More Secret Prisons, Tortured Confessions: The Debasement of Society and Politics Through Torture

Source: Firedoglake

By: Jeff Kaye Monday May 3, 2010 6:07 am

graphic adapted from: phill.d via Flickr

Almost every day, a new revelation surfaces regarding the United States’ role in spreading and perpetuating the crime of torture. In only the past few weeks, we’ve seen reported the following:

U.S.-backed Iraqi Regime Ran Secret Torture Prisons

First reported by Ned Parker at the Los Angeles Times, an April 19 story revealed that Iraqi army operations in the province of Ninevah last October swept up hundred of Sunnis, sending them off to a secret prison at the Muthanna military airfield run by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s own security office.

According to a Human Rights Watch report, as the New York Times noted, “The torture of Iraqi detainees at a secret prison in Baghdad was far more systematic and brutal than initially reported.” Approximately three hundred prisoners were said to have been tortured between September and December 2009. During this period, Maliki was a visitor to the Obama White House, complete with Oval Office photo ops.

According to HRW:

All the detainees interviewed described the same methods of torture employed by their Iraqi interrogators. The jailers suspended the detainees handcuffed and blindfolded upside down by means of two bars, one placed behind their calves and the other against their shins. All had terrible scabs and bruising on their legs. The interrogators then kicked, whipped and beat the detainees. Interrogators also placed a dirty plastic bag over the detainee’s head to close off his air supply. Typically, when the detainee passed out from this ordeal, his interrogators awakened him with electric shocks to his genitals or other parts of his body….

Read more: http://firedoglake.com/

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I want to know how a country that has such heavy bagage is able to move forward?

Ahem.

I don't know how we will move forward either unless we bring the architects to justice.

of circumstances would be a healthy start....