Tortured men look like 'Holocaust victims'

[Sapphire Blue]

Tortured men look like 'Holocaust victims'
By Kim Sengupta in Baghdad
Published: 18 November 2005

(excerpt)

Iraq's Interior Minister has defended the treatment of abused prisoners found in a government bunker, declaring that "no one was beheaded or killed". But while Bayan Jabr insisted that the allegations of torture were "exaggerated" fresh details emerged of the horrific conditions endured by the captives.

Witnesses said many of the 169 men and youths were emaciated and looked like "Holocaust survivors". Some had suffered beatings so severe that their skin had peeled off, and three men had been kept locked in a cupboard where they could not move. All the others were packed, blindfolded, into three rooms nine feet long and 11 feet wide.

Instruments of torture and beating were found hidden in a false ceiling. Witnesses also said that the guards in charge of the detainees, all but three of whom were Sunnis, at an interior ministry bunker in central Baghdad, wore combat fatigues of the Shia Badr Brigades militia. "Because of the appalling overcrowding, some of the most badly treated were squashed on to floors and their skins got stuck to the floor," said a witness.

<snip>

The prisoners were found by American troops and Iraqi police trying to trace a 15-year-old boy whose family had access to a US congressman.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article327777.ece

[dutchdemocrat]

1. Mogadishu on the Tigris: The Reality of Bush's Iraq

Mogadishu on the Tigris: The Reality of Bush's Iraq

The Independent provides more depth and perspective to the breaking story about the Iraqi torture chamber uncovered yesterday: Raid on torture dungeon exposes Iraq's secret war .

This story has the potential of becoming a "Katrina" moment: a revelatory episode that exposes long-suppressed truths about the reality of Bush's "leadership" and its agonizing consequences. Just as the hurricane finally brought Bush's incompetence, cronyism and callousness to mainstream attention, the torture chamber revelations could lead to a broader awareness of the murderous chaos that Bush's "liberation" has unleashed upon Iraq, with sectarian and ethnic death squads roaming the land, murdering and oppressing the people -- often with tacit U.S. backing or U.S. training. As one American officer said of Baghdad -- the centerpiece of Bushist "democracy" in Iraq: "It's getting more like Mogadishu every day."

Some excerpts from The Independent: Yesterday, 24 hours later, the Prime Minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, promised an investigation after the shocking demonstration of how paramilitary units working for the government, and death squads allegedly linked to it, are waging a savage war in the shadows.

People are arrested and disappear for months. Bodies appear every week of men, and sometimes women, executed with their hands tied behind their backs. Some have been grotesquely mutilated with knives and electric drills before their deaths.

The paramilitaries are not held responsible for all the deaths - some are the work of insurgents murdering supposed informers or government officials, or killing for purely sectarian motives.

You very seldom see American soldiers on the streets of Baghdad now. The Iraqi police are in evidence outside, but so are increasing numbers of militias running their own checkpoints - men in balaclavas or wrap-around sunglasses and headbands, with leather mittens and an array of weapons. An American official acknowledged: "It is getting more and more like Mogadishu every day."

Travelling through the Iraqi capital you meet Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi army; fellow Shias from the Badr Brigade; the Kurdish peshmerga; as well as Western and Iraqi security guards. Then there are Iraqi soldiers and policemen, government paramilitaries, special police commandos and a group which prides itself on being the most feared, the Wolf Brigade of the interior ministry.

Many of the allegations from Sunni leaders of abuse are against the 2,000-strong Wolf Brigade, which was formed in October 2004 after training with US forces and first saw action during the widespread disturbances in Mosul last year...

SNIP

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=285&Itemid=1