Proof of US orchestration of death squad killings in Iraq

Probably everyone remembers the discovery of the Jadiriyah detention facility in November 2005. US troops were reported to have uncovered the prison in their hunt for a missing person, only to discover some 170 detainees in horrific conditions, many of them clearly the victims of obscene tortures. Although it was admitted that the facility belonged to the Interior Ministry and that the detainees were held by a secretive Interior Ministry force known as the Special Investigations Unit, the story was quickly shuffled away as yet another example of the work of Shiite militiamen, in this instance, as was the vogue at that time, the Badr Brigade. Myriad promises were forthcoming both from the US and Iraqi governments that investigations would be rapidly carried out and better supervision would in the future be applied to Iraqi-run detention facilities. For instance, the Iraqi government assured the world that a ministerial level investigation would rapidly be carried out, while US officials promised a legal team to go through the detainees' files and a US embassy spokesman stated that Justice Department and FBI officers would provide technical assistance. Of course, given the scale of the abuse (flayings, burnings, drillings, etc.) and the proximity of the perpetrators to the Iraqi government (by dint of working for the Interior Ministry as well as by any possible Badr-Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq links) and to the US occupation which had, after all, established them (as numerous reports have amply documented, e.g., Knight Ridder, May 9, 2005), such investigations were grossly less than what was urgently required–a full and public criminal investigation by independent international agencies. Even these limited promises came to nothing, as the UN Human Rights Office in Iraq recently highlighted. What we have actually seen is neither investigation nor prosecutions, despite the fact that Jadiriyah lies at the heart of the state of fear that Iraq undeniably now is. In October last year, I had the privilege to interview one of the victims of that terrible abuse, the distinguished former professor of Pedagogy at Baghdad University, Tareq Samarree, who had been seized from his home in March 2005 by plain-clothes Interior Ministry personnel without charge. Samarree, who provided a horrific first-hand account of the torture that he had suffered as well as details of others who had died and of the disappearance of his son within the Iraqi detention system, never had sight of any hint of judicial process nor any access to the outside world. What made Samarree's story most striking were the details of his release. Samarree's physical condition was so bad when the American soldiers discovered the facility that he, along with around a dozen other detainees, was instantly taken to a local hospital. Here, he and his companions remained without access to lawyers, journalists, officials or even a telephone. In fact, it quickly became clear that these victims of torture were to be returned to Iraqi detention. Samarree, another of whose sons lives in the United States, was fortunate to be able to persuade an American solider to take pity on him and assist him and two of his companions to escape. The last words the soldier said to Samarree were, "Run, run. Don't look back!" Within days, Samarree had arranged for himself and his family to flee the country. He is now in Europe, where he is claiming political asylum. The full details of Samarree's story and a detailed account of the US-built Iraqi intelligence apparatus are contained in the article "Ghosts of Jadiriyah," published by the Brussels Tribunal. It should be noted that the story was offered on the one-year anniversary of discovery of the Jadiryah facility to a range of mainstream media publications, including New Yorker, New Statesman, the Independent, The Big Issue, as well as to the radical left publication Z Magazine. Of them all, only the New Statesmen and Z Magazine were courteous enough even to reply to affirm their rejection. It seemed that Samarree's remarkable story and any further interest in Jadiriyah were simply off the agenda. But Jadiriyah, with its ghosts and its horror, will not go away. On Feb. 7, 2007, another former inmate from Jadiriyah, Abbas Z Abid, presented his sworn testimony at the international peace conference in Kuala Lumpur. Like Samarree's, his description of the torture that he and others underwent is almost too harrowing to bear. What sets his testimony apart and completes our understanding of the grim world of Iraq's secret prisons are the dates of his incarceration. Abid, an electrical engineer from Falluja who was the Chief Engineer in Baghdad's Science and Technology Ministry, was arrested in August 2005, but was not released until October 2006. That means that Abid, like Samarree, was held when the American soldiers raided the facility, but his ordeal did not end there. In fact, not only does Abid describe the ongoing tortures that he was repeatedly subjected to after the US intervention, as well as describing the tortures that continued to be inflicted on fellow inmates, including the use of Black and Decker drills and other power tools (Abid names eight fellow detainees who died from their injuries), but Abid states that "American troops have visited the prison many times and therefore cannot deny the existence of such a prison." The implications of these two testimonies as well as the absence of independent and public scrutiny are obvious. The occupation has done nothing at all to halt abuse at the Interior Ministry's network of secret prisons or curtail in any way the culture of impunity in which they exist. And let's be absolutely clear what we are talking about here. This is as close as we can get to the tide of sectarian violence sweeping Iraq, whose victims are almost invariably arrested by Interior Ministry personnel, who are then horribly tortured within Interior Ministry prisons and whose bodies finally surface in abandoned lots, are dredged from rivers, are buried in shallow graves in the desert or left as human detritus around sewage works. (Former human rights chief in Iraq John Pace stated that the majority of killings were being carried out by groups under the control of the Interior Ministry, while the Iraqi Organization for Follow-up and Monitoring in Iraq found that in 92 percent of some 3,498 cases of extrajudicial killing, the victims had been arrested by Interior Ministry forces.) Such would undoubtedly have been the final fate of Samarree and Abid's hapless fellow detainees. Of course the Americans have always been aware of the existence of this and other horrific dungeons within Interior Ministry facilities. How could they not be? They set them up and continue to operate from the same facilities! And for any who would question the validity of Abid's testimony that American forces were regular visitors, his story is confirmed by Solomon Moore, writing in The Los Angeles Times (July 9, 2006), who stated that the US military had been at the facility before the November raid! And the same happened in Basra. After it was revealed by the Plaid Cymru [member of parliament] Adam Price that British trained policemen had tortured prisoners to death with drills, we discovered, through The New York Times (!!), that American intelligence officers had been working alongside them at the Jamiyat police station, where they passed on names of suspects knowing that those suspects would end up as the victims of death squads. That is their modus operandi and it is duplicated by British military intelligence units, like the Joint Support Group, who brought their nefarious experience from Northern Ireland (where, as Chris Floyd has recently documented, they orchestrated sectarian murder through the Ulster Defense Association) straight to Iraq. Thus in Basra we find a paramilitary death squad outfit called the Revenge of God (Thar Allah) nurtured and protected by the British, linked to police intelligence and given control of nightly curfews, despite its boasts of killing members of the former state (see "Ghosts of Jadiriyah" for a more complete account)! Since the mainstream Western media will not hear such voices as Samarree and Abid, it is absolutely beholden on every decent-minded individual as well as every organization that opposes the illegal occupation of Iraq to demand the truth and bring an end to this monstrous culture of impunity. Jean Paul Sartre noted that the American assault on Vietnam was not only an attack against that nation, but an act of violence directed against the whole of humanity. If we are to have any hope of rescuing our own collective humanity, we must raise our voices to bring an end to the screaming from Iraq. Max Fuller is an activist in the Colombia Solidarity Campaign and a member of the advisory committee of the Brussels Tribunal