Gareth Porter: Torture of Iraqis part of US dirty war

[unhappycamper]

Torture of Iraqis part of US dirty war
By Gareth Porter
Nov 3, 2010

WASHINGTON - The revelation by WikiLeaks of a United States military order directing US forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis has been treated in news reports as yet another case of lack of concern by the US military about detainee abuse.

But the deeper significance of the order, which has been missed by the news media, is that it was part of a larger US strategy of exploiting Shi'ite sectarian hatred against Sunnis to help suppress the Sunni insurgency when Sunnis had rejected the US war.

And General David Petraeus was a key figure in developing the strategy of using Shi'ite and Kurdish forces to suppress Sunnis in 2004-2005.

The strategy involved the deliberate deployment of Shi'ite and Kurdish police commandos in areas of Sunni insurgency, in the full knowledge that they were torturing Sunni detainees, as the reports released by WikiLeaks show.

That strategy inflamed Sunni fears of Shi'ite rule and was a major contributing factor to the rise of al-Qaeda's influence in the Sunni areas. The escalating Sunni-Shi'ite violence it produced led to the massive sectarian warfare of 2006 in Baghdad in which tens of thousands of civilians - mainly Sunnis - were killed.