Iraqi government death squad?

[Sayhey]

Apparent Death Squad Is Linked to Iraqi Ministry
By Nelson Hernandez and Bassam Sebti
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, February 17, 2006; Page A01


BAGHDAD, Feb. 16 -- U.S. and Iraqi authorities discovered an apparent death squad operating within the country's Interior Ministry last month when Iraqi troops prevented a group of highway patrol officers from killing a Sunni Arab man the officers had arrested, an American military spokesman said Thursday.

The 22 men, dressed in the camouflage uniforms of special police commandos, were stopped by chance at an Iraqi army checkpoint in northern Baghdad, according to Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, who gave a detailed account of the incident to the Chicago Tribune for an article published Thursday. When the soldiers asked the police what they were doing, they responded bluntly: They were going to execute their captive. Instead, they wound up in jail.

The men's arrest was first reported this month in the New York Times, which also quoted Peterson, who oversees the training of Iraqi police. The general outlines of the incident were confirmed Thursday in an e-mail from Peterson and by Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a U.S. military spokesman.

The incident is the first hard evidence to support the widely held suspicion among Sunni Arabs that vigilantes in the country's Shiite-dominated police force are rounding up Sunnis and killing them.

The bodies of Sunni men -- bound, shot in the head and left in dumpsters, on side streets and in patches of desert -- have turned up frequently since the middle of last year, shortly after the Shiite-led government was named in April. Such discoveries have been made almost daily in recent months, and police found four bodies on Thursday, two of them in Baghdad, according to the Reuters news agency.

Sunni leaders estimate that 1,600 people have been killed in what they say is a campaign of sectarian violence.

Survivors often say their attackers were dressed in police uniforms and drove police vehicles. Interior Ministry officials have countered that the clothes are easily available on the street and have suggested that the killings have been committed by criminals or militiamen posing as police....

Washington Post
Great coalition government we are building, heh?

[zimv20]

i hear that training for iraqi abu ghraib prison guards is nearing completion, too.

is it true that the proposed US budget has money for rape rooms?

[blackfox]

Honestly, what did people expect?

I hardly qualify as an Expert in any field, but I could've told you that Democracy is not what Iraq needs or what it will get.

Why? Because I've read a little history. At least the British installed a monarchy.

Like it or not, Iraq needed a strong dictator like Hussein to hold the country together - now that he is gone you better either break the country up into a confederation (which would probably be picked apart by neighbors), or find another, slightly nicer strongman to replace him.

It's not that the Neoconservatives are so bad - they are just so naive. Usually that's a charge leveled at Liberals.

We truly live in an Ironic age.