This week marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lumumba’s pan-Africanism and his vision of a united Congo gained him many enemies. Both Belgium and the United States actively sought to have him killed. The CIA ordered his assassination but could not complete the job. Instead, the United States and Belgium covertly funneled cash and aid to rival politicians who seized power and arrested Lumumba. On January 17, 1961, after being beaten and tortured, Lumumba was shot and killed. [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZALEZ: This week marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. He was the first democratically elected leader of what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Congo had been a colony of Belgium since the late 1800s, which ruled over it with brutality while plundering its rich natural resources. Patrice Lumumba rose as a leader of the Congo’s independence movement and, in 1960, was elected as the first prime minister of the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Lumumba’s pan-Africanism and his vision of a united Congo gained him many enemies. Both Belgium and the United States actively sought to have Lumumba overthrown or killed. The CIA ordered his assassination but could not complete the job. Instead, the United States and Belgium covertly funneled cash and aid to rival politicians who seized power and arrested President Lumumba. This is how it was reported in a Universal Studios newsreel in December of 1960.

UNIVERSAL STUDIOS NEWSREEL: A new chapter begins in the dark and tragic history of the Congo with the return to Leopoldville of deposed premier Lumumba, following his capture by crack commandos of strongman Colonel Mobutu. Taken to Mobutu’s headquarters past a jeering, threatening crowd, Lumumba — Lumumba, but promised the pro-red Lumumba a fair trial on charges of inciting the army to rebellion. Lumumba was removed to an army prison outside the capital, as his supporters in Stanleyville seized control of Orientale province and threatened a return of disorder. Before that, Lumumba suffered more indignities, including being forced to eat a speech, which he restated his claim to be the Congo’s rightful premier. Even in bonds, Lumumba remains a dangerous prisoner, storm center of savage loyalties and equally savage opposition.

AMY GOODMAN: On January 17th, 1961, after being beaten and tortured, the Congolese prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was shot and killed.

For more, we go to Adam Hochschild. He’s the author of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa and the forthcoming book To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion. He teaches at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, is co-founder of Mother Jones magazine, had an op-ed in the New York Times this week called “An Assassination’s Long Shadow.” Adam Hochschild is joining us from San Francisco.

Explain this “long shadow,” Adam.

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Well, Amy, I think the assassination of Lumumba was something that was felt by many people to be a sort of pivotal turning point in the saga of Africa gaining its independence. In the 1950s, there were movements for independence all over Africa. There was a great deal of idealism in the air. There was a great deal of hope in the air, both among Africans and among their supporters in the United States and Europe, that at last these colonies would become independent. And I think people imagined real independence — that is, that these countries would be able to set off on their own and control their own destiny economically as well as politically. And the assassination of Lumumba really signaled that that was not to be, because, for Belgium, as for the other major European colonial powers, like Britain and France, giving independence to an African colony was OK for them as long as it didn’t disturb existing business arrangements. As long as the European country could continue to own the mines, the factories, the plantations, well, OK, let them have their politics.

But Lumumba spoke very loudly, very dramatically, saying Africa needs to be economically independent, as well. And it was a fiery speech on this subject that he gave at the actual independence ceremonies, June 30th, 1960, where he was replying to an extremely arrogant speech by King Baudouin of Belgium. It was a speech he gave on this subject that I think really began the process that ended two months later with the CIA, with White House approval, decreeing that he should be assassinated.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, for most Americans, who — we’re not, perhaps, as familiar with African colonialism, since that was basically a European project throughout the 19th century — the role of Belgium and the importance of the Congo as really the jewel of Africa in terms of its wealth and resources — how did the Congo suffer before Lumumba came to power?

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Well, the story really begins, in the modern era, in 1885, when — or 1884 to ’85, when all the major countries of Europe led — preceded by the United States, actually; we were the very first — recognized the Congo not as a Belgian colony, but as the private, personally owned colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, a very greedy, ambitious man who wanted a colony of his own. At that point, Belgium was not sure that it wanted a colony. Leopold ruled this place for 23 years, made an enormous fortune, estimated at over a billion in today’s American dollars. Finally, in 1908, he was forced to give it up to become a Belgian colony, and then he died the following year. And the Belgians ran it for the next half-century, extracting an enormous amount of wealth, initially in ivory and rubber, then in diamonds, gold, copper, timber, palm oil, all sorts of other minerals. And as with almost all European colonies in Africa, this wealth flowed back to Europe. It benefited the Europeans much more than the Africans.

And the hope that many people had when independence came all over Africa, for the most part, you know, within a few years on either side of 1960, people had the hope that at last African countries would begin to control their own destiny and that they would be the ones who would reap the profits from the mines and the plantations and so on. Lumumba put that hope into words. And for that reason, he was immediately considered a very dangerous figure by the United States and Belgium. The CIA issued this assassination order with White House approval. And as was said at the beginning, they couldn’t get close enough to him to actually poison him, but they got money under the table to Congolese politicians who did see that he was assassinated, with Belgian help. It was a Belgian pilot who flew the plane to where he was killed, a Belgian officer who commanded the firing squad.

And then, the really disastrous thing that followed was this enthusiastic United States backing for the dictatorial regime of Mobutu, who seized total power a couple years later and ran a 32-year dictatorship, enriched himself by about $4 billion, and really ran his country into the ground, was greeted by every American president, with the sole exception of Jimmy Carter, who was in office during those 32 years. And he left the country a wreck, from which it has still not recovered.

AMY GOODMAN: Adam Hochschild, I want to play a clip of the former CIA agent John Stockwell talking about the CIA’s plans to assassinate the prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba.

JOHN STOCKWELL: The CIA had developed a program to assassinate Lumumba, under Devlin’s encouragement and management. The program they developed, the operation, didn’t work. They didn’t follow through on it. It was to give poison to Lumumba. And they couldn’t find a setting in which to get the poison to him successfully in a way that it wouldn’t appear to be a CIA operation. I mean, you couldn’t invite him to a cocktail party and give him a drink and have him die a short time later, obviously. And so, they gave up on it. They got cold feet. And instead, they handled it by the chief of station talking to Mobutu about the threat that Lumumba posed, and Mobutu going out and killing Lumumba, having his men kill Lumumba.

INTERVIEWER: What about the CIA’s relationship with Mobutu? Were they paying him money?

JOHN STOCKWELL: Yes, indeed. I was there in 1968 when the chief of station told the story about having been, the day before that day, having gone to make payment to Mobutu of cash — $25,000 — and Mobutu saying, “Keep the money. I don’t need it.” And by then, of course, Mobutu’s European bank account was so huge that $25,000 was nothing to him.

