Iraqis say U.S. rehired Saddam-era torturers as "new" police force

[lostnfound]

http://www.unknownnews.org/0507120708sameoldsameold.html
by James Hider, The Times of London

July 8, 2005

Iraqi security forces, set up by U.S. and British troops, tortured detainees by pulling out their fingernails, burning them with hot irons or giving them electric shocks, Iraqi officials claimed.

Cases had also been recorded of prisoners being tied up and beaten to death.

In their haste to put police on the streets to counter the brutal insurgency, Iraqi and U.S. authorities had enlisted men trained under Saddam Hussein's regime and versed in torture and abuse, the officials told The Times.

...

The Human Rights Ministry official in charge of monitoring Iraq's prisons, Saad Sultan, said commandos were responsible for random arrests, hanging people from ceilings and beating them, attaching electrodes to ears, hands, feet and genitals, and holding hot irons to flesh.

The article mentions that the Interior Ministry is made up mostly of former army officers and special forces soldiers drawn from the ranks of Saddam's dissolved army.

[Son of California]

1. Isn' this what we always end up doing

Every time we get involved in another countries politics?
We end supporting and enabling the wrong people, either out of laziness or stupidity.

Are we training the Bin Ladens of Tomorrow?

[neweurope]

2. Neither lazyness nor stupidity! You have always been gulled

into supporting the wrong people - for the bigger interest of your big business.

After World War II nothing happened in Germany without the consent of the US. Here's an example of my own experience: When my father, a former Waffen-SS officer, got up the courage to visit East Germany for the first time, he was contacted by intelligence and asked to work for them. He declined, but as it turned out other former SS-officers my father knew were asked, too. There must have been a lot of them who started working for intelligence in the late Fifties/early Sixties. While they were being scorned in public they were already working for the government...

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Remember Fallujah

Bush to The Hague!

[spindoctor]

3. It was in a lot of papers years ago

I'm sure you can google a host of sources on it.

[lostnfound]

4. On DemocracyNow! several times too. "Regime Unchanged"

author was on today I think.