House of Horrors...
by Riverbend

The talk of the town is the torture house they recently found in Jadriya. The whole world heard about the one in Jadriya, recently raided by the Americans. Jadriya was once one of the best areas in Baghdad. It's an area on the river and is special in that it's greener, and cleaner, than most areas. Baghdads largest university, Baghdad University, is located in Jadriya (with a campus in another area). Jadriya had some of the best shops and restaurants- not to mention some of Baghdad's most elegant homes...… and apparently, now, a torture house. We hear constantly about these torture dungeons. Right after the war, certain areas became infamous for them. The world knows them as 'torture houses' for the obvious reasons- they were once ordinary homes, and now they've become torture centers for suspects and innocents alike. The Iraqi government conveniently calls them 'detention centers' and the Iraqi Ministry of Interior oversees and funds them. One area which was well-known for its torture houses immediately after the war was Sadir City in Baghdad. Except they weren't called torture houses back then. The people who ran them called them 'ma7akim' or 'courts'. They would bring 'suspects' in for interrogation- often ordinary citizens- and beat and whip them for various confessions involving accusations and alleged crimes. A 'Sayid' would then come in and sentence the culprit- the sentence would sometimes involve cutting off a hand or a foot and at other times it might be death. We heard this from an aunts neighbor who was mistakenly taken in and beaten as a suspected former security agent. His family connections with influential Shia clerics in the area were the only things that got him out alive- bruised and broken- but alive.

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It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature

A recent Times article pointed out that the methods for torture we used were taken adapted from tolitarian communist techniques valued not for their success in obtaining the truth but in their ability to obtain false confessions. Apparently that wasn't really a bug, but a feature. The Times also recently pointed that even though the Bush administration was warned that one of the information sources, al Libi, was full of shit they kept on using his information to justify the war. The Times article quoted a Defense Intelligence Report claiming that al-Libi "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" although this stretches the concept of "intentionally" somewhat. You see, al-Libi was a fine graduate of our exciting new school of interrogation. On him we used torture techniques designed to encourage the subject to tell the interrogaters what they wanted to hear. And, miracle of miracles, he did indeed tell them what they wanted to hear.

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The Salvadoran Option II

They really ought to send John Negroponte back to Iraq. It would be just like old home week: Baghdad's Medical Forensic Institute - the mortuary - is a low, modern building reached via a narrow street. Most days it is filled with families of the dead. They come here for two reasons. One group, animated and noisy in grief, comes to collect its dead. The other, however, returns day after day to poke through the new cargoes of corpses ferried in by ambulance, looking for a face or clothes they might recognise. They are the relatives and friends of the 'disappeared', searching for their men. And when the disappeared are finally found, on the streets or in the city's massive rubbish dumps, or in the river, their bodies bear the all-too-telling signs of a savage beating, often with electrical cables, followed by the inevitable bullet to the head. It's apparent -- both from this story and from reports by human rights groups (note the date on that one) -- that the U.S. and U.K. embassies have been aware for some time that Iraq's Ministry of the Interior has been turned into what the old National Guard used to be in El Salvador, or the Presidential Intelligence Unit in Guatemala, or the National Directorate of Investigation in Honduras, which is to say: death squad central. And it's more than a bit noteworthy that something like this was predicted -- boasted about, really -- by anonymous Pentagon sources earlier this year: The Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. . . . One military source involved in the Pentagon debate . . . suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

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