AMY GOODMAN: That was former CIA agent John Stockwell talking about the CIA’s plans to assassinate Lumumba. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Adam, I’d like to ask you — you were in the Congo shortly after Lumumba’s death. Could you talk about — we have about a minute — could you talk about your personal experiences there and what you saw?

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Yes, I was there. I was just a college student at the time. And I wish I could say that I was smart and politically knowledgeable enough to realize the full significance of everything I was seeing. I was not, and it was really only in later years that I began to understand it. But what I do remember — and this was, as I say, six months or so after he was killed — was the sort of ominous atmosphere in Leopoldville, as the capital was called then, these jeeps full of soldiers who were patrolling the streets, the way the streets quickly emptied at dusk, and then two very, very arrogant guys at the American embassy who were proudly talking over drinks one evening about how this person, Lumumba, had been killed, whom they regarded, you know, not as a democratically elected African leader, but as an enemy of the United States. And so, of course, I, as a fellow American, they expected to be happy that he had been done away with. There was something quite chilling about that, and it stuck with me. But I think it’s only in much later years that I fully realized the significance.

AMY GOODMAN: Adam Hochschild, I want to thank you very much for being with us, author of several books, including King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Find this story at 21 January 2013

It’s pretty obvious why British governments have been anxious to keep the history of their secret service secret for so long. In the case of decolonisation, which is the subject of Calder Walton’s book, revelations about dirty tricks even after fifty years might do irreparable damage to the myth carefully cultivated at the time: which was that for Britain, unlike France, say, or the Netherlands, or Belgium, the process was smooth and friendly. Britain, so the story went, was freely granting self-government to its colonies as the culmination of imperial rule, which had always had this as its ultimate aim – ‘Empire into Commonwealth’, as the history books used to put it. If for no other reason, the myth was needed in order to make ordinary Britons feel better.

Letters

Vol. 35 No. 7 · 11 April 2013

From David Lea

Referring to the controversy surrounding the death of Patrice Lumumba in1960, Bernard Porter quotes Calder Walton’s conclusion: ‘The question remains whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba … ever amounted to anything. At present, we do not know’ (LRB, 21 March). Actually, in this particular case, I can report that we do. It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park – we were colleagues from opposite sides of the Lords – a few months before she died in March 2010. She had been consul and first secretary in Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, from 1959 to 1961, which in practice (this was subsequently acknowledged) meant head of MI6 there. I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder, and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it. ‘We did,’ she replied, ‘I organised it.’

We went on to discuss her contention that Lumumba would have handed over the whole lot to the Russians: the high-value Katangese uranium deposits as well as the diamonds and other important minerals largely located in the secessionist eastern state of Katanga. Against that, I put the point that I didn’t see how suspicion of Western involvement and of our motivation for Balkanising their country would be a happy augury for the new republic’s peaceful development.

David Lea
London SW1

Bernard Porter
Harper, 411 pp, £25.00, February, ISBN 978 0 00 745796 0
[*] Cambridge, 449 pp., £25, December 2012, 978 1 107 00099 5.

Find this story at 21 March 2013

Beate Zschäpe fand im Urlaub schnell Freunde, verabredete sich zum Sport und erzählte von ihren Katzen. Da lebte sie schon im Untergrund. Jetzt steht sie wegen der zehn Morde des NSU vor Gericht. Ein Blick in das Leben einer mutmaßlichen Neonazi-Terroristin.

Beate Zschäpe schweigt – und alle fragen sich: Wie ist aus der “Diddlemaus” eine gefährliche Neonazi-Terroristin geworden? – Foto: dpa

Die Zeugin, die das Bundeskriminalamt im Juli 2012 befragt, verschweigt offenbar nichts. Obwohl Sabine Schneider (Name geändert) der frühere Kontakt zur rechten Szene peinlich zu sein scheint. „Politik ist überhaupt nicht mein Ding“, gibt Schneider den BKA-Beamten zu Protokoll, „ich war halt bei diesen Runden damals dabei, das war lustig und da wurde getrunken.“ Rechtsradikales Gedankengut „habe ich persönlich überhaupt nicht“.

Die Frau Anfang 40 aus Ludwigsburg (Baden-Württemberg) wirkt wie die Mitläuferin einer rechten Clique, die sich mit Kumpels aus Thüringen und Sachsen traf.

Mal dort, mal in Ludwigsburg. Schneider fand die Ostler sympathisch, vor allem eine Frau aus Thüringen. Die war fröhlich und die Einzige, die sich nicht szenetypisch kleidete. Die Frau hieß Beate Zschäpe. In ihr hat sich Schneider, so sieht sie es heute, furchtbar getäuscht.

Schneider erlebte „die Beate“ als „liebevolle, nette, höfliche Dame“. Auch ihre Mutter sei von Zschäpe begeistert gewesen, sagt Schneider. „Beate hatte ja Gärtnerin gelernt und gab meiner Mutter Tipps.“ Von 1994 bis 2001 hielt der Kontakt, Zschäpe kam meist mit Uwe Mundlos nach Ludwigsburg, selten nur war Uwe Böhnhardt dabei. Offenbar ahnungslos lachte und trank Sabine Schneider mit rechten Mördern. Sie hat sich „auch mit dem Uwe Mundlos bestens verstanden“. Bis zum Sommer 2001 hatten sie, die beiden Killer der Terrorzelle „Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund“, bereits vier Türken erschossen und einen Sprengstoffanschlag verübt, vier Geldinstitute und einen Supermarkt überfallen.

Ahnungslos war auch der Staat. Er wusste nichts vom NSU, trotz aufwendiger Ermittlungen nach jedem Verbrechen, das die Terroristen begangen hatten. Es erscheint unglaublich, auch heute noch, fast anderthalb Jahre nach dem dramatischen Ende der Terrorgruppe. Mundlos und Böhnhardt sind tot, vom Trio, das 1998 untertauchte, ist nur Beate Zschäpe übrig. Sie wird in der kommenden Woche ein gewaltiges Medieninteresse auf sich ziehen, über Deutschland hinaus.

Am 17. April beginnt am Oberlandesgericht München der Prozess gegen die 38 Jahre alte Frau und vier Mitangeklagte – den Ex-NPD-Funktionär Ralf Wohlleben sowie André E., Holger G. und Carsten S. Die vier Männer sollen dem Trio geholfen haben, es geht da um Waffen, falsche Ausweise, unter Tarnnamen gemietete Wohnmobile. Der 6. Strafsenat wird über eine unfassbare Serie von Verbrechen zu urteilen haben, mit fassbaren Kategorien wie Täterschaft, Schuld, Unschuld, Strafmaß. Eine gigantische Aufgabe.

