LAT: Police Tied to Death Squads (Iraq's hwy patrol)

[Rose Siding]

U.S. military officials say they suspect Iraq's highway patrol, staffed largely by Shiites, is deeply involved in torture and killings.

By Solomon Moore, Times Staff Writer


BAGHDAD — A 1,500-member Iraqi police force with close ties to Shiite militia groups has emerged as a focus of investigations into suspected death squads working within the country's Interior Ministry.

Iraq's national highway patrol was established largely to stave off insurgent attacks on roadways. But U.S. military officials, interviewed over the last several days, say they suspect the patrol of being deeply involved in illegal detentions, torture and extrajudicial killings.
....
"You've got the facilities protection service, the public order brigades, the commandos, the highway patrol, the regular police, the traffic police, patrol officers," said a second U.S. military official.

"Who knows who they all are? Nobody controls them but the minister," the officer said, referring to Interior Minister Bayan Jabr.

Jabr, a Shiite with close ties to the Badr Brigade, a paramilitary group, has been at the center of allegations of abuse at the hands of Iraqi security forces. The minister's notoriety rose last year as the bodies of hundreds of men — mostly Sunni Arabs — started appearing in sewage treatment plants, garbage dumps and desert ravines. Most of the bodies showed signs of torture and execution-style killings. Many families of the deceased said their kin had last been seen in the back of a police vehicle.........MORE........

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-deathsquad21feb21,0,6612561.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[libodem]

1. I hate Bush

History will see him as the author of a second Holocaust. Nazi bastard. I blame him for all of this.

[Mithras61]

2. Paging Mr. Negroponte...

Your death squads are awaiting your orders & direction... :sarcasm:

Wasn't one of W_rong's rationalizations that Saddam was a nasty evil man who tortured his own people?

[rodeodance]

3. Revenge is part ofthe culture

[Rose Siding]

4. The Iraqi minister wants to investigate "quietly, without any media"

How cheneyesque.

snip>
Two U.S. Embassy officials said Monday that Iraqi authorities were conducting visits of Interior Ministry jails and prisons, but declined to release details about the facilities.

Kamal, the ministry's intelligence chief, said of the detention probe, "we are still investigating this, but it is better if we do this quietly, without any media."

[slaveplanet]

5. Is there anybody who couldn't see

this coming?....ANYBODY?

[Mandate My Ass]

6. Except the Pentagon already authorized this

and sent Negroponte there because of his relevant experience in Central America.

‘The Salvador Option’
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq

Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

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