Some more sordid details from Salam/Pax about the Baghdad charnel/torture houses.
Including stuff about chain saws, razors, etc. Also this:
- It is said that the investigations will reveal that there are about 10 or 12 such centres in and around Baghdad. One of them in al-Ameryiah district was being used as a sort of a site for graves for those who die in detention.
His conclusion– an astute reference to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses— is particularly worth reading.
I’m torn between sarcasm and tears — and I wonder if the pundits and politicians here in the U.S. who favor “staying the course” will be sobered enough by this news to refrain from suggesting that Iraq is undergoing a democratic process thanks to American soldiers.
Somehow I doubt it.
“A key figure in the development of the Special Police Commandos was James Steele, a former US Army special forces operative who cut his teeth in Vietnam before moving on to direct the US military mission in El Salvador at the height of that country’s civil war. Steele was responsible for selecting and training the small units (or death squads) who were boasted to have inflicted 60% of the casualties caused in that ‘counterinsurgency’ campaign (Manwaring, El Salvador at War, 1988, p 306-8). Principally, the tens of thousands of victims were civilians.”
“Another US contributor was the same Steven Casteel who as the most senior US advisor within the Interior Ministry brushed off serious and well-substantiated accusations of appalling human right violations as ‘rumor and innuendo’. Like Steele, Casteel gained considerable experience in Latin America, in his case participating in the hunt for the cocaine baron Pablo Escobar in Colombia’s Drugs Wars of the 1990s, as well as working alongside local forces in Peru and Bolivia (Maas op. cit.). Whilst Casteel’s background is said to be Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the operation against Escobar was a joint intelligence effort, involving the CIA, DEA, Delta Force and a top-secret military intelligence surveillance unit knows as Centra Spike (Marihemp, SpecWarNet).”
Crying Wolf
British Chief Police Investigator in Basra dies under mysterious circumstances
This is sickening, stomach-turning stuff and I feel nothing but shame that the United States brought this to Iraq.
The London Independent is reporting that the secret prisons and squads such as the Wolf Brigades are part of the “El Salvador’ option, a $3 billion “black budget” secret operation using militias, death squads, and torture that is run by the Pentagon. I believe that Cheney and Wolfowitz set this in motion after it became clear that the guerrilla insurgency could not be stopped even with actions like the destruction of Falluja, and after the Abu Ghraib discloures had destroyed the “moral” foundation of the occupation. The conclusion they drew was not to stop the abuses but to increase them by creating an undercover operation run directly by them, not the military.
This “parallel” track is quite similar to the parallel “cherry picking” intelligence operation set up through Cheney and Douglas Feith’s office. The “brazenness” of these secret operations is built upon an administration wedded to secrecy, which it can get away with in the absence of judicial and congressional restraints and oversight. The corrollary of secrecy and of having these operations planned and run by a cabal, as Colin Powell’s former aide Lawrence Wilkerson has noted, however, is incompetence and disaster.
The “El Salvador” option could just as easily be called the “Vietnam” option, which also featured elections as well as heavy bombing, strategic hamlets (Falluja), and the Phoenix Program, the undercover CIA operation that assassinated 40,000 alleged Viet Cong. Torture was widely used by U.S. forces, and even more so by the Vietnamese government.
Peeling off a prisoner’s skin is a torture technique used by Iranian torturers. It’s likely that the Badr Corps, which was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, was also trained in torture while in Iran.
However, the ultimate responsibility lies with the United States, which is required, under international law, to protect the people it occupies. Because the Bush administration chose to ignore international law in going to war and in allowing/encouraging torture, it is the actual and intellectual author of these crimes. By dismantling the Iraqi government and military, it encouraged the growth of militias and then used them for its own purposes.
The torture of prisoners is no doubt in part a reaction especially to the suicide bombings. In the calculus of violence, though, U.S. artillery and bombing from planes kills far more civilians than does suicide bombing. This may seem like macabre speculation, but I wonder whether some of the suicide bombing results from the intersection of the impotence/helplessness felt as a result of the overwhelming firepower of the occupiers and from knowing that it might be better to die resisting than to be caught and tortured and possibly killed?