In einigen Medien ist schon vom „Jahrhundertprozess“ die Rede. Der Superlativ erscheint sogar plausibel. Das NSU-Verfahren ist, sieht man von den Prozessen zum Staatsterrorismus der Nazis ab, das größte zu rechtsextremem Terror seit Gründung der Bundesrepublik. Der Präsident des Gerichts, Karl Huber, erwartet eine Dauer von mehr als zwei Jahren. Die juristische, aber auch die politische Dimension des Prozesses erinnert an die so spektakulären wie schwierigen Verfahren gegen Mitglieder der Roten Armee Fraktion. Und der Blick auf den Komplex RAF, auf die hier immer noch schmerzlich offenen Fragen zu Morden, Motiven und Hintergründen, verstärkt die Ahnung, auch im NSU-Verfahren werde vieles unbegreiflich bleiben. Vielleicht auch die Person Beate Zschäpe.
Beate Zschäpe schweigt. Die Akten erzählen aus ihrem Leben.

Die Angeklagte schweigt – voraussichtlich auch im Prozess, zumindest am Anfang. Dass Zschäpe nicht redet, ist ihr gutes Recht. Auch Zschäpes Mutter und Großmutter sprechen nicht mit den Medien. Dennoch kommt man ihr näher bei der Lektüre von Ermittlungsakten des BKA und anderen Unterlagen. Zschäpe erscheint da zunächst wie eine Durchschnittsfigur, die sich radikalisiert hat, die an den beiden Uwes hing und plötzlich mit ihnen verschwand. Keine Ulrike Meinhof, die den Kampf für die RAF intellektuell zu begründen suchte, keine Fanatikerin mit einem bizarren Charisma wie Gudrun Ensslin. Nur ein unbedeutende Thüringer Rechtsextremistin. Die dann, so sieht es die Bundesanwaltschaft, eine ungeheure kriminelle Energie entwickelte. In der knapp 500-seitigen Anklage werden aufgelistet: Beteiligung an den zehn Morden des NSU, an mehreren Mordversuchen, an 15 Raubüberfällen, dazu Mitgliedschaft in einer terroristischen Vereinigung und besonders schwere Brandstiftung. Zschäpes Anwälte halten die Vorwürfe für weit übertrieben. Doch aus Sicht der Ermittler wurde die junge, unauffällige Frau aus Jena, in der rechten Szene als „Diddlmaus“ verniedlicht, die gefährlichste Neonazi-Terroristin in der deutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte.

Die Biografie bis zum Gang in den Untergrund zeugt, wie bei vielen Rechtsextremisten üblich, von einer schwierigen Kindheit. Geboren am 2. Januar 1975 in Jena, wächst Zschäpe bei ihrer Mutter Annerose Apel und ihrer Großmutter auf. Annerose Apel hatte den rumänischen Vater beim Zahnmedizinstudium in Rumänien kennengelernt. Als die Mutter 1975 heiratet, einen Deutschen, nimmt sie dessen Nachnamen an. 1977 lässt sie sich scheiden, ein Jahr später heiratet sie Günter Zschäpe und zieht zu ihm in eine andere Stadt in Thüringen. Tochter Beate bleibt bei der Großmutter. Als wenig später auch die zweite Ehe scheitert, zieht Annerose Zschäpe zurück nach Jena und nimmt Beate wieder zu sich. Doch Mutter und Tochter verstehen sich nicht, es gibt häufig Streit. Familiäre Wärme erlebt Beate offenbar nur bei der Großmutter.

Bei der Festnahme im November 2011 sagt Beate Zschäpe einem Polizisten, sie sei als „Omakind“ aufgewachsen. 1981 wird sie in Jena an der Polytechnischen Oberschule „Otto Grotewohl“ eingeschult, 1992 macht sie an der Oberschule „Johann Wolfgang von Goethe“ den Abschluss nach der 10. Klasse. Der Wunsch, sich zur Kindergärtnerin ausbilden zu lassen, geht nicht in Erfüllung. Zschäpe macht eine Lehre als Gärtnerin für Gemüseanbau, die Abschlussprüfung besteht sie 1995 mit „befriedigend“. Übernommen wird Zschäpe nicht. Sie ist länger arbeitslos, ein Jahr lang hat sie eine ABM-Stelle als Malergehilfin, dann wieder nichts.

Es sind die Jahre, in denen Beate Zschäpe in den Rechtsextremismus abdriftet. 1993 beginnt sie eine Beziehung mit dem Professorensohn Mundlos, der auch in einer rechten Clique abhängt. Das ist die Keimzelle der „Kameradschaft Jena“, einem kleinen, verschworenen Neonazi-Trupp, der sich später dem Netzwerk „Thüringer Heimatschutz“ anschließt. 1995 fällt Zschäpe erstmals dem Verfassungsschutz auf, als sie an einem größeren rechtsextremen Treffen teilnimmt – zusammen mit Mundlos und Böhnhardt. Im selben Jahr werden Zschäpe und Böhnhardt ein Paar. 1996 zieht sie bei Böhnhardts Familie ein. Doch der enge Kontakt zu Mundlos bleibt erhalten. Das Trio wird zunehmend fanatisch und für Zschäpe eine Art Ersatzfamilie.

In den kommenden Jahren fallen sie Polizei und Verfassungsschutz immer wieder auf. Es sind die für die Szene typischen Provokationen, zum Beispiel ein Auftritt von Mundlos und Böhnhardt in SA-ähnlicher Kluft in der KZ-Gedenkstätte Buchenwald. Aber bald schon reicht das nicht, die Aktionen werden härter. An einer Autobahnbrücke nahe Jena hängt das Trio einen Puppentorso auf, der einen Juden darstellen soll und mit einer Bombenattrappe verbunden ist. Der Drang zur Militanz wird stärker. Mundlos, Böhnhardt und Zschäpe planen den bewaffneten Kampf.

Als Polizisten am 26. Januar 1998, auf einen Tipp des Verfassungsschutzes hin, eine von Zschäpe gemietete Garage in Jena durchsuchen, finden sie eine Sprengstoffwerkstatt. Da liegen eine fertige und vier halb gebastelte Rohrbomben, ein Sprengsatz in einer Blechdose, eine Zündvorrichtung mit einem Wecker, 60 Superböller, Schwarzpulver und ein TNT-Gemisch. Die Beamten entdecken eine Diskette, darauf ein Gedicht mit dem Titel „Ali-Drecksau, wir hassen Dich“. Durchsucht wird auch Zschäpes Wohnung, in die sie 1997 gezogen ist. Die Polizisten stellen mehrere Waffen sicher und ein Exemplar des Brettspiels „Pogromly“, eine obszöne, Auschwitz glorifizierende Version von Monopoly.
Bei ihrem letzten Anruf sagte sie: Es ist was passiert in Eisenach.

