Iraqi government and the Americans that Americans would not enter Sadr City, and from that time abuses from the special forces started emerging.
I wrote about in my article situations where people would describe a force coming in that were dressed in American uniforms, had all-American weapons, but they always kind of described them as acting, not acting like Iraqis, being kind of strange.
And there was situations of killing and abuse just following that battle, and that was when they started kind of going and operating on their own without oversight, and so had a little bit more free reign of how they could operate.
And is that good or bad for the average citizen of Sadr City, that they have more free reign?
Does that mean they're less violent or more?
It definitely seems like more, and people, I mean, in Sadr City the term, I heard the term Dirty Brigade a lot, which is what people called the special forces group.
Even, you know, at Friday prayers people would kind of preach, you'd hear them mentioned, kind of condemning them for attacking civilians.
And a lot of people had this sense there that there's a kind of collective punishment going on where they're punishing everybody for supposedly supporting the Mahdi Army, which is fighting against the government, or has in the past, and the Americans.
Well, you know, I mean, that sounds like basically American-level intelligence that they're operating on, right?
I mean, here's Sadr City, it's this giant Shiite slum, you know, according to Patrick Coburn, it's basically its own separate little city there, and how can anybody that lives between here and there not be somehow collectively guilty for supporting the Mahdi Army that happens to be from their same neighborhood?
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And the point about intelligence seems to be correct.
A lot of, you know, sharing of intelligence, and that's a concern for the future, is how exactly the Americans are going to be involved with the special forces.
The general that I mentioned in my article, Simeon Trumbidis, he, you know, talks about a kind of web of a global community of special forces, I think is how he put it, with the Americans and other groups.
Nice.
And the way a lot of that seems to play out is, you know, sharing, the Americans giving intelligence on a target, and then the special forces going after that target.
So it's not actually American forces going after the target, but Iraqis.
So it kind of keeps everything clean.
Yeah, a little bit of outsourcing there.
That, I think, is my new favorite phrase on Earth.
A global community of special forces, huh?
That's really nice.
It's almost like the global village of raising your child.
Very progressive.
Well, tell me more about this guy, Trumbidis.
What did you say his name was?
Trumbidis.
Simeon Trumbidis.
And he's one of the leaders of the American Special Operations Command.
He is the commander of the Counterterrorism Transition Team, which is the American military body that is responsible for transferring the command of the Iraqi Special Operations Force from the Americans to the Iraqis.
And this has been happening for two years now, this transition has been going on.
So he is essentially the American that oversees the Iraqi Special Forces.
What about General McChrystal?
Does his name come up in any of your investigation?
He was in charge of the American side of this, and they were the bosses, at least for a time, of these guys.
But his name didn't come up, and that kind of brings up another question.
McChrystal is a special forces guy, and I inquired into this, and when you inquire about McChrystal with the Defense Department, you get a lot of responses that the information is classified.
So it's very difficult to know the history of this person, but he works with an elite undercover force.
So he was involved with the American Special Forces in Iraq, certainly, and with the Joint Special Operations Committee, which is generally responsible for training foreign special forces.
So he's definitely a part of the same community.
Well, you know, there was that article, and I think we're finding out more and more about this, but there was certainly that Esquire article from back in 2006 that has a couple of soldiers talking about McChrystal's the guy that keeps the Red Cross out, and I guess now the former interrogator Matthew Alexander has said that, yeah, he was the one responsible anyway, even if he was a couple of layers of command up from where this abuse was going on.
Well, then that goes, I guess, back to the question of how these Iraqi special forces guys treat the people of Iraq.
You talked about collective punishment in Sadr City.
What about torture?
Are these guys in charge of interrogations, or how do they respect human rights when they detain people?
Do you know?
Well, it's not clear what their role is in interrogation.
I've got a lot of responses about that.
Some of them said that they had nothing to do with interrogation, but at the same time Trombitas told me that a couple of them had been let go this past year because of prisoner abuse.
So all of that kind of stuff is very covered up within the special forces community of what role exactly they have.
After someone is captured, between errands and imprisonment, it's pretty unclear.
I definitely heard accounts of situations in people's homes where they were arrested and interrogated in their homes and definitely didn't refrain from use of physical violence or threatening of women and children, even at gunpoint, to get information out of people, including police officers.
I think a couple of Iraqi police officers that had been arrested and interrogated by them.
One of them had their father killed in the raid.
Well, and now, isn't that interesting?
And I guess this has always sort of been the story.
I guess Maliki is trying to consolidate as much power as he can, but there are different factions of power groups that control different ministries and different parts of the army and different parts of the police forces and so forth.
So here you're saying these special forces guys went and arrested a bunch of cops and killed at least one of them.
What happened after that?
Nothing?
Well, no, I mean, eventually they were released and there was, I heard, situations of clashes, actually.
It's a very complicated situation when they come into a neighborhood because you have the Iraqi police and you also have the Iraqi army, which operate separately.
So when they come into a neighborhood, like the situation where they arrested the police from their homes, they took them to the outskirts of the city and kind of lined them up.
And while that was happening, the army is coming in to make a gunfire.
They're responding.
And then they get into a clash with the special forces.
There's a shootout between both of these groups.
It definitely gets, you know, it turns into a big mess of fighting between groups that are all part of the Iraqi armed forces.
Is that the call to prayer going on in the background there?
Yeah, it is.
I'm talking with Shane Bauer.
He's a freelance journalist on the phone from Syria right now.
