BAGHDAD -- Last Nov. 13, U.S. soldiers found 173 incarcerated men, some of them emaciated and showing signs of torture, in a secret bunker in an Interior Ministry compound in central Baghdad. The soldiers immediately transferred the men to a separate detention facility to protect them from further abuse, the U.S. military reported.
Since then, there have been at least six joint U.S.-Iraqi inspections of detention centers, most of them run by Iraq's Shiite Muslim-dominated Interior Ministry. Two sources involved with the inspections, one Iraqi official and one U.S. official, said abuse of prisoners was found at all the sites visited through February. U.S. military authorities confirmed that signs of severe abuse were observed at two of the detention centers.
But U.S. troops have not responded by removing all the detainees, as they did in November. Instead, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials, only a handful of the most severely abused detainees at a single site were removed for medical treatment. Prisoners at two other sites were removed to alleviate overcrowding. U.S. and Iraqi authorities left the rest where they were.
This practice of leaving the detainees in place has raised concerns that detainees now face additional threats.
(there's much more...)
While insurgents are being blamed for the continual tension in the war on a daily basis and the presence of a civil war has been denied, there is no doubt that the Shiite-run Interior Ministry is another huge threat to the security of Iraq's citizens.
This news follows on the heels of a recent report by the UN that thousands of Iraqis are being detained illegally and the fact that the UN is set to question US officials about contraventions of the torture conventions in May:
The debate, set for May 5 and May 8, will focus on a report filed a year ago by the United States on its compliance with the Convention against Torture, which bans all forms of torture.
Washington said at the time it was abiding by the treaty and that any abuses of detainees in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were not systemic.
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It seems they'll no longer be able to back up that claim, especially in light of this damning evidence.
These abuses cannot be placed solely on the shoulders of the Iraq Interior Ministry:
According to the Iraqi official, the Americans initially said they would suspend their policy of removing prisoners from sites where abuse was found until after Iraq's national elections, which were held Dec. 15, because disclosures of Interior Ministry abuses were politically sensitive. The elections came and went, the official said, and the Americans continued leaving detainees at sites that held bruised, burned and limping prisoners.
That is the smoking war crimes gun against Rumsfeld and the military's commander-in-chief, George W Bush.
What is absolutely sickening about all of this - from the run up to the war in which intelligence contradicting the neocons' agenda was ignored, to these new revelations that detainees are still being horrendously treated - is the fact that this is all about politics. Period.
And, anyone who hasn't grasped that by now is simply beyond reality's reach.
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