Für die Beamten ist die Aktion trotz der Funde ein Fehlschlag, das Trio taucht ab. Es wird fast 14 Jahre dauern, bis die Polizei Mundlos, Böhnhardt und Zschäpe wieder entdeckt. Die beiden Uwes am 4. November 2011 als Leichen in einem brennenden Wohnmobil in Eisenach, Beate Zschäpe vier Tage später an der Pforte einer Polizeistation in Jena. Die Frau stellt sich.

Die 14 Jahre Untergrund bleiben bis heute zumindest in Teilen eine Black Box. Die Ermittler haben nur wenige Erkenntnisse darüber, was Zschäpe in all den Jahren gemacht hat, warum sie bei den Uwes blieb, was sie von deren Mord- und Raubtouren wusste. Bei Mutter und Großmutter hat sie sich offenbar nie gemeldet. Nachbarinnen aus Zwickau, wo sich das Trio von 2000 an in drei Wohnungen versteckte, und Urlaubsbekanntschaften, die das Trio bei Urlauben auf der Insel Fehmarn erlebten, schildern so ungläubig wie Sabine Schneider eine freundliche, lustige, warmherzige Frau. Die sich allerdings in dieser Zeit nicht Beate Zschäpe nennt, sondern „Lisa Dienelt“ oder „Susann Dienelt“ oder einfach „Liese“. „Ich habe mit Liese häufig morgens Sport gemacht“, erzählt später eine Zeugin der Polizei, die Zschäpe 2001 auf Fehmarn kennengelernt hatte. „Und mittags haben wir uns gesonnt“. Die Liese habe ihr auch erzählt, „dass sie zwei Katzen hat, die zu Hause von einer Freundin versorgt werden“. Das mit den beiden Katzen stimmt sogar. „Heidi“ und „Lilly“ geht es gut in der Wohnung in der Zwickauer Frühlingsstraße, wo sie auch einen kleinen Kratzbaum haben.

Wie die Wohnung des Trios sonst noch aussah, ist für die Bundesanwaltschaft ein Beweis dafür, dass Zschäpe in die Taten von Mundlos und Böhnhardt eingeweiht war. Fünf Kameras überwachten die Umgebung der Wohnungstür. Eine weitere Tür war massiv gesichert und mit einem Schallschutz versehen, der Eingang zum Kellerraum mit einem Alarmsystem ausgestattet. Nachdem Zschäpe am 4. November 2011 die Wohnung angezündet hatte und dabei das halbe Haus in die Luft flog, fand die Polizei im Brandschutt zwölf Schusswaffen, darunter die Ceska Typ 83. Mit ihr erschossen Mundlos und Böhnhardt die neun Migranten türkischer und griechischer Herkunft.

Aus Sicht der Bundesanwaltschaft gibt es noch mehr Belege für die Beteiligung Zschäpes an allen Verbrechen. Sie habe 2001 gemeinsam mit Mundlos und Böhnhardt vom Mitangeklagten Holger G. die Ceska entgegengenommen, sagen Ermittler. Sie habe zudem mit erfundenen Geschichten gegenüber Nachbarn die häufige Abwesenheit der beiden Uwes „abgetarnt“. Und sie habe die Beute der Raubzüge verwaltet und nach der Brandstiftung in Zwickau 15 Briefe mit der Paulchen-Panther-DVD verschickt, auf der sich der NSU zu den Morden und Anschlägen bekennt.

Die Ermittler betonen auch, eine Zeugin erinnere sich daran, Zschäpe am 9. Juni 2005 in Nürnberg gesehen zu haben. Sie soll in einem Supermarkt gestanden haben, kurz bevor Mundlos und Böhnhardt im benachbarten Imbiss den Türken Ismail Yasar erschossen. Zschäpes Anwälte halten gerade diese Aussage für unglaubhaft. Die Zeugin habe erst, nachdem Zschäpes Bild über die Medien bekannt geworden war, behauptet, sie damals gesehen zu haben. Für die Verteidiger gibt es keinen tragfähigen Beweis, dass Zschäpe an den Morden beteiligt war.

…

08.04.2013 12:51 Uhr
von Frank Jansen

Find this story at 8 April 2013

Copyright © Der Tagesspiegel

BERLIN — A neo-Nazi group suspected of committing a string of murders and bank robberies across Germany likely had more assistance than currently known, a German lawmaker with access to still-classified material on the case said Wednesday.

Sebastian Edathy, who heads a parliamentary inquiry into why security services failed to stop the group for more than a decade, said the self-styled National Socialist Underground couldn’t have carried out two bombings, 10 murders and more than a dozen bank heists without a support network.

The crimes took place between 1998 and 2011, when two of the three core members of the group died in an apparent murder-suicide. The surviving core member, Beate Zschaepe, and four alleged accomplices go on trial April 17.

“If you live underground for 13 years in a country like Germany, if you depend on logistical help to carry out crimes, then you will probably have had to draw on a network of supporters,” Edathy told reporters in Berlin.

Germany’s chief federal prosecutor Harald Range said last month that authorities believe the three were an “isolated group” without a nationwide network of helpers.

But many in Germany and abroad – eight of the victims were of Turkish origin and one was Greek – have questioned how the group could have committed so many murders across Germany, as well as the bank robberies and bomb attacks, without further help.

There also are concerns that police may have missed earlier opportunities to nab the trio, who in years past had been sought for lesser infractions.

In one instance, security services in the eastern state of Brandenburg failed to act on an informant’s tip about the trio’s whereabouts shortly after they went on the lam in 1998, Edathy said. The informant’s handlers were afraid that passing the information to officers searching for the group might compromise their agent, he said.

…

FRANK JORDANS | April 3, 2013 02:04 PM EST |

Find this story at 3 April 2013

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

Die Liste der V-Leute und Helfer rund um die Terrorzelle NSU beläuft sich derzeit auf über 100 Beteiligte. Für den Kopf des Untersuchungsausschusses Edathy war das noch nicht das Ende.

