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[Gemüsepizza]

I read a pretty interesting and shocking article today:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

"They worked hand in hand," said General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being set up. "I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there ... the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture."

Samari claimed that torture was routine in the SPC-controlled detention centres. "I remember a 14-year-old who was tied to one of the library's columns. And he was tied up, with his legs above his head. Tied up. His whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he had been beaten."

Gilles Peress, a photographer, came across Steele when he was on assignment for the New York Times, visiting one of the commando centres in the same library, in Samarra. "We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I'm looking around I see blood everywhere."

The long-term impact of funding and arming this paramilitary force was to unleash a deadly sectarian militia that terrorised the Sunni community and helped germinate a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the height of that sectarian conflict, 3,000 bodies a month were strewn on the streets of Iraq.

There is also a 51-minute documentation about this on their website:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/06/james-steele-america-iraq-video

Here is an edited 5-minute version:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/06/us-petraeus-torture-iraq-video

I have only seen the short version yet, but it's really disgusting. Letting others do dirty work like torture seems to be a common tactic of certain US authorities. And this is probably only a fraction of what happened there. I wonder if we will ever find out the whole story.

 

[Freezie KO]

Ugh. I really hope in 20 years the Iraqis don't come flying planes into our buildings for all the horrible shit the US government is doing in their country.

 

[Gemüsepizza]

Yeah. What I also find angering is when you look at how this story went public:

The Guardian/BBC Arabic investigation was sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention centres run by the police commandos across Iraq. Private Bradley Manning, 25, is facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years after he pleaded guilty to leaking the documents.

And I am pretty sure there won't be any investigations of the US government regarding this issue, they will just deny everything and cover it up and nothing will happen. But people who made this public are thrown into jail.

 

[Gemüsepizza]

Here is a new, short video from the German news site "Spiegel Online":

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausla...olter-gefaengnis-der-amerikaner-a-887519.html

http://translate.google.de/translat...olter-gefaengnis-der-amerikaner-a-887519.html

The journalists somehow tricked their way in when a patrol arrived, and filmed with a small camera, I guess they only got in because the prisoners werent tortured at the time.