Despite being legally barred from assisting abusive security forces, the US military have joined such forces in numerous covert missions, documents suggest.

According to a Wednesday report by The Intercept, newly obtained documents show that US Special Operations forces have carried out Joint Combined Exchange Trainings (JCETs) “in Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Chad, and many other nations regularly cited for abuses by the Department of State.”

The report notes that the JCETs are "part of a shadowy and growing global engagement strategy involving America's most secretive and least scrutinized troops," and while officially, they are intended to offer training for the US, in reality they are designed to serve the purpose of “transferring elite military skills from American operators to local forces.”

For instance, despite US State Department criticism of Columbia over“extrajudicial killings, insubordinate military collaboration with members of illegal armed groups [and] forced disappearances,” Washington conducted four JCETs with the country regardless.

In another instance, US Special Ops forces headed to Saudi Arabia the same year and trained Saudi security forces for 60 days. This coincided with armed crackdown of various demonstrations all over the kingdom.

The US State Department reports noted that Saudi “security forces responded to stone-throwing youths by firing indiscriminately.”

Bahrain was also mentioned on the long list, where in 2012, US forces held three JCETs. The State Department had also questioned the Persian Gulf nation for “a number of reports that government security forces committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.”

Other countries like Chad, Algeria, El Salvador, Romania and Mexico also received the special training from Washington, while unsurprisingly, they were all slammed by the White House for human rights violations at the same time.

The trend continued in 2013 in countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cameroon, El Salvador, Kenya, Romania, Indonesia, and Uganda.

Meanwhile, a US human rights law, dubbed the Leahy amendment prohibits such activities.

Under the Leahy Law, named after its principal sponsor Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, foreign troops or units implicated in “gross human rights violations” must be denied alliance with US forces through a vetting process.

Reports by senior policy analysts state that the State Department’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, which carries out the vetting process, had a budget of only $2.75 million in 2014, while the security assistance projects it oversaw, including JCETs, were worth $15 billion.

Documents obtained from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs suggest that, just in 2012 and 2013, under the JCET program, elite US troops trained and collaborated with nearly 25,000 foreign troops in 77 foreign nations.