08 April 2013

Torture, again

The UK Guardian article Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres is a cavalcade of horror. It pains me to excerpt it; almost every sentence is stunning.

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.

....

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

Petraeus is implicated. Military advisors who helped set up the death squads in El Salvador back in the ’80s are implicated. The leads came from the WikiLeaks documents that put Bradley Manning in prison. Torture victims were shown on a reality TV show in Iraq.

I had this stupid fantasy that I'd be able to retire my tag for the horror on this blog thanks to Obama. How naïve I am.

We need to be sending people to the The Hague for this.

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