The New York Times reported this morning in a story titled “Iraq Prison Raid Finds a New Case of Mistreatment” by Edward Wong that the Iraqi government is mistreating prisoners:
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Monday, Dec. 12 – American and Iraqi forces raiding an Iraqi government detention center last Thursday in Baghdad discovered more than 600 prisoners packed into a cramped space, 13 of them mistreated so badly they had to be taken to a hospital, a senior American official said early Monday.
The raid was the second in the past month in which American forces have uncovered mistreatment of prisoners at the hands of Interior Ministry officials. On Nov. 15, soldiers with the Third Infantry Division, charged with controlling Baghdad, entered a ministry bunker in central Baghdad and found 169 malnourished prisoners, some of them tortured. Most of those prisoners were Sunni Arabs.
The detention center raided Thursday, situated to the east of the Tigris River, is run by a commando unit from the Interior Ministry, which oversees the country’s police forces, said the senior American official, Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill, a spokesman for the American detention system in Iraq. When members of the search team entered the building, he said, they found “overcrowded” conditions that prompted them to begin transferring the prisoners.
“Thirteen of them were removed due to medical reasons and sent to a hospital,” the colonel said in a telephone interview, declining to specify exactly what signs of abuse or torture, if any, the prisoners might have exhibited. Iraqi officials are still investigating the findings, he added. A total of 625 prisoners had been kept in the center.
Does anyone know what we are fighting for over there? We kicked out one abusive government and put in another abusive government that somehow we are managing to call Democratic because they voted for themselves.
Life in the Third Layer 