West turns blind eye as police put Saddam's torturers back to work

[hattra]

[QUOTE
As to the laws of their country they only apply in their country.
Result? Guantalamo Bay prison entirely under US military control but not under US law
[/QUOTE]
When it suits them, the Americans consider that their law applies to other countries too, and get really miffed when other countries simply ignore their Court rulings.

The American military has a history of ignoring Court rulings - they occupied Hawaii illegally, and ignored an order by the Senate to abandon the island, and give it back to the British - just think, it could have been the Royal Navy at Pearl Harbour

[hattra]

Two minor points - the Iraqi forces in question are no longer under Coalition control, they are under Iraqi Government control, (and after suffering under the Baathist regime for all those years, who blames them if they don't want a totalitarian regime back)

Secondly, Camp X-Ray isn't governed by the Geneva Convention, according to the US, because there are no members of the Afghani armed forced held there, only "illegal combatants". Mind you, IIRC, under the Geneva Convention, illegal combatants (i.e. civilians who take up arms) can be executed without trial.

[Not So Wise]

whereas US and coalition forces are accountable to the laws of their country and to the Geneva convention.

Actually the US does not accept any autority above their own supreme court . While they will happyly use international courts to persue those outside their own reach they will not and never will accept those courts same turned against them
As to the laws of their country they only apply in their country.
Result? Guantalamo Bay prison entirely under US military control but not under US law

you and I are free to criticise these people,

Hey give Bush time, he has only been in power for 5 years and is after all only human

[AtW]

The fact that things like that actually get printed in the media is certainly a good thing that is much better than what it was under Saddam. However that reporting exposes rather serious things, and what's worrying response to those things is not as robust as it should have been: XRay is still where it was, even though apparently those "not-torture" techniques are no longer in use.

Perhaps now they show a computer-generated movie of an inmate being shot or drawn to soften up the detainees? That would be okay under Geneva convetion, thats for sure.

[DodgyAgent]

AtW

The fact AtW that the media reports these activities and that you and I are free to criticise these people, and tyherefore free to vot governments out of power means that the accountabilty exists.. whether you agree with how that accountability is exercised is down to your subjective view.. a view that no person under Saddams regime was allowed to express. And yes whilst war is dirty and atrocities are committed by both sides.. our side is at least held in check (to the irritation of the military and their governments) by being answerable to its people. Saddam, Al Quaeda can formulate strategies to kill innocents or whoever they wish in the knowledge that they can do so without being answerable to anyone. No such privilege is afforded to our military.. If the killing of children is a central part of UK armed forces strategey then it would be either stopped or there would be recriminations for it. There may not be much difference to yo (you either kill or you dont kill a child) but "intent" is very much part of Western law.

[AtW]

whereas US and coalition forces are accountable to the laws of their country and to the Geneva convention.

Oh really? How about those secret CIA prisons all around the world? And do you think "simulated drawning" that was authorised for use in camp XRay (and no doubt other locations) is inline with the Geneva convention?

Already proven by court marshalls that have taken place to convict US marines for the torture of Iraqi prisoners.

Remind me please what sentense received that marine who shot wounded combatant on live CNN TV? I believe he was let off.

Its that kind of bollox that allows extremists to recruit terrorists.

[DodgyAgent]

assume

Let us assume that these stories are true. The difference between Saddam and his reginme and that of the coalition forces in the west is that Saddam is not accountable to anyone for his activities, whereas US and coalition forces are accountable to the laws of their country and to the Geneva convention. Already proven by court marshalls that have taken place to convict US marines for the torture of Iraqi prisoners.
We also have something called a free press which is free to challenge the activities of the military.. So for you moral equivalence cowards... no different from the guilt ridden lefties who support debt relief because it makes them feel better rather than helps the poor... there are subtle differences between the regimes of the west and tose of tyrants like Saddam.

[AtW]

West turns blind eye as police put Saddam's torturers back to work
From James Hider in Baghdad

IRAQI security forces, set up by American and British troops, torture detainees by pulling out their fingernails, burning them with hot irons or giving them electric shocks, Iraqi officials say. Cases have also been recorded of bound prisoners being beaten to death by police.