Ausschussvorsitzender Edathy geht davon aus, dass das NSU-Netzwerk größer ist als bislang bekannt
© Rainer Jensen/DPA

Der Vorsitzende des NSU-Untersuchungsausschusses im Bundestag, Sebastian Edathy (SPD), hat Zweifel daran geäußert, dass die bislang vorliegenden Listen der V-Leute im Umfeld der rechtsextremen Terrororganisation vollständig sind. “Ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob die jüngste Liste mit Namen von Helfern, Helfershelfern und Kontaktpersonen im Zusammenhang mit dem NSU, die wir vom Bundeskriminalamt bekommen haben, nicht schon überholt ist und es noch mehr Namen gibt”, sagte Edathy der “Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung”. Er wolle “bis nach der Osterpause” wissen, welches der aktuelle Stand sei.

Der Ausschussvorsitzende erwartet nach eigenen Angaben noch weitere Erkenntnisse über V-Leute im Umfeld des Nationalsozialistischen Untergrunds (NSU): “Ich bin ziemlich sicher, dass wir noch nicht von allen V-Leuten im Umfeld des NSU-Trios wissen, dass sie V-Leute waren.” Auch auf der Liste, die dem Ausschuss jetzt vorliege, seien gegenüber früher einige Personen hinzugekommen, “bei denen noch geprüft werden muss, ob sie nicht Täterwissen hatten oder ob sie V-Leute waren”, sagte Edathy der “FAS”.

…

31. März 2013, 15:47 Uhr

Find this story at 31 March 2013

© 2013 stern.de GmbH

Das Netzwerk der Zwickauer Terrorzelle ist offenbar viel größer als bislang bekannt. Einer geheimen Fahnder-Liste zufolge gehörten 129 Personen aus der rechtsextremen Szene zum engeren und weiteren Umfeld des Untergrund-Trios. Womöglich sind auch V-Leute darunter.
Die rechtsextreme Zwickauer Terrorzelle hatte nach einem Zeitungsbericht mehr Helfer als bislang bekannt. Nach einer geheimen Liste der Sicherheitsbehörden gehörten 129 Personen aus der rechtsextremen Szene zum engeren und weiteren Umfeld des „Nationalsozialistischen Untergrunds“ (NSU), berichtete die „Bild am Sonntag“ („BamS“).

Der NSU soll in den Jahren 2000 bis 2007 neun türkisch- und griechischstämmige Kleinunternehmer und eine Polizistin getötet haben. Die Gruppe war erst im November 2011 aufgeflogen. Der Prozess gegen die mutmaßliche Neonazi-Terroristin Beate Zschäpe und vier Mitangeklagte beginnt am 17. April vor dem Oberlandesgericht München. Er könnte mehr als zwei Jahre dauern.

Liste soll auf V-Leute geprüft werden
Gegen knapp ein Dutzend weiterer Beschuldigter wird noch ermittelt. Hinzu kämen zahlreiche Helfer und Helfershelfer, die direkt oder indirekt Kontakt mit den mutmaßlichen Terroristen hatten, denen sie unter anderem Geld, falsche Papiere oder Waffen beschaffen sollten.

Die Liste mit den Namen von 129 Personen ging dem Bericht zufolge dem NSU-Untersuchungsausschuss des Bundestages zu. Der Ausschussvorsitzende Sebastian Edathy (SPD) sagte der „BamS“: „Die neue Zahl ist erschreckend hoch. Jetzt muss schnell geklärt werden, ob es darunter Mitwisser der NSU-Verbrechen und weitere V-Leute gab.“

…

Sonntag, 24.03.2013, 15:20

Find this story at 24 March 2013

© FOCUS Online 1996-2013

Kurz vor Beginn des Prozesses gegen Beate Zschäpe gibt es neue Erkenntnisse der Ermittlungsbehörden zur Terrorzelle NSU: Das braune Netzwerk des Trios Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos und Beate Zschäpe war laut Informationen von BILD am SONNTAG größer als bisher bekannt.

Demnach gehörten 129 Personen aus der rechtsextremen Szene zum engeren und weiteren Umfeld des Nazi-Trios, dem zehn Morde an Migranten und einer deutschen Polizistin angelastet werden. Die 129 Namen stehen auf einer geheimen Liste der Sicherheitsbehörden, die dem NSU-Untersuchungsausschuss des Bundestags jetzt zuging.

Als harter Kern der Terrorgruppe gelten die vier Angeklagten, die neben Zschäpe ab dem 17. April vor Gericht stehen, sowie knapp ein Dutzend weiterer Beschuldigter, gegen die noch ermittelt wird.
Prozess gegen Nazi-Braut Zschäpe
NSU-Terror
HIER wird der Nazi-Braut der Prozess gemacht

Gerichtssaal umgebaut, Sicherheitsschleusen angebracht, Fenster zugemauert: Hier wird Beate Zschäpe am 17. April der Prozess gemacht.
mehr…
München
JVA Stadelheim Nazi-Braut sitzt jetzt im Knast in München
Beate Zschäpe (37) Vom schüchternen Teenie zur Terror-Braut
in München Gerichtssaal wird für NSU-Prozess umgebaut

Dazu kommen zahlreiche Helfer und Helfershelfer, die direkt oder indirekt Kontakt mit den mutmaßlichen Terroristen hatten, denen sie unter anderem Geld, falsche Papiere oder Waffen beschaffen sollten.

…

24.03.2013 – 09:56 Uhr
Von KAYHAN ÖZGENC Und OLAF WILKE

Find this story at 24 March 2013

© Copyright BILD digital 2011

Hat V-Mann “Primus” das rechtsextreme NSU-Netzwerk unterstützt? Um diesen Verdacht zu klären, will der Untersuchungsauschuss des Bundestags den zuständigen Beamten des Verfassungsschutzes vernehmen.

Welche Rolle spielte V-Mann “Primus” im Fall des NSU? Der zuständige Beamte des Verfassungsschutz soll dazu Auskunft geben.

Nach Berichten über einen V-Mann namens “Primus” und dessen mögliche Hilfe für das NSU-Terrortrio wollen Mitglieder des Bundestags-Untersuchungsausschusses die zuständigen Beamten befragen. Es müsse geklärt werden, inwieweit der Verfassungsschutz “Primus” genutzt habe, um die untergetauchte Terrorzelle zu finden, sagte die SPD-Obfrau im Ausschuss, Eva Högl, der “Süddeutschen Zeitung”. “Sollte dies nicht in ausreichendem Maße geschehen sein, fragt sich natürlich, warum.” Medienberichten zufolge half er den Rechtsextremen möglicherweise beim Anmieten von Autos.

Auch die Linke-Politikerin Petra Pau sprach sich dafür aus, die sogenannten V-Mann-Führer zu vernehmen. Sollte sich der Verdacht erhärten, dass “Primus” verwickelt gewesen sei, stelle sich immer mehr die Frage, warum der “Nationalsozialistische Untergrund” (NSU) jahrelang von den Behörden unbehelligt geblieben sei, sagte Pau.

