Bush regarding Iraq: "There won't be any more mass graves and torture rooms"

[sabra]

http://www.slate.com/id/2100014

"One thing is for certain: There won't be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms."—Bush, press availability in Monterrey, Mexico, Jan. 12, 2004

http://www.azzaman.com/english/index.asp?fname=news/2010-03-26/kurd.htm

More post-Saddam mass graves discovered in Iraq

Azzaman, March 26, 2010

The Ministry of Human Rights says its experts have uncovered 84 mass graves all holding victims of violence that engulfed the country in the aftermath of the 2003-U.S. invasion.

Ayam Sharif, head of the ministry’s department of terror victims, said the graves were all discovered last year.

She said the ministry, given its limited resources, does not have the means and expertise to deal with the stream of mass graves that are being discovered in the country.

She said the 84 graves were only those found in two Iraqi provinces: Baghdad and Diyala.

...

The ministry now has a special section called Department of Mass Graves. It was set up to deal with the mass graves of the former regime of Saddam Hussein.

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Privately, the department’s personnel say it never occurred to them that they would spend most of their time working on mass graves holding the corpses of Iraqis killed following the overthrow of the former regime.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/opinion/05iht-edmuscati.html

May 5, 2010
I.H.T. Op-Ed Contributor
Iraqis Torturing Iraqis
By SAMER MUSCATI


BAGHDAD — The man looked much older than his 24 years, in part because his front teeth had been smashed, he told us, during one of his interrogation sessions in the secret prison here. His emaciated body and trembling arms were those of a fragile hospital patient rather than the fearsome terrorist the security forces had accused him of being. His psychological wounds matched his physical state: He confided that after repeatedly being sodomized with a stick and a pistol, he frequently wets his bed and has trouble sleeping.

Despite overwhelming evidence that torture was routine and systematic at a secret prison in the old Muthanna airport in West Baghdad where the young man had been held, Iraqi officials at the highest level appear to be in denial, claiming the accounts by the men who were held there are fictitious. Instead of ordering an independent inquiry, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has dismissed the torture accounts as “lies” and “a smear campaign.” He told the state-run Iraqiya television that the detainees inflicted the scars on themselves “by rubbing matches on some of their body parts.”

But the wounds that my colleague and I witnessed on April 26, when we interviewed 42 of the men who had been held in that place, could not have been self-inflicted, let alone with matches. Huge scabs on their legs matched detainees’ descriptions of being suspended upside down with their lower legs trapped between bars. Deep welts on their backs were consistent with cable whipping. These scars were just the beginning of the horror the men, and the evidence on their bodies, revealed.

...

The 42 men the two of us were able to interview in the three hours we spent there candidly recounted in appalling detail interrogation sessions that lasted three or four hours each. They described how their torturers kicked, whipped, beat and tried to suffocate them, gave them electric shocks, burned them with cigarettes and pulled out their fingernails and teeth. The prisoners said that interrogators sodomized some detainees with sticks and pistol barrels. Some young men said they had been forced to perform oral sex on interrogators and guards and that interrogator forced detainees to molest one another.

If the detainees still refused to confess, interrogators would threaten to rape the women and girls in their families.