He's got an article in The Nation magazine called Iraq's New Death Squad.
And now, well, we talked briefly about the arrest of some of these Sunni leaders, the so-called sons of Iraq, the former Sunni insurgency that Petraeus bought off, and how there have been these stories about Maliki sending, you know, I guess pretending, feigning ignorance, but basically his groups going around and arresting the leaders of these awakening councils that he's supposed to be negotiating some sort of, you know, power-sharing agreement with.
And he's supposed to be hiring them into the army.
Right.
And now...
Yeah, there's, well, I was in Baghdad.
I spoke to a lot of these awakening council leaders, and there was definitely a feeling that, you know, there was a lot of dissatisfaction in Baghdad about the government not paying people and that sort of thing.
And there was a kind of sense that the government was backing them into a corner.
And, you know, there was some people I talked to who threatened that if nothing changed that they would fight, and that actually did happen in a couple of, or at least one situation a couple of months ago.
Well, and it seems like if we're only just learning that this Iraqi Special Operations Force exists now, that that means there's been no accountability for any killings, any abuse, any, you know, arresting people they shouldn't be arresting or picking fights they shouldn't be picking.
There's no, there, how could there possibly have been any accountability when we haven't even known, when nobody's really even known about this group this whole time except, I guess, the people in Sadr City and Fallujah?
Right.
Yeah, and that's really the big issue is that regular Iraqis talk to me about, and Iraqi parliamentarians talk to me about is that, you know, there's really, this group is accountable only to Maliki, and Maliki himself has kind of denied knowledge of a lot of their more controversial actions.
So, you know, the question is who ultimately these people answer to.
Parliament has no, nothing to do with them.
They have no say in how they operate.
They're kind of, you know, they're really independent, and in kind of a way that some special forces advisors that I talked to said is really unique, and they're more independent than other forces the U.S. has trained in the past and set up.
Well, now, on the question of the global community of special forces, your article ends with you being told by this general that, well, quote, we are going to have a working relationship with them for a while.
What does that mean, you think?
I think, I mean, from the way that he was talking when I was asking about the future of this force, I think there's going to be a relationship between the U.S. and U.S. special forces and Iraq's special forces in the foreseeable future probably for a long time.
I mean, if we look at El Salvador, Korea, Colombia, all these situations where the U.S. set up special forces groups, there's still a very strong relationship until now, but now we're talking about Iraq.
It's a country that the U.S. has gone to war with that it has a lot of interest in.
I think that there's going to be a direct relationship for a long time, and that's the way that Trumby just talked about it.
Well, you know, it kind of makes me wonder whether, you know, the whole thing about we promise to get all our forces out by 2012 and all that is even, I mean, assuming that they mean that at all, I wonder if that's contingent on the idea that leaving this special forces group in charge would be good enough, right?
I mean, we don't have, I don't know, there may be American advisors in El Salvador, I don't know, but certainly our army doesn't occupy El Salvador, but apparently, you know, our special forces guys, that, pardon me, the goons that our CIA put in power there, basically, and our military put in power there are still in power there.
Is that it?
Right.
Yeah, that was a concern of some parliamentarians that I talked to, is that you now have a force that has the same capabilities as American special forces, is actually in number about the same size as the American army special forces, have the same equipment, and have a very, very strong relationship with the most secretive of American forces.
The concern with them was that they're going to be kind of a replacement force that won't actually be American, you know, a force that is almost equivalent and has a strong relationship with the Americans.
What about the refugees in Syria?
You're on the phone from Syria right now, and, you know, from here in California and before that in Texas, the reports were that there were roughly two and a half million refugees from Iraq that had fled to Jordan and to Syria.
Can you tell us at all about the situation of the refugees there?
Yeah, there are right now official figures say about one million refugees, probably more like, you know, seven, eight hundred thousand refugees here.
Some have started to go back, but a lot believe that it's not safe enough to go back.
What percent have gone back?
I'm sorry for interrupting.
I should never interrupt when I'm interviewing someone across the world because of time lag.
But what percentage do you think have returned to Iraq?
It's hard to say.
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, I guess at this point, a wild guess would be 10 to 20 percent.
It's very difficult to know because a lot of people go back to kind of test the waters, you know, they'll go and come back.
There's people that go to Iraq, like kind of husbands, like heads of household, will go back to work because they are not allowed to work in Syria, you know, and come back and forth.
And I know that four or five months ago, there was roughly the same amount of people coming and going from Iraq.
I think now there's actually more people going into Iraq.
Refugees still come, but I think the number going back is larger.
But there's a huge, you know, hundreds of thousands of people here that feel they cannot go back and are trying to find somewhere else, a new place to live, you know, spreading across the world, which in itself is very difficult.
It's a very difficult process to be resettled in another country.
And then you have the problem of what happens after they get there.
There's a lot of problems arising with refugees moving to the U.S. that don't speak English or can't find work and some actually end up moving back to Iraq from the U.S.
Yeah, I've actually read a couple of reports like that where they'd rather live in Iraq than here.
That's a bummer.
What does that say?
A lot of things, I think.
I really appreciate your time on the show today, Shane.
All right, thanks a lot.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Everybody, that's Shane Bauer.
He's a freelance reporter in Syria right now and has this great article in The Nation.
That's thenation.com, of course.
Iraq's New Death Squad.
And, in fact, you go to the front page of antiwar.com and click on More Viewpoints there.
You'll certainly be able to find it there.
This is Antiwar Radio.