torture times. standard american policy and practice

The American torturers in Iraq were not just the 'few bad apples' the American authorities have insisted they were. The few that were punished were just sacrificial lambs to protect the higher ups who actually set and  OK ed the implementation of the Torture Policies that are a part and parcel of American counter insurgency practices around the world..

WikiLeaks continues to  lay bare the  hidden war crimes of those who would make examples of  the likes of  poor Nepali colonels.

Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres

Exclusive: General David Petraeus and 'dirty wars' veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse 

See the full-length documentary film of the 15-month investigation

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• Mona Mahmood, Maggie O'Kane, Chavala Madlena and Teresa Smith
• The Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 2013 20.04 GMT
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Link to video: US special forces veteran links General Petraeus to torture in Iraq

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.

A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding.

Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIAafter a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

The Guardian/BBC Arabic investigation was sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention centres run by the police commandos across Iraq. Private Bradley Manning, 25, is facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years after he pleaded guilty to leaking the documents.

The pattern in Iraq provides an eerie parallel to the well-documented human rights abuses committed by US-advised and funded paramilitary squads in Central America in the 1980s. Steele was head of a US team of special military advisers that trained units of El Salvador's security forces in counterinsurgency. Petraeus visited El Salvador in 1986 while Steele was there and became a major advocate of counterinsurgency methods.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link