Laut “Spiegel” stießen Ermittler bei der Suche nach Unterstützern des NSU auf einen langjährigen Rechtsextremisten, der unter dem Decknamen “Primus” bis kurz nach der Jahrtausendwende für den Verfassungsschutz gearbeitet habe. In Unterlagen einer Zwickauer Autovermietung hätten Beamte Verträge für Fahrzeuganmietungen auf seinen Namen gefunden. Es gebe zeitliche Überschneidungen mit zwei dem NSU zugeschriebenen Morden im Juni und August 2001 in Nürnberg und München. Hinsichtlich beider Taten fehlten bisher Hinweise zu Fluchtwagen. Nach den Abrechnungen seien beide Wagen für lange Fahrten genutzt worden.
Edathy rechnet mit weiteren V-Leuten

…

Erscheinungsdatum: 1. April 2013, 09:18 Uhr

Find this story at 1 April 2013

© 2013 stern.de GmbH

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency is a hotbed of “institutional racism,” where Islamophobic, racist and offensive remarks are an everyday occurrence, a newspaper reported on Friday.
Westerwelle slams media limits for neo-Nazi trial (10 Apr 13)
Search for Nazi death camp guards widens (9 Apr 13)
Radical German Muslims join fight in Syria (7 Apr 13)

Germany’s security service the Verfassungsschutz is a hornet’s nest of conflict, envy, jealousy and inappropriate insults, wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung, citing inside sources.

And they aren’t just innocent office jokes. Employees of the department tasked with observing militant Islamists reportedly throw around deeply offensive, Nazi-affiliated words in private of the kind which would be unthinkable in a public setting.

These range from Herrenrasse, the German for “master race” to Muselmann – originally a German word meaning “Muslim man” later used by the Nazis as a slang word for emaciated death camp inmates who had surrendered to their fate – to Ölauge, a derogatory name for “greasy” dark-eyed foreigners.

In one case currently the subject of an internal investigation, an agency employee is said to have offended co-workers in his office by positioning a doll of a Teutonic Knight with his sword pointing at a miniature mosque, wrote the paper.

The highly secretive intelligence agency declined to comment on the investigation into the doll incident, but the paper reported mixed views among internal sources.
While some insisted the incident was an isolated, one-off occurrence, others told paper the issue of racism was not being dealt with at all within the agency.

…

Published: 22 Mar 13 10:50 CET | Print version

Find this story at 22 March 2013
The Local/jlb

Mark Kennedy, a British police officer who spent seven years infiltrating environmental and activist groups while working undercover for the Metropolitan Police force in London, may have monitored an American computer scientist and spied on others while in the United States.

The computer scientist, Harry Halpin, said that he was at a gathering of activists and academics in Manhattan in January 2008 that Mr. Kennedy — then using the pseudonym Mark Stone — also attended. He said Mr. Kennedy collected information about him and about a man and a woman who were accused later that year of associating with “a terrorist enterprise” and sabotaging high-speed train lines in France.

In addition to Mr. Halpin’s assertions, documents connected to the case indicate that prosecutors in Paris looked to American officials to provide evidence about a handful of people in the United States and events that took place in New York in 2008.

“Mark Kennedy spied upon myself on United States soil, as well as Julien Coupat and Yildune Levy,” Mr. Halpin wrote in an e-mail, naming two defendants in the group known in France as the Tarnac 10, after the small mountain village where several of them had lived in a commune.

Mr. Halpin added that Mr. Coupat introduced him to Mr. Kennedy in the fall of 2007. “It appears that Mark Kennedy also passed information to the F.B.I. that I knew Julian Coupat,” he added.

Reached via e-mail on Thursday, Mr. Kennedy, who now works with The Densus Group, a security consulting firm based in the United States, declined to comment on Mr. Halpin’s statements.

In 2010, Mr. Halpin said that F.B.I. agents detained him for five hours after he arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport from Europe, seizing his computer and threatening put him in jail if he did not agree to provide information about Mr. Coupat. Mr. Halpin said that he refused but the agents let him go when they were asked to explain the charges against him.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. in New York, James Margolin, declined to comment on the encounter described by Mr. Halpin.

The accounts of events in New York provided by Mr. Halpin and others added a new twist to two dramas that have received widespread attention in Europe, where they have slowly unraveled over the past few years.

Mr. Kennedy’s actions while spying on political activists in Britain have brought embarrassment to Scotland Yard, as officials there have been forced to confront allegations of inappropriate behavior by some undercover operatives.

As reported in The Guardian newspaper, Mr. Kennedy was said to have had sexual relationships with a number of women connected to groups he had infiltrated.

In 2011, the trial of six people accused of planning to take over a coal-fired power plant collapsed amid claims, denied by Mr. Kennedy, that he had acted as an agent provocateur. Mr. Kennedy was also shown to have worked undercover in more than 20 other countries, including Iceland, Spain and Germany, where members of parliament have raised questions about his role.

Eventually, 10 women, including three who said they had intimate relationships with Mr. Kennedy, sued the police in London saying that they had formed strong personal ties with undercover officers. Later, it was reported in British papers that Mr. Kennedy sued the police, saying that his superiors had failed to prevent him from sleeping with an activist and falling in love.

In France, l’affaire de Tarnac, as it is known, has become a cause célèbre among civil libertarians who have criticized the use of terrorism statutes against people suspected of sabotage but not accused of harming anyone. The defendants have denied wrongdoing, but the authorities have portrayed them as dangerous subversives who plotted attacks against the state then “refused to answer questions, or gave whimsical answers” about their activities.

An unusual element of the case involves a book called “The Coming Insurrection” by an anonymous group of authors called the Invisible Committee. The book advocates rebellion against capitalist culture, encourages readers to form self-sufficient communes and calls for “a diffuse, efficient guerrilla war to give us back our ungovernableness.” Prosecutors have said that Mr. Coupat and his comrades wrote the volume. The suspects denied authorship but Mr. Coupat told journalists in France that the book had merit.

While the Tarnac case has moved slowly through the French legal system, documents have emerged showing that F.B.I. agents were posted outside the Manhattan building where the activists gathered in 2008, videotaping the arrival and departure of Mr. Halpin, Mr. Coupat and Ms. Levy, among others. Those tapes were later given to French prosecutors along with a detailed log compiled by the F.B.I. agents.

