A detailed new compilation of evidence by the Guardian newspaper (London) and the BBC Arabic Service (London) has brought up fresh material to support the emerging international view that the US government and its AIPAC/Zionist corporate controllers now form the major engine of state-sponsored terrorism on the planet.

During the Bush Jnr presidency, the US Pentagon sent Colonel James Steele (58), an American veteran of its dirty wars in Central America, to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq which set up covert detention and torture centres to extract information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture reported during the US occupation and deliberately accelerated the country's downward spiral into civil war. This civil war served the requirements of US business and diplomacy in the region.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the new fifty-minute London documentary, implicate US government advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed. David Petraeus has been directly linked through an adviser, Colonel James H Coffman, to this abuse. Coffman described himself as Petraeus's eyes and ears out on the ground in Iraq. Steele and Coffman worked as a team and knew everything about the US-sanctioned torture programmes.

Each clandestine US detention centre in Iraq had its own interrogation committee. Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. These committees used various means of torture to make the detainees confess, including electricity, hanging them upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on their genitals.

The fifteen-month Guardian/BBC Arabic investigation was sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks which detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in the secret network of US/Iraqi detention centres.

The US torture pattern in Iraq showed a clear parallel with the well-documented human rights abuses committed by US-advised and funded paramilitary squads in Central America in the 1980s. James Steele was head of a US team of special military advisers which trained units of El Salvador's security forces in 'counterinsurgency'. David Petraeus visited El Salvador in 1986 while Steele was there and became a major advocate of his 'counterinsurgency' methods.

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

High-ranking Iraqis who worked with the US after the invasion of Iraq warned Petraeus of the consequences of appointing Solagh. Their pleas were ignored. The resultant Iraqi civil war claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the height of the sectarian conflict, three thousand bodies a month were found strewn across the streets.

Above Petraeus, and actively supportive of his covert torture organisations in Iraq, was Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defense from January 2001 to December 2006. Rumsfeld, it should not be forgotten, narrowly avoided arrest in Paris on war crimes charges, on Friday 26th October 2007. Only a desperate dash to the American embassy on the Avenue Gabriel saved him on that occasion.

Mainstream reportage and fifty minute video documentary: here (06.03.13) and here (06.03.13).

Commentary: here (07.03.13), here (07.03.13) and here (07.03.13).

Historical note: The Petraeus Doctrine and The Salvador Option for Iraq here (08.10.08).