title: US-UK DIRTY WAR: ‘Latin American-style’ Death Squads in Iraq Revealed Through Chilcot
text:  Patrick Henningsen 21st Century WireThis week another toxic revelation dripped from the Chilcot Report.According to top British SAS officers, US commander Stanley McChrystal s counter-insurgency  black-ops  featured a program of relentless violence designed to  speed up  the process of political cleansing and the so-called  reconstruction  of Iraq.What is so interesting here, is the Chilcot s choice of language, including the term  Latin American-style death squads , which by default implies the United States government was party to war crimes in Central America during the 1980 s   a claim which has always been strenuously denied in public, even though the general public and academia recognizes this to be a self-evident fact of America s long-running ugly history of intervention in that region.The Independent report reveals the level of sheer depravity by US command: The mission was an extraordinary set-up: inside the command centre    The Machine    was the  Death Star , on the walls of which were banks of television screens,  Kill TV , running live pictures of action taking place and surveillance footage in real time from which suspects could be picked out for future arrest or elimination. The Independent also detailed how reckless and violent practices by the US military caused noticeable divisions and splits between joint US-UK command structures and operations, including political tension between British military command.Through the newly created  Office of Special Plans , neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith rolled out their own sub-layer to the US controlled shadow government in Iraq, including the establishment of the  Iraqi De Baathification Council  which, under the supervision of then US Viceroy Paul Bremer, began dismantling the Iraqi military, security and intelligence agency infrastructures of President Saddam Hussein. And so began the process of the Pentagon s  de-Baathification  process in Iraq, immediately followed by a hive of violent  Gangs and Counter-gangs  created by the US and UK covert military and intelligence apparatuses. Front and center in this effort were US operatives John Negroponte and his understudy at the time, Robert Ford, who was later dispatched as US Ambassador to Syria in the run-up to the Syrian Conflict which began in 2011.The legacy of this destructive policy still lingers in Iraq and now in Syria. This unquestionably spawned ISIS and many other terrorist factions in both Iraq and Syria. Only last week, Iraq saw its most deadly car bomb ever, a questionable  sectarian attack  (a narrative not challenged by the western and international press) which killed 200 innocent civilians, and injured many more. GLADIO REDUX: A map of every car bomb in Baghdad since the US-UK invasion in 2003 (Source: Twitter)Prof Michel Chossudovsky explains this same highly disturbing pattern that generally follows every US intervention overseas, be it overt or covert: The recruitment of death squads is part of a well established US military-intelligence agenda. There is a long and gruesome US history of covert funding and support of  terror brigades and targeted assassinations going back to the Vietnam war.   As government forces continue to confront the self-proclaimed  Free Syrian Army  (FSA),  the historical roots of  the West s covert war on Syria  which has resulted in countless atrocities  must be fully revealed.  Once again, we can see the revelation of the US-UK method of not simply instigating wars, but facilitating dirty wars not only overseas, but also at home, as in the case of Operation GLADIO and numerous other false flag events admittedly staged in North America.As 21WIRE will demonstrate in subsequent reports, this latest Chilcot revelation is only the tip of a much larger, covert iceberg RTHowever, kill or capture operations in and around Baghdad, launched from the Balad base 50 miles (80km) north of the city, were a key if little known chapter in Britain s shadow war, the Independent reports.Despite killing or taking as prisoner up to 3,500 insurgents, the mission against the Sunni insurgency caused deep rifts to the point where a senior commander, himself ex-SAS, demanded to know why the UK Special Forces were  helping to run Latin American-style death squads? The mission, under now-famed US General Stanley McChrystal, involved a shift from searching for apparently non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to man-hunting.Antagonism over the tactics led to UK troops being banned from some operations and a UK SAS commander lodging a complaint with US authorities for talking about British involvement in operations. Another SAS colonel was also ostracized from his regiment after serving under McCrystal.Chilcot does sketch out some of the details of the growing rift, though his report appears to leave out direct references to Special Forces operations. US and UK strategies had, in effect, been on different courses since the UK decision to focus its attention on MND (SE) [Multi-National Division South East, the British run zone] in 2003.As result of this decision, the UK had acquired distinctly different priorities from the US,  the 2.6-million-word report argues.It says the UK was then only  marginally involved in the central tasks of stabilizing the Iraqi government in Baghdad and managing sectarian divisions, while it had come to see its main task in Basra as one of keeping the situation calm while building the case for withdrawal. From that point on, it appears, the US became increasingly concerned that a wavering UK was chiefly focused on getting out of the unpopular war in the best order it could and as soon as possible.In 2006, a former SAS soldier blew the whistle on some of the tactics used in and around Baghdad. Ben Griffin was later gagged by the UK courts for talking about his experiences, but before he was silenced told the Telegraph,  The Americans had this catch-all approach to lifting suspects. The tactics were draconian and completely ineffective. The Americans were doing things like chucking farmers into Abu Ghraib [the notorious prison in Baghdad where US troops abused and tortured Iraqi detainees] or handing them over to the Iraqi authorities, knowing full well they were going to be tortured,  he said at the time.It may be of note that the SAS commander s reference to  Latin American-style deaths squads  appears to ignore the fact that at time of the Iraq war, in July 2003, the UK was itself stepping up training of Colombian paramilitary forces.Commenting on the revelations at the time, human rights NGO Amnesty International warned  the Colombian government has not implemented the UN human rights recommendations and military assistance only gives a green light to the army to carry on as before.  Support our work by Subscribing and becoming a Member @21WIRE.TV