11/18/05 "Tom
Paine"
--- -It is time to start waving the bloody shirt.
There is no longer any doubt that the men that the
United States has installed in power in Iraq are
monsters. Not only that, but they are monsters armed,
trained and supported by George W. Bush's
administration. The very same Bush administration that
defends torture of captives in the so-called War on
Terrorism is using 150,000 U.S. troops to support a
regime in Baghdad for which torture, assassination and
other war crimes are routine.
So far, it appears that
the facts are these: that Iraq's interior ministry,
whose top officials, strike forces and police commando
units (including the so-called Wolf Brigade) are
controlled by paramilitary units from Shiite militias,
maintained a medieval torture chamber; that inside that
facility, hundreds of mostly Sunni Arab men were
bestialized, with electric drills skewering their bones,
with their skins flayed off, and more; that roving units
of death-squad commandos are killing countless other
Sunni Arab men in order to terrorize the Iraqi
opposition. Even the Washington
Post, that last-ditch defender of America's
illegal and unprovoked assault on Iraq, says:
Scandal over the secret prison has forced the
seven-month-old Shiite-led government to confront
growing charges of mass illegal detentions, torture
and killings of Sunni men. Members of the Sunni
minority, locked in a struggle with the Shiite
majority over the division of power in Iraq, say men
dressed in Interior Ministry uniforms have
repeatedly rounded up Sunni men from neighborhoods
and towns. Bodies of scores of them have been found
dumped by roadsides or in gullies.
The New York Times reports that the Iraqi
interior minister isn't all that upset about the torture
center. Bayan
Jabr, "speaking of the prison in an angry sarcastic
tone, said, 'There has been much exaggeration about this
issue.' And he added, "Nobody
was beheaded.'" So, apparently not beheading
innocents is the standard of justice in the New Iraq.
And, apparently there may be dozens, scores or hundreds
of similar facilities.
This is not a surprise.
Nearly two years ago, writing in the
American Prospect, I wrote the
following: "The Prospect has learned that part
of a secret $3 billion in new funds—tucked away in the
$87 billion Iraq appropriation that Congress approved in
early November—will go toward the creation of a
paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with
former Iraqi exile groups...The bulk of the covert money
will support U.S. efforts to create a lethal, and
revenge-minded, Iraqi security force." Except for a
parallel story by Sy Hersh in the New Yorker,
the story was ignored.
Over the past two years, writing for TomPaine.com,
I have repeatedly written about Shiite
death squads and about abuses by the paramilitary
Badr Brigade, the secret army trained and run by Iran's
Revolutionary Guards. Iraqi Sunnis and opposition
leaders, including Aiham Al Sammarae (as I
wrote for TomPaine ) have charged that the
Iraqi government has been running assassination teams.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, have been killed already,
including two attorneys for those accused in the
kangaroo court set up to convict Saddam Hussein and
other former Iraqi government officials. The
Post suggests that the prison uncovered in
Baghdad was a "secret torture center run with the help
of intelligence agents from neighboring Iran." Read that
again: intelligence agents from Iran.
Last week I had a
chilling encounter with one of the monsters
responsible for the Murder Inc. units run by Badr and by
the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
At a Washington think tank, I met Adel Abdul Mahdi,
Iraq's so-called deputy president and a SCIRI official.
When I asked Mahdi about reports that Iraqi police and
interior ministry squads were carrying out
assassinations and other illegal acts, he didn't deny
it—but, he said, such acts were merely a reaction to the
terrorism of the resistance. "There is terrorism on only
one side," he said. "Inappropriate acts by the other
side, by the police—this is something else. This is a
reaction." As far as civilian casualties in Sunni towns,
he had this to say: "You can't fight terrorism without
attacking some popular areas."
I also asked him about the Badr Brigade, the
Iranian-backed paramilitary force that is the main
domestic army propping up Abdul Mahdi's Shiite
coalition, he said "they are disarmed," which is
patently absurd. He added: "They participate fully in
the political process."
Abdul Mahdi had this to say about Fallujah, the city
that was obliterated by the U.S. armed forces a year
ago. "It is one of the most peaceful areas in Iraq. I
don't know whether the people are happy or not. But it
is one of the most peaceful cities."
Make no mistake. The gangsters now running Iraq are our
creatures.
Earlier this week, I was speaking with someone who
was involved in the pre-2003 war planning effort
vis-à-vis Iraq. As I mentioned in TPM
Cafe , he told me that some of his colleagues
realized that the New Iraq would probably be taken over
not by Ahmed Chalabi, but by the Shiite fundamentalists.
Those radical-right parties (along with the Kurds) were
the real forces that took part in Chalabi's INC bloc.
And the United States consciously supported the toppling
of Saddam knowing that radical Shiites would be the
chief beneficiaries. This was not an intelligence
failure. We knew it. This was an explicit decision by
the neocon-dominated cabal to replace Saddam with Shiite
crazies. Now, we see that those crazies are running
Saddam-like torture prisons where they use electric
drills and flay the skin off Sunni captives.
The military in Iraq is scrambling to limit the
damage from the stunning revelation about the men who
are running Iraq today. We toppled Saddam—and in his
place we've installed a hundred mini-Saddams.
Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's
Game: How the United States Helped Unleash
Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books,
2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in
Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and
national security issues. He is a contributing editor at
The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother
Jones, a senior correspondent for The American
Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling
Stone.He can be reached at his website:
www.robertdreyfuss.com.