This must also be set in the context of what the Los Angeles Times and others called the “Sunni intimidation” option, the flattening of Falluja before the January 2005 elections, which made the Sunni boycott of the elections a certainty. The torture and murder of Sunnis by the Iraqi government can only deepen Sunni alienation from the Iraqi political system. This is the precise opposite of what is needed, which is a reconciliation with the Sunnis, bringing them into the government, the end of the U.S. occupation, and a resulting lessening of the violence. This would allow the United States to declare “victory” and leave.
On the present course, there are only two possible outcomes: continued occupation, or the “defeat” of the United States, whether militarily, morally, and/or politically, and its subsequent withdrawal in disgrace. Under neither scenario will Americans be safer, which was the ostensible reason for going to war with Iraq.
Whether that is the result of incompetence or design doesn’t much matter in the real world. The Bush adminstration denigrates the role of government, international (and domestic) law, and refuses to respect or to involve in decisionmaking those it disagrees with–including its own State Department and CIA, as well as Congress, other governments, the Iraqi people, and international agencies. In short, it dismisses or denigrates the very resources–the legal powers of government, legitimacy for its policies, and wide consultation and support–that would allow its policies to succeed. Incompetence, then, is an integral part of the design (or, if not consciously done, the fabric) of its policies and actions, and failure the inevitable result.
That, paradoxically, is hopeful. A minority of Americans object to the Iraq War on moral or legal grounds. Most Americans are primarily pragmatic, however, and will support a war as long as we are winning, but the continued pursuit of failure will eventually lead them to withdraw their approval. The war is not over, but the Bush administration has already lost the fight for the hearts and minds of the American people as well as those of the Iraqis and of world public opinion.
Its not truly and only Bush administration doing so, it’s the United State Policies for long time ago starting from WWII till now through Philippines assassinations of the opposition their for US, also the supporting of a brutal Suharto regime, then Vietnam war when Lyndon Johnson singe 15 years extension for the war to be continue and the recent Iraqi invasion with all the lies surrounded that occupation adding to that the miss treatments of Iraqis and the distraction of Iraqi state completely.
I might add the recent US move by support Al_Akhwan “Muslims Brotherhoods” groups in Egypt and Syria and regarded them as moderate this just disastrous that will be more dangerous whet we experienced before 11/9 by bringing and supporting these fanatics and lead them to power in very rich countries and more sensible land that affected the all world in the future.
Don’t forgot the blindly supporting of Israelis occupations of Arabs lands from four Arab sates who are members of UN with all frustrating of Arab of that support for the state opposed very basic requirements of withdraws from invaded land by wars, moreover that state continuing killing the Palestinians and distractions of their land and assets and bringing and supporting more settlements and immigrants from around the world to settle on the occupying Arab lands, these are the polices US doing for last 50 years or more.
This will bring to you to think there should be some sort of changes in the politic system in US that preventing the president or other group of peoples like Necons behaving with their personal politics and personal desire that not fit US citizens desire or not with line of international laws that most of the countries around the world agrees on.
We should all be work toward to stope this system to continue for the benefit of US citizens and the entire world, this is the real move that will repair of US image in the world.
Folks probably already know this, but Riverbend has posted on the torture house (long a fixture of the landscape to Iraqis; a revelation to us innocents abroad.) She has also viewed the white phosphorous documentary.
We disgust me.
“Another detained Iraqi cameraman, Samir Mohammed Noor, was arrested by Iraqi troops in a similar situation, Moody said, adding that he was beaten so badly that he had to be delivered to the US detention facility in a blanket.”
“U.S. military sources said troops were shocked when they came across the prisoners, some of whom showed the marks of beatings and looked like they had not been fed well for weeks.”
OOOHHHH SHOCKED…..
There’s a good article by Trish Schuh at http://www.counterpunch.org/schuh11182005.html .
“This is sickening, stomach-turning stuff and I feel nothing but shame that the United States brought this to Iraq.”
TO LATE…….