A special investigation by The Guardian newspaper and BBC Arabic that took place over 15 months claims to reveal a shocking, but substantial connection between the murderous tactics of US-backed Latin American 'death squads' in the 1980's and the rise of a similar tactics—including secret detention centers, torture, disappearances, and mass killings—that helped spark a sectarian civil war between Shia and Sunni rivals in the violent days triggered by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
And the connection, according to the investigation, lives in a gated golf community in Texas and has a name: (Ret.) Colonel James Steele.
"Steele's contribution was pivotal" in Iraq, says the report. And his time in El Salvador nearly 20 years earlier made him a perfect choice for the Pentagon's Donald Rumsfeld, who took control over a plan to break the back of an insurgency unwilling to conform to US occupation.
"It was a role made for Steele," the investigative team writes. "The veteran had made his name in El Salvador almost 20 years earlier as head of a US group of special forces advisers who were training and funding the Salvadoran military to fight the FNLM guerrilla insurgency. These government units developed a fearsome international reputation for their death squad activities. Steele's own biography describes his work there as the "training of the best counterinsurgency force" in El Salvador."
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