New Torture Chamber Raided in Baghdad

By Meteor Blades

A second prison crammed with hundreds of maltreated Iraqis was uncovered last Thursday in Baghdad the Washington Post and The New York Times are reporting in Monday’s editions. Thirteen prisoners were in such bad shape they were immediately taken to a hospital. The Post’s story by Ellen Knickmeyer appeared late Sunday night on the newspaper’s Web site:

An Iraqi government search of a detention center in Baghdad operated by Interior Ministry special commandos found 13 prisoners who had suffered abuse serious enough to require medical treatment, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Sunday night.

An Iraqi official with firsthand knowledge of the search said that at least 12 of the 13 prisoners had been subjected to "severe torture," including sessions of electric shock and episodes that left them with broken bones.

"Two of them showed me their nails, and they were gone," the official said on condition of anonymity because of security concerns..

Edward Wong at the Times wrote, however, that the raid was a joint Iraqi-U.S. operation, led by the Ministry of Human Rights:

The detention center raided Thursday, situated to the east of the Tigris River, is run by a commando unit from the Interior Ministry, which oversees the country's police forces, said the senior American official, Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill, a spokesman for the American detention system in Iraq. When members of the search team entered the building, he said, they found "overcrowded" conditions that prompted them to begin transferring the prisoners. …

The Interior Ministry is run by Bayan Jabr, a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a leading religious Shiite party that has an Iranian-trained armed wing called the Badr Organization. Many Iraqi officials have said the ministry has recruited heavily from Badr and other Shiite militias, and there is growing evidence that such forces are abducting, torturing and killing Sunni Arabs.

Colonel Rudisill said he did not know the ethnic or religious make-up of the prisoners found Thursday, or whether the commandos running the center had been recruited from militias. The Interior Ministry employs a vast array of commando units, many shrouded in secrecy.

After the November 15 discovery of the first Iraqi prison brimful of malnourished, ill-treated prisoners, Brigadier General Karl Horst told The Los Angeles Times, "We're going to hit every single one of them, every single one of them." There are said to be 1,000 detention centers in Iraq. So far, two raids, two prisons filled with malnourished, ill-treated, and in the most recent case, obviously tortured prisoners. Nine hundred ninety-eight to go?

Since the discovery of that first secret prison, U.S. officials - including Donald Rumsfeld, General George W. Casey and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad – have made strong public statements decrying maltreatment at detention centers and declared that the United States will not stand for it.

Sort of. There was this telling exchange between Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Rumsfeld at a November 29 press conference:

Pace said then that it was "absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member if they see inhumane treatment being conducted to intervene to stop it."
Rumsfeld said, "I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it's to report it."
Pace responded, "If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it."

It still doesn’t seem to have dawned on anybody in the megamedia – at least not enough to say so aloud or in print – that perhaps the people in charge of these Iraqi detention centers thought their U.S. occupiers would have no objections since America is itself running torture chambers. What's wrong with a little fingernail-pulling when your "liberator" is water-boarding and hanging prisoners upside-down in a secret global chain of prisons that - in one of those jaw-droppers which this Administration has given us so many of over the past five years - recycles gulags left over from the USSR. Gulags about which even the chairpersons and deputy chairpersons of the Senate and House intelligence committees were not informed.

Save us your horrified hypocrisy, Ms. Rice, Mr. Rumsfeld and all you other Administration scofflaws. Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo set the standards for how the U.S. expects civilized people to behave in the post-9/11 world, and the dungeon-masters of Iraq have learned the lesson well.

Comments

[DemFromCT]

Say no to torture. We did. It's not that hard.

[jonnybutter]

The 'Ministry of Human Rights'? Do the divvy up scarce human rights?

[Mimikatz]

Just one more reason why the OFFICIAL policy has to be that torture is wrong, won't be tolerated and is against treaties which we have signed. That should be the official policy of our and every other government. Only that places the bar so high that if torture is ever used, and I'm not saying it should ever be, it is only in circumstances that the people involved truly, truly think justify it and are prepared to defend their actions if it comes out.

Instead, our policy of condining mistreatment in the WOT gives too many low-level people the ok to indulge themselves or simply make bad judgments. And our end-justifies-the-means, "I'm the Commander in Chief and the Constitution is just a piece of paper" attitude not only leads to abuses like this but completely undermines our ability to combat them, or, indeed, to convince the rest of the world, particularly the Arab world, that we don't torture our captives.

[Meteor Blades]

Elsewhere, I've been taken to task for ignoring the fact the Iranian-backed SCIRI is an enemy of the U.S. and that it's possible that busting these two prisons was just a way for Washington to undermine Shi'a power in addition to making it appear torture is really a bad thing in the view of the cabal.

Well, possible, but highly speculative.

The Badr militias that run these two detention centers are nasty pieces of work, and we knew that long ago. Maybe it's true that the U.S. is ignoring other torture chambers run by Iraqis whom Washington is more comfortable with. Maybe these discovered prisons are just a Rovian-style sham to push the theme that the U.S. must stay in Iraq. Maybe this is just window-dressing to take the heat off the discovery of secret prisons in Europe. The permutations are endless.

Of one thing we can be sure: we're not even close to seeing the whole picture, and it may be years before we do.

Since around May 1, 2003, when Omission Accomplished was declared from the decks of the USS Abraham Lincoln, Iraq has been swarming with shifting alliances, black ops carried out by dozens of entities, sophisticated disinformation specialists and tons of unaccounted for everything: money, weapons, militias, private "security" groups like Blackwater. What's actually going on is more impossible for on-the-ground old-timers to be sure of than in pre-World War II Rangoon.

Now, more than ever, we should not treat the American presence in Iraq as monolithic anymore than we should treat the Shi'a as such. Private operations outside the reach of any traditional controls plus traditional black ops units running under the veil of plausible deniability could easily be competing with each other and with American military units. Some generals are pissed off because they STILL haven't been able to get through to the White House. If they see their role as futile and their support from Washington unhelpful, who knows what they might do that's not in the interests of Donny Rumsfeld and the NeoImp Brigade? When a general, however politely, smacks down a SefDef in full public view, you know the jig is just about up.

[Kagro X]

Man, I wish I knew what to say about this.

I mean, what do you say? They're not even ashamed. They think the answer to "discovering" torture is to call 911.

[smintheus]

In the year 2255, maybe as early as April if we're lucky, they should get around to visiting the thousandth of those detention centers, if it's still standing. I won't guarantee that further detention centers will not have come into existence in the interim. We may have to wait until the 25th century before U.S. troops get into the last of them and begin writing the final report.

I think my calculations are right. The existence of these centers and the horrific treatment of prisoners under the new Iraqi Interior Ministry had broken into the news by June of 2005 at the latest (and HRW may have been onto it even earlier). That means in the last six months the U.S. forces in Iraq have visited two detention centers, for a rate of four centers per year. The remaining 998 should take very approximately 249 and one half years.

I'm glad we're making such progress in Iraq. Curiously, when U.S. forces liberated European countries in 1945, they seemed to be able to visit the detention and torture centers at a much faster rate than they are now doing in the territories they themselves occupy. Why the non-rush?