http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1878.shtmlProbably everyone remembers the discovery of the Jadiriyah detention facility in November 2005. US troops were reported to have uncovered the prison in their hunt for a missing person, only to discover some 170 detainees in horrific conditions, many of them clearly the victims of obscene tortures. Although it was admitted that the facility belonged to the Interior Ministry and that the detainees were held by a secretive Interior Ministry force known as the Special Investigations Unit, the story was quickly shuffled away as yet another example of the work of Shiite militiamen, in this instance, as was the vogue at that time, the Badr Brigade <1>.
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In October last year, I had the privilege to interview one of the victims of that terrible abuse, the distinguished former professor of Pedagogy at Baghdad University, Tareq Samarree, who had been seized from his home in March 2005 by plain-clothes Interior Ministry personnel without charge. Professor Samarree, who provided a horrific first-hand account of the torture that he had suffered as well as details of others who had died and of the disappearance of his son within the Iraqi detention system, never had sight of any hint of judicial process nor any access to the outside world.
What made Professor Samarree’s story most striking were the details of his release. Professor Samarree’s physical condition was so bad when the American soldiers discovered the facility that he, along with around a dozen other detainees, was instantly taken to a local hospital. Here, he and his companions remained without access to lawyers, journalists, officials or even a telephone. In fact, it quickly became clear that these victims of torture were to be returned to Iraqi detention. Professor Samarree, another of whose sons lives in the United States, was fortunate to be able to persuade an American solider to take pity on him and assist him and two of his companions to escape. The last words the soldier said to Professor Samarree were, “Run, run. Don’t look back!”
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The full details of Professor Samarree’s story and a detailed account of the US-built Iraqi intelligence apparatus are contained in the article Ghosts of Jadiriyah, published by the BRussells Tribunal. It should be noted that the story was offered on the one-year anniversary of discovery of the Jadiryah facility to a range of mainstream media publications, including New Yorker, New Statesman, the Independent, The Big Issue, as well as to the radical left publication Z Mag. Of them all, only the New Statesmen and Z Mag were courteous enough even to reply to affirm their rejection. It seemed that Professor Samarree’s remarkable story and any further interest in Jadiriyah were simply off the agenda.
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On 7 February 2007, another former inmate from Jadiriyah, Abbas Z Abid, presented his sworn testimony at the international peace conference in Kuala Lumpur. Like Professor Samarree’s, his description of the torture that he and others underwent is almost too harrowing to bear. What sets his testimony apart and completes our understanding of the grim world of Iraq’s secret prisons are the dates of his incarceration. Mr Abid, an electrical engineer from Fallujah who was the Chief Engineer in Baghdad’s Science and Technology Ministry, was arrested in August 2005, but was not released until October 2006. That means that Mr Abid, like Dr Samarree, was held when the American soldiers raided the facility, but his ordeal did not end there. In fact, not only does Mr Abid describe the ongoing tortures that he was repeatedly subjected to after the US intervention, as well as describing the tortures that continued to be inflicted on fellow inmates, including the use of Black and Decker drills and other power tools (Mr Abid names eight fellow detainees who died from their injuries), but Mr Abid states that “American troops have visited the prison many times and therefore cannot deny the existence of such a prison.”
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Of course the Americans have always been aware of the existence of this and other horrific dungeons within Interior Ministry facilities. How could they not be? They set them up and continue to operate from the same facilities! And for any who would question the validity of Mr Abid’s testimony that American forces were regular visitors, his story is confirmed by Solomon Moore writing in the Los Angeles Times (9 July 2006), who stated that the US military had been at the facility before the November raid! And the same happened in Basra. After it was revealed by the Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price that British trained policemen had tortured prisoners to death with drills, we discovered, through the New York Times (!!), that American intelligence officers had been working alongside them at the Jamiyat police station, where they passed on names of suspects knowing that those suspects would end up as the victims of death squads. That is their modus operandi and it is duplicated by British military intelligence units, like the Joint Support Group, who brought their nefarious experience from Northern Ireland (where, as Chris Floyd has recently documented, they orchestrated sectarian murder through the Ulster Defence Association) straight to Iraq. Thus in Basra we find a paramilitary death squad outfit called the Revenge of God (Thar Allah) nurtured and protected by the British, linked to police intelligence and given control of nightly curfews, despite its boasts of killing members of the former state (see Ghosts of Jadiriyah for a more complete account)!
Since the mainstream Western media will not hear such voices as Professor Samarree and Mr Abid, it is absolutely beholden on every decent-minded individual as well as every organisation that opposes the illegal occupation of Iraq to demand the truth and bring an end to this monstrous culture of impunity.
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america, the country that tortures
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