Ex-Official: Iraq Abuses Growing Worse

[cal04]

Australia - Human rights abuses in Iraq are as bad now as they were under Saddam Hussein, as lawlessness and sectarian violence sweep the country, the former U.N. human rights chief in Iraq said Thursday.

John Pace, who last month left his post as director of the human rights office at the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, said the level of extra-judicial executions and torture is soaring, and morgue workers are being threatened by both government-backed militia and insurgents not to properly investigate deaths.

"Under Saddam, if you agreed to forgo your basic right to freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK," Pace said in an interview with The Associated Press. "But now, no. Here, you have a primitive, chaotic situation where anybody can do anything they want to anyone."

Pace, who was born in Malta but now resides in Australia, said that while the scale of atrocity under Saddam was "daunting," now nobody is safe from abuse. "It is certainly as bad," he said. "It extends over a much wider section of the population than it did under Saddam." Pace, currently a visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, spoke as sectarian tensions in Iraq push the country to the brink of civil war.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060302/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_human_rights

[CoffeeCat]

1. This is such a sick farce...

...Look at what we have done!!

Look at what we have paid for, with our tax dollars!!

We told the chimp it wouldn't work. The end result will be the same as Lebanon.

As Tim Robbins said in "War of the Worlds", "Occupations don't ever work."

When all is said and done--this will be deemed a miserable, sickening failure--worse than Vietnam.

The only thing that helps me feel the slightest bit better--is that Junior will be alive when he sees and hears how history will judge him. He told Woodward that "we won't know if it will be a success, because we'll be dead." HA! I've got news for Junior, it isn't going to take decades to file this shit farce into the failure column.

Junior will live the rest of his life hearing what a miserable failure he is.