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By MICHAEL ROSTON
April 20, 2010 "Trueslant" -- Late on Sunday, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the danger remains that Iraq may still slide back into Saddam Hussein-style tyranny. Ned Parker reported on the shocking details – a secret jail under the authority of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s military office at the Old Muthanna airport in Baghdad:
The alleged brutal treatment of prisoners at the facility raised concerns that the country could drift back to its authoritarian past.
Commanders initially resisted efforts to inspect the prison but relented and allowed visits by two teams of inspectors, including Human Rights Minister Wijdan Salim. Inspectors said they found that the 431 prisoners had been subjected to appalling conditions and quoted prisoners as saying that one of them, a former colonel in President Saddam Hussein’s army, had died in January as a result of torture.
“More than 100 were tortured. There were a lot of marks on their bodies,” said an Iraqi official familiar with the inspections. “They beat people, they used electricity. They suffocated them with plastic bags, and different methods.”
An internal U.S. Embassy report quotes Salim as saying that prisoners had told her they were handcuffed for three to four hours at a time in stress positions or sodomized.
“One prisoner told her that he had been raped on a daily basis, another showed her his undergarments, which were entirely bloodstained,” the memo reads.
This story was probably set to lead off foreign coverage this morning, especially with the results of Maliki’s re-election fight against former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi still up for grabs….until Prime Minister Maliki appeared on the scene to announce in a press conference that Iraqi commandos in a joint raid with US forces had killed two senior al Qaida in Iraq or ‘Islamic State of Iraq’ leaders. And then suddenly, it was as though the the secret torture site had never been uncovered!
You won’t find reference to it in Tim Arango’s coverage in the New York Times. Ernesto Londono elides mention of the Muthanna in his report for the Washington Post as well. And Yochi J. Dreazen steers clear of it in the Wall Street Journal, too. And of course it wasn’t on Vice President Biden’s mind when he touted the mission in a press conference today – of course, hours after Maliki got to tee off the announcement.
But these reports do reveal a couple of crucial facts. For instance, the Post notes that the two leading Al Qaida in Iraq figures – Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi – were killed in an operation late on Saturday night/very early Sunday morning, i.e. less than 24 hours prior to the LA Times’s newsbreak on Old Muthanna. And the Journal reports that DNA testing on the corpses of the two killed leaders by the American military had not yet been completed to confirm their identities. Is it possible that they weren’t certain of who they had killed, or whether this was the opportune moment to announce it?
So let’s total this up: The US helps Iraq kill two top al Qaida leaders in Iraq, but the US sits on the development for more than 24 hours, and it wasn’t clear that Maliki had the DNA evidence before he claimed credit for the mission. But it sure led the day in terms of American interest in foreign news.
Meanwhile, what secret torture prisons in Iraq are you referring to? You must be talking about Afghanistan…
There is nothing civil about civil wars!