As the French investigation continued, documents show that prosecutors in Paris asked officials in the United States about a “meeting of anarchists” in New York and about several people who could be connected to Mr. Coupat. They also asked for information about a low-grade explosive attack in March 2008 that damaged an armed forces recruitment center in Times Square.

In 2012, letters show that Justice Department officials said they had not identified any connection between the people at the Manhattan gathering and the attack on the recruitment center. The officials also gave French prosecutors background information on some American citizens who appeared to have visited the commune in Tarnac and records of an interview that F.B.I. agents had conducted with an assistant professor and French philosophist at New York University who had translated “The Coming Insurrection.”

The professor, Alexander Galloway, told the agents that he had taught the books in a class on political theory and French philosophy, but had never met Mr. Coupat.

Official documents do not mention Mr. Kennedy but several people from New York said that he spent about a week there in early 2008 on his way to visit a brother in Cleveland. During that period, witnesses said Mr. Kennedy attended several informal gatherings, sometimes with Mr. Coupat and Ms. Levy.

…

March 15, 2013, 3:06 pm
By COLIN MOYNIHAN

Find this story at 15 March 2013

Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

The family of a teenager whose murder by a far-right commando rocked Spain in 1980 called Friday for an official inquiry after a newspaper reported that her killer has worked for police as an advisor since his release from jail.

Yolanda Gonzalez, a 19-year-old Socialist Party activist who had appeared in photographs at the head of student protest marches, was shot two times in the head at close range in a field near Madrid by a far-right commando who suspected her of belonging to the armed Basque separatist group ETA.

Gonzalez’s murder shocked Spain, which at the time was going through a tumultuous transition to democracy following the death of right-wing dictator General Francisco Franco.

The man who shot Gonzalez, Emilio Hellin Moro, a former member of the Grup 41 commando with ties to the far-right party Fuerza Nueva, changed his name to Luis Enrique Hellin after he was released from jail in 1996 after serving 14 years of a 43-year jail sentence, top-selling newspaper El Pais reported last month.

According to the left-leaning paper, the 63-year-old expert on IT-related criminal investigations secured contracts under the changed name with Spain’s security forces, acting for years as an advisor to Spain’s top court and proving training courses to police on how to carry out electronic eavesdropping and comb computers and cellphones for evidence.

…

Agence France-PresseMarch 8, 2013 17:30

Find this story at 8 March 2013
Copyright 2013 GlobalPost

JERUSALEM — When President Obama lands here on Wednesday, he may encounter some Israelis staging a hunger strike in support of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the American serving a life term in a North Carolina prison for spying for Israel.

But the call for Mr. Pollard’s release will not be restricted to the strident, right-wing protests that have previously greeted American officials.

Instead, it will come from Israel’s dovish president, Shimon Peres, and some of the country’s most respected public figures: Nobel Prize-winning scientists, retired generals, celebrated authors and intellectuals who have signed, along with more than 175,000 other citizens, an online petition appealing for clemency for Mr. Pollard.

After years of being viewed as a somewhat marginal and divisive issue here, the campaign to free Mr. Pollard has become a mainstream crusade. Prominent Israelis are shedding the shame long felt over the affair, one of the most damaging, painful episodes in the annals of the American-Israeli relationship, and recasting it as a humanitarian issue ready to be resolved.

The effort has gathered momentum, and many Israelis consider Mr. Obama’s visit to be the perfect opportunity for a gesture of good will.

“I will sum it up in three words: enough is enough,” said Amnon Rubinstein, a law professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, and a former minister of education. “It is not humane to keep him in jail any longer.”

A main factor behind the shift, Israelis supporting the campaign say, is the time that Mr. Pollard, 58, who is said to be ailing, has already served — 28 years. Advocates for his release say that is unprecedented among Americans convicted of spying for an ally.

Another factor is the growing number of former officials in the United States who have called for clemency in recent years, including two former secretaries of state, George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger, and a former director of the C.I.A., R. James Woolsey.

Mr. Woolsey, who has firsthand knowledge of the case and strongly opposed clemency for Mr. Pollard during his tenure at the C.I.A., told Israel’s Army Radio last week that three other spies for friendly countries who were tried and convicted in the United States were each sentenced to less than five years in prison.

Such voices have given the advocates for Mr. Pollard a new level of respectability and have allowed more Israelis to speak out.

Amos Yadlin, the former director of Israeli military intelligence who now runs the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, recently appeared on Israeli television to appeal for Mr. Pollard’s release.

“Clemency for Pollard, given his health situation, is a humanitarian issue that we can put behind us as our two countries face extraordinary challenges in 2013,” Mr. Yadlin said.

Yair Lapid, the new centrist force in Israeli politics, also signed the petition, as did Gilad Shalit, a former soldier who was held captive by Hamas militants for five years. Veteran campaigners have also changed their tone. After Israel refused to recognize Mr. Pollard as a “prisoner of Zion” in 2005, his wife, Esther, called the government’s attitude “petty and meanspirited.”

Now, Mrs. Pollard is taking a more stately approach. Lawrence J. Korb, who was an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and is now pushing for clemency for Mr. Pollard, has accompanied Mrs. Pollard to meetings with Israeli leaders in recent years.

Last week on Israeli television, Mrs. Pollard said that she and her husband felt “profound remorse and sorrow for what has happened” and begged Mr. Obama for mercy.

Mr. Pollard, a former United States Navy intelligence analyst, began spying for Israel after he approached an Israeli officer in 1984. When he was discovered 18 months later, he sought refuge in the Israeli Embassy in Washington but was refused entry. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.

At first, Israel disowned Mr. Pollard, saying that he was an actor in a rogue operation. But he was granted Israeli citizenship in 1995, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during his first term in office in the late 1990s, officially recognized Mr. Pollard as an Israeli agent.

Many details of the case remain classified. But recently declassified documents from a 1987 C.I.A. damage assessment stated that Mr. Pollard’s instructions were primarily to provide Israel with American intelligence on Israel’s Arab adversaries and the military support they received from the Soviet Union, including information on Arab chemical and biological weapons.

Mr. Pollard’s supporters note that he was not asked to spy on the United States per se.

Mr. Pollard delivered suitcases full of copies of classified documents to the Israelis every two weeks. The copious disclosures posed multiple risks to American intelligence sources and methods, and to American foreign policy interests, the C.I.A. assessment stated.

In the past, Mr. Netanyahu pushed for Mr. Pollard’s release to balance concessions he was being pressed to make in Middle East peace negotiations.

But Sallai Meridor, Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2006 to 2009, said that a “strong nucleus of people” within the United States defense establishment had adamantly opposed Mr. Pollard’s release, “exerting a lot of influence over others.”

