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02/26/2006:

"Iraqis tortured by government death squads"

Most of the corpses in Baghdad's mortuary show signs of torture and execution. And the Interior Ministry is being blamed.

Hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily executed every month in Baghdad alone by death squads working from the Ministry of the Interior, the United Nations' outgoing human rights chief in Iraq has revealed.

John Pace, who left Baghdad two weeks ago, told The Independent on Sunday that up to three-quarters of the corpses stacked in the city's mortuary show evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes. Much of the killing, he said, was carried out by Shia Muslim groups under the control of the Ministry of the Interior.

Much of the statistical information provided to Mr Pace and his team comes from the Baghdad Medico-Legal Institute, which is located next to the city's mortuary. He said figures show that last July the morgue alone received 1,100 bodies, about 900 of which bore evidence of torture or summary execution. The pattern prevailed throughout the year until December, when the number dropped to 780 bodies, about 400 of which had gunshot or torture wounds.
independent.co.uk


'The cheapest thing in Iraq is a human life'
At the city’s main mortuary yesterday corpses were piled in the corridors according to the districts where they had been discovered. Periodically a policeman would shout the name of a district to the crowd outside and take families to see if they could find their missing men.

There were no stretchers, sheets or shrouds. The bodies were simply identified, pulled from the piles, dumped into cheap coffins and removed from the building by any available transport. Some were simply tied to the roofs of taxis.

“Don’t cry,” one man told his daughter. “We’ve got to get used to this by now. The cheapest thing in Iraq is a human.”

Finally it was Mr Dulaimi’s turn. He walked slowly into the mortuary with his brother and a nephew, looking down at the long line of corpses. He stopped abruptly. Though he had feared the worst, nothing had prepared him for the sight of his dead son’s face. “Tortured!” he cried as he turned to his weeping cousin. “How can one imagine? They have pulled out his eye and teeth.”

Well that's one problem, it is impossible to imagine, and so we dutifully pay our taxes and don't. This filth is on our hands.


Whose Bombs were they?
02/25/06 "ICH" -- -- “We should stand hand in hand to prevent the danger of a civil war. We are facing a major conspiracy that is targeting Iraq’s unity.” Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

There’s no telling who was behind the bombing of the al-Askariya Mosque. There were no security cameras at the site and it’s doubtful that the police will be able to perform a thorough forensic investigation.

That’s too bad; the bomb-residue would probably provide clear evidence of who engineered the attack. So far, there’s little more to go on than the early reports of four men (three who were dressed in black, one in a police uniform) who overtook security guards at the mosque and placed the bombs in broad daylight.

It was a bold assault that strongly suggests the involvement of highly-trained paramilitaries conducting a well-rehearsed plan. Still, that doesn’t give us any solid proof of what groups may have been involved.

The destruction of the Samarra shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, has unleashed a wave of retaliatory attacks against the Sunnis. More than 110 people were reported killed by the rampaging Shia. More than 90 Sunni mosques have been either destroyed or badly damaged. In Baghdad alone, 47 men have been found scattered throughout the city after being killed execution-style with a bullet to the back of the head. The chaos ends a week of increased violence following two major suicide bombings directed against Shia civilians that resulted in the deaths of 36 people.

The public outrage over the desecration of one of the country’s holiest sights has reached fever-pitch and it’s doubtful that the flimsy American-backed regime will be able to head-off a civil war.

It is difficult to imagine that the perpetrators of this heinous attack didn’t anticipate its disastrous effects. Certainly, the Sunni-led resistance does not benefit from alienating the very people it is trying to enlist in its fight against the American occupation. Accordingly, most of the prominent Sunni groups have denied involvement in the attack and dismissed it as collaboration between American and Iranian intelligence agencies.

A communiqué from “The Foreign Relations Department of the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party” denounced the attack pointing the finger at the Interior Ministry’s Badr Brigade and American paramilitaries.

The Ba’ath statement explains:

“America is the main party responsible for the crime of attacking the tomb of Ali al-Hadi…because it is the power that occupies Iraq and has a basic interest in committing it.”

“The escalation of differences between America and Iran has found their main political arena in Iraq, because the most important group of agents of Iran is there and are able to use the blood of Iraqis and the future of Iraq to exert pressure on America. Iran has laid out a plan to embroil America in the Iraqi morass to prevent it from obstructing Iran’s nuclear plans. Particularly since America is eager to move on to completing arrangements for a withdrawal from Iraq, after signing binding agreements on oil and strategy. America believes that without the participation of “Sunni” parties in the regime those arrangements will fail. For that reason ‘cutting Iran’s claws’ has become one of the important requirements for American plans. This is what Ambassador Zalmay spoke of recently when he declared that no sectarian would take control of the Ministries of the Interior or Defense. Similarly, America has begun to publish information that it formally kept hidden regarding the crimes of the Badr Brigade and the Interior Ministry.”

Don't blame Canada anymore, blame Iran.