Torture and Death Are the Norm in Iraq - Just don't tell anybody

[MrScorpio]

By Robert Fisk
Republished from Independent UK
Up to 20 per cent of the bodies are never identified, many of the dead have been tortured or disfigured

The Baghdad morgue is a fearful place of heat and stench and mourning, the cries of relatives echoing down the narrow, foetid laneway behind the pale-yellow brick medical centre where the authorities keep their computerised records. So many corpses are being brought to the mortuary that human remains are stacked on top of each other.

Unidentified bodies must be buried within days for lack of space – but the municipality is so overwhelmed by the number of killings that it can no longer provide the vehicles and personnel to take the remains to cemeteries.

July was the bloodiest month in Baghdad’s modern history – in all, 1,100 bodies were brought to the city’s mortuary; executed for the most part, eviscerated, stabbed, bludgeoned, tortured to death. The figure is secret.

We are not supposed to know that the Iraqi capital’s death toll last month was only 700 short of the total American fatalities in Iraq since April of 2003. Of the dead, 963 were men – many with their hands bound, their eyes taped and bullets in their heads – and 137 women. The statistics are as shameful as they are horrifying. For these are the men and women we supposedly came to “liberate” – and about whose fate we do not care.

The figures for this month cannot, of course, yet be calculated. But last Sunday, the mortuary received the bodies of 36 men and women, all killed by violence. By 8am on Monday, nine more human remains had been received. By midday, the figure had reached 25.

“I consider this a quiet day,” one of the mortuary officials said to me as we stood close to the dead. So in just 36 hours – from dawn on Sunday to midday on Monday, 62 Baghdad civilians had been killed. No Western official, no Iraqi government minister, no civil servant, no press release from the authorities, no newspaper, mentioned this terrible statistic. The dead of Iraq – as they have from the beginning of our illegal invasion – were simply written out of the script.

Officially they do not exist.

The rest: http://www.guerrillanews.com/headlines/4360/Secrets_of_the_morgue_Baghdad_s_body_count

Victims of insurgent bomb attacks notwithstanding, this can only mean one thing; both sides of the Iraq Civil War are engaging in the most heinous of death squad operations.

Everybody knows it and in concert with the MSM, they are trying to keep the truth from getting out.

I have no doubt that our troops are providing cover for Iraqi govt. death squad ops, in the same mode that was done in Central America during the proxy wars of the 1980's.

This is absolutely sickening that we've come to this point again:


Nuns pray over the bodies of four American sisters killed by the military in El Salvador in 1980

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/

[teryang]

1. A veteran of multiple tours in war zones, home from Iraq

...met a close friend of mine by chance at a firing range last weekend. My friend inquired respectfully how things were going in Iraq, seeking to take advantage of a primary source. This gray haired veteran who had done Vietnam, Iraq I and also had combat experience in latin America, said it was the worst combat environment he had ever experienced. He was working in the medical field in Iraq, in a change from his prior combat MOS. Even as a medical provider he was subject to unexpected shootings, had to carry a rifle, in addition to assisting at surgeries for people shot and blown apart on a daily basis.

[El Fuego]

2. Thanks for the link.