A shocking report by The Guardian and BBC Arabic details how the US armed and trained Iraqi death squads that ran torture centers. The report exposes the role the retired U.S. colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played in training Iraqi police commando units, mostly made up of Shia militias, hungry to take revenge on the Sunni supporters of Saddam Hussein. Steele oversaw the commandos, mostly made up of militias. They were torturing detainees for information on the insurgency.
This is one of the great untold stories of the Iraq War, how the US funded a sectarian police commando force that set up a network of torture centers to fight the insurgency. It was a decision that helped fuel a sectarian civil war between Shia and Sunni that has ripped the country apart, claiming 3,000 victims a month.
[http://truth-out.org/news/item/15324-bbc-guardian-expos-uses-wikileaks-to-link-iraq-torture-centers-to-us-col-steele-gen-petraeus]