As It Was In Honduras, So Shall It Be In Iraq

Who says the USA has not done a good job of training Iraqi forces? It's just been revealed that the Iraqi military no longer has even one single brigade capable of fighting without US forces there to ... um... make sure they don't go join the insurgents.

But never mind. That's not the real game, is it? As those familiar with the dark past of US power-brokers like John Negroponte (former Iraqi czar, now US intelligence czar) know, there are other ways to get people to do your bidding.

While its grip may be slipping, the USA still controls the Iraqi puppet government, as numerous PR blips constantly reveal (Ahmed Chalabi is still Deputy PM - nuff said?). The USA is also secretly training and financing numerous death squads within Iraq to do their dirty work for them. That is hardly a secret.

This is the same formula that the USA's secretive pro-torture "parralel government" has been following for for the past 50 years. Heck, even failed Iraqi PM Iyad Allawi used to roam around Baghdad bombing innocent civilians for the CIA!

The USA controls the government, the government controls the Ministry of Interior, and the Ministry of Interior control the death squads. Now it seems those death squads are going around torturing people at random and dumping the bodies...

From the Independent :

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.

"It's being done by anyone who wishes to wipe out anybody else for various reasons," said Mr Pace, who worked for the UN for more than 40 years in countries ranging from Liberia to Chile. "But the bulk are attributed to the agents of the Ministry of the Interior."

Now why is all this torture going on? Obviously, because certain people want to get information before they kill their captives.

But who are these people and what information do they want? Obviously, people on both sides - pro-US and anti-US - want to protect themselves and damage their enemy. But it's interesting that Mr Pace fingers the Shia rather than Sunnis as the main culprits. It looks like we have a clear chain of pro-torture command going from the PNAC to the WHIG to Gitmo to Abu Ghraib and onwards from there to "training the Iraqis so they can take over for themselves".

You can hardly point the finger at Saddam's old Baathist Sunni torturers, since a major plank of US invasion tactics was to disband and disempower these people. They are not even allowed to work for the government, and anyway it seems that the Sunnis are mostly being tortured rather than doing it.

Dahr Jamail looks at who benefits from the latest violence. He says the timing of the Golden Mosque bombing is not insignificant: Iraqis were enraged by recent videos of British soldiers beating Iraqi youths, followed by more horrific photos from Abu Ghraib. Furthermore, the head of the Misan provincial council in southern Iraq had just announced his council's decision to lift immunity from foreign forces (an immunity ordered by Paul Bremer).

And lest you think that US and British forces are not capable of such atrocities, Jamail closes with this:

British Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that those who committed the attack on the Golden Mosque have only one motive: to create a violent sedition between the Sunnis and the Shiites in order to derail the Iraqi rising democracy from its path.

Well said Mr. Blair, particularly when we keep in mind the fact that less than a year ago in Basra, two undercover British SAS soldiers were detained by Iraqi security forces whilst traveling in a car full of bombs and remote detonators.

Jailed and accused by Muqtada al-Sadr and others of attempting to generate sectarian conflict by planting bombs in mosques, they were broken out of the Iraqi jail by the British military before they could be tried.

Vietnam, Honduras, Iraq... Why do we seem to be so incapable of acknowledging the horrors are government forces are perpetrating in our names???