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Monday, August 20, 2001

Index: "New" Iraq

Saddam Hussein now sits in a prison cell, and Iraqi men and women are no longer carried to torture chambers and rape rooms ...

-- Bush, 2004

The promise of a new Iraq free from human rights abuse was hard to argue with, even for those of us who opposed the invasion. Unfortunately, this promise to the Iraqi people has been broken. Now the Ministry of Interior and its paramilitary police commandos like the Wolf Brigade regularly abduct, torture, and murder Iraqis. The old patterns are reestablishing themselves.

The American public were given an opporunity to avert this crisis during the Abu Ghraib scandal. But instead of taking a firm stand against torture, they chose to disregard it as "a few bad apples" and "hazing". Because of their negligence, the problem has spread. Initially the Ministry under Allawi worked in concert with the US military, or while US forces looked on in approval. Now the structure has grown its own connections with militias, feeding and feeding off the sectarian violence, increasing the threat of full-blown civil war.

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