In their haste to put police on the streets to counter the brutal insurgency, [v]Iraqi and US authorities have enlisted men trained under Saddam Hussein’s regime and versed in torture and abuse, the officials told The Times.[/b] They said that recruits were also being drawn from the ranks of outlawed Shia militias.

Counter-insurgencies are rarely clean fights, but Iraq’s dirty war is being waged under the noses of US and British troops whose mission is to end the abuses of the former dictatorship. Instead, they appear to have turned a blind eye to the constant reports of torture from Iraq’s prisons.

Among the worst offenders cited are the Interior Ministry police commandos, a force made up largely of former army officers and special forces soldiers drawn from the ranks of Saddam’s dissolved army. They are seen as the most effective tool the coalition has in fighting the insurgency.

“It’s a gruesome situation we are in,” a senior Iraqi official said. “You have to understand the situation when the special commandos were formed last August. They were taking on an awful lot of people in a great hurry. Many of them were people who served in Saddam’s forces . . . The choice of taking them on was a difficult one. There was no supervision. There still really isn ’t any, and that applies to all the security forces. They’re all doing this.”

“This”, said Saad Sultan, the Human Rights Ministry official in charge of monitoring Iraq’s prisons, includes random arrests, sometimes without a warrant, hanging people from ceilings and beating them, attaching electrodes to ears, hands, feet and genitals, and holding hot irons to flesh.

Four of his 22 monitors have already quit their jobs, leaving a handful of lawyers to inspect scores of prisons.

“Two months ago I could go into a prison and more than 50 per cent of the people had been ill-treated,” Mr Sultan said. Six months ago the situation had been even worse.

Reports of torture and abuse are commonplace. Omar, a 22-year-old student, said that he was picked up in a night raid on his home in Baghdad by police commandos, who dragged him away from his family to a detention facility. No one told him where he was or what he was accused of, he said. As he was marched into prison, policemen lined up to beat him and his fellow detainees. The prisoners’ handcuffs were tightened until the men screamed.

The next day, he and his neighbour were blindfolded and transported to another facility, where his neighbour collapsed unconscious during a beating. He was then led into an interrogation room, where a policeman attached electrodes to his thumbs and toes. “I immediately asked what they wanted and he said something like, ‘You have been targeting police and national guardsmen’. Without waiting for my response, he switched on the electricity, then kept on turning it off and on until I could hardly breathe.

“I screamed under torture,” Omar said. “It’s not a place to prove your courage. These guys are trying to kill you for nothing.” He was released without charge after 12 days.

The abuse has not gone unnoticed by the coalition, but little has been done to address it. A US State Department report in February stated that Iraqi authorities had been accused of “arbitrary deprivation of life, torture, impunity, poor prison conditions — particularly in pre-trial detention facilities — and arbitrary arrest and detention.” A Human Rights Watch report also noted that “unlawful arrest, long-term incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment of detainees (including children) by Iraqi authorities have become routine and commonplace”.

Evidence of extra-judicial killings by the security forces has also come to light. Mr Sultan is investigating the case of three members of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary wing of one of the main Shia parties in government, who were arrested by police, handcuffed and beaten to death.

An Iraqi official said that the Iraqi National Guard, the US-trained paramilitary police, regularly disposed of the corpses of its victims by throwing them in the river. “The problem is that some people have still got that training from the past,” he said. “You have ten or twelve of them in the same unit working, and if they seize terrorists they will torture or kill them.”

He added that while the de facto death squads were not part of government policy, little was being done to counteract them. “These are exceptional times. It’s an emergency.”

General Adnan Thabet, the commandos’ commander and a special adviser to the Interior Minister, was a senior officer under Saddam. He was sentenced to death for plotting against the former dictator and was tortured after his sentence was commuted.

He denied any allegation of torture, but admitted: “This is a dirty war. We are the only ones with the nerves to fight it.”

---

So much for removal of Saddam's regime, DodgyAgent, or perhaps its okay so long as they torture in the name of the West?