Torture in the Bush Gulag: The Iraqi subsidiaries

"I wouldn't join the International Criminal Court. It's a body based in The Hague where unaccountable judges and prosecutors can pull our troops or diplomats up for trial.

"And I wouldn't join it. And I understand that in certain capitals around the world that that wasn't a popular move. But it's the right move not to join a foreign court that could -- where our people could be prosecuted." - George W. Bush 09/30/04

"Men without conscience are capable of any cruelty the human mind can imagine." - Dick Cheney 01/26/05

I'm not sure if the newly-reported Iraqi "torture houses" qualify as part of the Bush Gulag, since they are run by the SCIRI Shi'a Party under the authority of the new Iraqi government; SCIRI is the largest party in the Iraqi government.

But it's bad.  Bad for the victims, bad for the United States, bad for the fight against the international jihadists.

Robert Dreyfuss has just written a sobering piece about Our Monsters in Iraq TomPaine.com 11/18/05:

It is time to start waving the bloody shirt. There is no longer any doubt that the men that the United States has installed in power in Iraq are monsters. Not only that, but they are monsters armed, trained and supported by George W. Bush's administration. The very same Bush administration that defends torture of captives in the so-called War on Terrorism is using 150,000 U.S. troops to support a regime in Baghdad for which torture, assassination and other war crimes are routine.

So far, it appears that the facts are these: that Iraq's interior ministry, whose top officials, strike forces and police commando units (including the so-called Wolf Brigade) are controlled by paramilitary units fromShiite militias, maintained a medieval torture chamber; that inside that facility, hundreds of mostly Sunni Arab men were bestialized, with electric drills skewering their bones, with their skins flayed off, and more; that roving units of death-squad commandos are killing countless other Sunni Arab men in order to terrorize the Iraqi opposition.

Dreyfuss' new book Devil's Game: How the United Staes Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam describes, as the subtitle suggests, the ways in which US policy has misjudged Islamic fundamentalism for decades, which fatal blowback that we're seeing now.  He has called attention to an aspect of the neoconservatives' worldview that has probably been underestimated, but which time and events are convincing me is probably as Dreyfuss analyzes it: a misguided faith in radical Shi'ism as a potential ally of the United States.

That faith played some role in the infamous Iran-Contra affair, as well as the "October Surprise" dealings of Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign with the ruling extremists in Iran.  In their warmongering 2003 tract An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle and former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote that one of the things the Bush administration should do about  Saudi Arabia is:

Warn the Saudis that anything less than their utmost cooperation in the war on terror will have the severest consequences for the Saudi state. A seldom noted fact about Saudi Arabia is that while the royal family, the government, and the moneyed elite all live on the western, Red Sea side of the country, the oil is located on the eastern, Persian Gulf side. And while the people of the west are almost uniformly Sunni, one-third of the people of the Eastern Province - to whom the oil might well have belonged had the fortunes of battle turned out a little differently in the 1920s - are Shiites. The State Department's most recent biennial human rights report notes "institutionalized discrimination against adherents of the minority Shi'a branch of Islam." The construction of Shiite mosques is not permitted, and the testimony of Shiites is often disregarded in court. Shiite children are required to attend Sunni schools. Shiite leaders have been arbitrarily arrested, tortured, and on occasion murdered. It is not bigotry alone that explains these Saudi actions, but also their fear that the Shiites might someday seek independence for the Eastern Province - and its oil. Independence for the Eastern Province would obviously be a catastrophic outcome for the Saudi state. But it might be a very good outcome for the United States. Certainly it's an outcome to ponder. Even more certainly, we would want the Saudis to know that we are pondering it. The knowledge that the United States has options other than abjectly accepting whatever abuse the Saudis choose to throw our way might have a ... chastening . . . effect on Saudi behavior.  [The ellipses are theirs, presumably to give it a bit of a spy-novel effect.]

Dreyfuss refers us to another post of his (It's Not Just History TPM Cafe 11/17/05), in which he argues that the installation of radical Shi'a was actually the goal of the Bush administration all along.  I'm not entirely convinced on that point, although it's hard to deny that it has been the current result.  It seemed pretty obvious in the 2004 elections for the transitional government that the US was backing the interim prime minister Iyad Allawi, a (theoretically) more secular Shi'a, and his Iraqi National Accord.

In that post, he wrote:

As I mentioned in one of the threads, we continue to make the same mistakes. But we are doing even more creatively, which means that we are indeed learning from our past mistakes! (For the literal among you, I mean that ironically.)

Yesterday I was speaking with someone who was involved in the pre-2003 war planning effort vis a vis Iraq. He told me of the exact moment when some of his colleagues realized that the New Iraq would probably be taken over not by Ahmed Chalabi but by the Shiite fundamentalists. Those radical-right parties (along with the Kurds) were the real forces that took part in Chalabi's INC bloc. And the United States consciously supported the toppling of Saddam knowing that radical Shiites would be the chief beneficiaries. This was not an intelligence failure. We knew it. This was an explicit decision by the neocon-dominated cabal to replace Saddam with Shiite crazies. Now, we see that those crazies are running Saddam-like torture prisons ...

In his TomPaine.com post, Dreyfuss quotes Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr sought to minimize the signficance of the torture houses, observing that at least, "Nobody was beheaded."  Dreyfuss' comment:

So, apparently not beheading innocents is the standard of justice in the New Iraq. And, apparently there may be dozens, scores or hundreds of similar facilities.

And he concludes:

Make no mistake. The gangsters now running Iraq are our creatures. ...

The military in Iraq is scrambling to limit the damage from the stunning revelation about the men who are running Iraq today. We toppled Saddam - ”and in his place we've installed a hundred mini-Saddams.

"The primary goal of torture or the threat of torture is not to obtain convictions for crimes, but to engender and maintain fear." - Jimmy Carter, Our Endangered Values (2005)