“None of us know all the details,” Mr. Meridor said. “But assuming he did something really bad, the very worst that you could anticipate in this realm, 28 years is more than enough.”

…

March 17, 2013
By ISABEL KERSHNER

Find this story at 17 March 2013

Copyright The New York Times Company

Ex-army officer Benjamin Pierce Bishop charged with communicating national defence information to Chinese woman

Benjamin Pierce Bishop, who works for a defence contractor at US Pacific Command in Oahu, Hawaii, was arrested on Friday . Photograph: Alamy

A US defence contractor in Hawaii has been arrested on charges of passing national military secrets, including classified information about nuclear weapons, to a Chinese woman with whom he was romantically involved, authorities have said.

Benjamin Pierce Bishop, 59, a former US army officer who works as a civilian employee of a defence contractor at US Pacific Command in Oahu, was arrested on Friday and made his first appearance in federal court on Monday, said the US attorney’s office for the District of Hawaii.

He is charged with one count of willfully communicating national defence information to a person not entitled to receive it and one count of unlawfully retaining documents related to national defence. If convicted Bishop faces a maximum of 20 years in prison.

Bishop met the woman – a 27-year-old Chinese national referred to as Person 1 – in Hawaii during a conference on international military defence issues, according to the affidavit.

He had allegedly been involved in a romantic relationship since June 2011 with the woman, who was living in the US on a visa and had no security clearance.

From May 2011 until December 2012 he allegedly passed national defence secrets to her including classified information about nuclear weapons and the planned deployment of US strategic nuclear systems.

…

Reuters
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 March 2013 07.13 GMT

Find this story at 19 March 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic reveals how retired US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq. Another special forces veteran, Colonel James Coffman, worked with Steele and reported directly to General David Petraeus, who had been sent into Iraq to organise the Iraqi security services

• Watch a five-minute edited version of this film narrated by Dearbhla Molloy

• Revealed: Pentagon’s link to Iraqi torture centres

Find this story at 6 March 2013

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

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.

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

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 CIA after a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

Coffman reported to Petraeus and described himself in an interview with the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus’s “eyes and ears out on the ground” in Iraq.

“They worked hand in hand,” said General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being set up. “I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there … the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture.”

Additional Guardian reporting has confirmed more details of how the interrogation system worked. “Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee,” claimed Samari, talking for the first time in detail about the US role in the interrogation units.

“Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts.”

There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman tortured prisoners themselves, only that they were sometimes present in the detention centres where torture took place and were involved in the processing of thousands of detainees.

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.

Samari claimed that torture was routine in the SPC-controlled detention centres. “I remember a 14-year-old who was tied to one of the library’s columns. And he was tied up, with his legs above his head. Tied up. His whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he had been beaten.”

Gilles Peress, a photographer, came across Steele when he was on assignment for the New York Times, visiting one of the commando centres in the same library, in Samarra. “We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I’m looking around I see blood everywhere.”

The reporter Peter Maass was also there, working on the story with Peress. “And while this interview was going on with a Saudi jihadi with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams, somebody shouting: ‘Allah, Allah, Allah!’ But it wasn’t kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror.”

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.

Steele has not responded to any questions from the Guardian and BBC Arabic about his role in El Salvador or Iraq. He has in the past denied any involvement in torture and said publicly he is “opposed to human rights abuses.” Coffman declined to comment.

An official speaking for Petraeus said: “During the course of his years in Iraq, General Petraeus did learn of allegations of Iraqi forces torturing detainees. In each incident, he shared information immediately with the US military chain of command, the US ambassador in Baghdad … and the relevant Iraqi leaders.”

The Guardian has learned that the SPC units’ involvement with torture entered the popular consciousness in Iraq when some of their victims were paraded in front of a TV audience on a programme called “Terrorism In The Hands of Justice.”

SPC detention centres bought video cameras, funded by the US military, which they used to film detainees for the show. When the show began to outrage the Iraqi public, Samari remembers being in the home of General Adnan Thabit – head of the special commandos – when a call came from Petraeus’s office demanding that they stop showing tortured men on TV.

“General Petraeus’s special translator, Sadi Othman, rang up to pass on a message from General Petraeus telling us not to show the prisoners on TV after they had been tortured,” said Samari. “Then 20 minutes later we got a call from the Iraqi ministry of interior telling us the same thing, that General Petraeus didn’t want the torture victims shown on TV.”

Othman, who now lives in New York, confirmed that he made the phone call on behalf of Petraeus to the head of the SPC to ask him to stop showing the tortured prisoners. “But General Petraeus does not agree with torture,” he added. “To suggest he does support torture is horseshit.”

Thabit is dismissive of the idea that the Americans he dealt with were unaware of what the commandos were doing. “Until I left, the Americans knew about everything I did; they knew what was going on in the interrogations and they knew the detainees. Even some of the intelligence about the detainees came to us from them – they are lying.”

Just before Petraeus and Steele left Iraq in September 2005, Jabr al-Solagh was appointed as the new minister of the interior. Under Solagh, who was closely associated with the violent Badr Brigades militia, allegations of torture and brutality by the commandos soared. It was also widely believed that the units had evolved into death squads.

The Guardian has learned that high-ranking Iraqis who worked with the US after the invasion warned Petraeus of the consequences of appointing Solagh but their pleas were ignored.

The long-term impact of funding and arming this paramilitary force was to unleash a deadly sectarian militia that terrorised the Sunni community and helped germinate a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the height of that sectarian conflict, 3,000 bodies a month were strewn on the streets of Iraq.
CV: James Steele

Vietnam

Jim Steele’s first experience of war was in Vietnam, where from 1965 to 1975 US combat units were deployed against the communist North Vietnamese government and Viet Cong. 58,000 Americans were killed, dealing a blow to the nation’s self-esteem and leading to a change in military thinking for subsequent conflicts.

El Salvador

A 1979 military coup plunged the smallest country in Central America into civil war and drew in US training and funding on the side of the rightwing government. From 1984 to 1986 Steele – a “counterinsurgency specialist” – was head of the US MilGroup of US special forces advisers to frontline battalions of the Salvadorean military, which developed a fearsome international reputation for its death-squad activities. Prof Terry Karl, an expert at Stanford University on El Salvador’s civil war, said that Steele’s main aim was to shift the fight from so-called total war, which then meant the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, to a more “discriminate” approach. One of his tasks was to put more emphasis on “human intelligence” and interrogation.

Nicaragua

…

Mona Mahmood, Maggie O’Kane, Chavala Madlena and Teresa Smith
The Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 2013 20.04 GMT

Find this story at 6 March 2013
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.