Rape, beatings and bribery: Iraqi police out of control

Source: Sunday Times UK

The brief film is deeply disturbing, even in a country famed for its al-Qaeda beheading videos and sniper snuff movies. The young woman, evidently drugged, vomiting and occasionally calling for her mother, tries weakly to stop the grinning man in a white T-shirt and boxer shorts from pulling off her underwear.

She fails. The man, instructing the cameraman to shoot the scene with his mobile phone from various angles, rapes her.

That is not the only shocking aspect of the film, according to Jassim al-Bidawi, former Mayor of Fallujah and now a human rights activist. He has identified the rapist as an Iraqi police officer, and says that the cameraman is one, too. They are thought to have drugged the woman as she visited her husband in a detention centre in Ramadi. Since the rapist's uncle is a senior policeman in the city the attacker is all but untouchable, Mr al-Bidawi says.

In the desperate rush to drag Iraq back from civil war, sweeping powers were granted to its new security forces. Human rights workers, MPs and American officials now believe that they are all too often a law unto themselves: admired when they defeat terrorists but also feared for their widespread abuse of power.

...

“The Iraqi security forces are out of control,” Abu Aliya said. “If you quarrel with a simple soldier, even one out of uniform, he will arrest you and your family. This is happening everywhere, all the time.”

Read more: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article6157590.ece

They are certainly learning from the US.

That would be us. Mission accomplished.

:cry:

We all feel the same way it's pretty horrid stuff. We can spend our lives fighting to make the world a better place though.

:hug:

:hug:

Free people are free to do free things.

Ten years ago Saddam Hussein would have taken this police officer and executed him.

We were lied to. The way we were lied to about the Shah of Iran. We were told the Shah of Iran tortured and maimed and killed his enemies in secret torture chambers in secret prisons. And 30 years later, we are still waiting for the evidence of the secret torture chambers in the secret prisons. Which in reality didn't exist.

The Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein believed in a secular Islamic society. Where women had rights. Where men respected those rights. Where gays and lesbians at least had the right to privacy which the state could not invade. They encouraged education. They promoted culture - reveling in not only their own ancient civilizations but the modern civilization they were creating for their people. They elevated their people. They brought their people out of the Dark Ages of Islam.

But they weren't willing to allow the American and British oil companies to control the oil. And so suddenly they became despots and dictators and tyrants and so we had to liberate the people. We were interested only in liberating the oil. We still do not have the oil of Iran. We will never get it. We will never get the oil of Iraq.

And yet in our quest for it, we have plunged the people of Iran and Iraq back to the Dark Ages of Islam.

Jimmy Carter was lied to. He knows he was lied to. He will rot in hell along with the rest of them for not speaking out and telling the truth finally. The blood of millions is on his hands as well. His hands and the hands of our Congress the past 30 years. All of them.

And it is on the hands of Barack Obama as well who instead of holding someone accountable tells us we must move on. He needs to move on. He is a disgrace. As are we at this point.

We are the monsters. We are the Nazis. We are the good Germans.

summary of the whole situation I have seen. All very sad but all very true.

It's common knowledge that the USA and Britain together overthrew the democratically elected Iranian Mossadegh government in 1953 and installed the Shah as a puppet government.

It was Mossadegh who was going to nationalize the British and American oil holdings in Iraq, the Shah was put there specifically to allow the oil companies to steal Iranian oil from the Iranians.

http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html

Similar stuff from SA - except there was no war there.

As he writes in his introduction: "The history of countries throwing off tyrannical regimes tends to follow a pattern. In the immediate aftermath there is euphoria, accompanied by utopian pledges for the future. Then the new rulers find the business of governing more difficult and messier than they could ever have imagined. They also find that it is far harder to overcome their own past than they had appreciated as they plotted their takeover in prison or in exile. It is in this second stage that the true meaning and trajectory of a revolution unfolds."

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-04-18-growing-pains-in-the-colourful-country

Pure evil. How some people can be so cruel and cowardly never ceases to amaze me.

to police itself. Isn't it?

That is, if it's true that it's rampant. Because of course, that sort of horrible thing occurs everywhere. It occurs here in America many times every day.

If it's rampant, I wonder who would be the people to address the problem of the corrupt police. The government? American forces?

Horrible. Also awful are the girls in Afghanistan who get acid thrown in their faces as they walk to school.

The horrors that that war was brought to Iraq. Of course, thousands were getting killed before. Kurdish children were gassed decades ago. But in some ways, it seems worse for the average citizen there. I don't have a full picture of the country anymore, now, though. I confess I haven't watched a documentary about Iraq in a while. I was watching them up until a couple of years ago.

for another brutal regime

It disgusts me

that our troops are there disgusts me

so BushCo could line his cronies pockets.

These men understand that they are living insanely --

If they live long, IMO, they will live to long regret this time in their lives.

Women everywhere suffer with the rise of the right ---

I can't see how we could hope for a better Iraqi government that one run by another dictator like Saddam. I, nonetheless, hope that a democracy can take hold, but if the Iraqi soldiers and police support anti-democratic elements then how can any democracy result in anything but a civil war?

Especially if you consider the Kurds. The Iraqis deserve better and they could have had better if it was handled in the right way.

It was the hugest blunder in the entire world to get involved in this as deeply as we are.