US Training of Death Squads in Iraq? - War Is A Crime .org

Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Iraqi Sunnis and opposition leaders, including Aiham Al Sammarae(as I wrote for TomPaine ) have charged that the Iraqi government has been runningassassination teams. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, have been killed already, including twoattorneys for those accused in the kangaroo court set up to convict Saddam Hussein and otherformer Iraqi government officials. The Post suggests that the prison uncovered in Baghdad was a"secret torture center run with the help of intelligence agents from neighboring Iran." Read thatagain: intelligence agents from Iran.Last week I had a chilling encounter with one of the monsters responsible for the Murder Inc.units run by Badr and by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). At aWashington think tank, I met Adel Abdul Mahdi, Iraq's so-called deputy president and a SCIRIofficial. When I asked Mahdi about reports that Iraqi police and interior ministry squads werecarrying out assassinations and other illegal acts, he didn't deny it --- but, he said, such acts weremerely a reaction to the terrorism of the resistance. "There is terrorism on only one side," he said."Inappropriate acts by the other side, by the police --- this is something else. This is a reaction."As far as civilian casualties in Sunni towns, he had this to say: "You can't fight terrorism withoutattacking some popular areas."I also asked him about the Badr Brigade, the Iranian-backed paramilitary force that is the maindomestic army propping up Abdul Mahdi's Shiite coalition, he said "they are disarmed," which ispatently absurd. He added: "They participate fully in the political process."Abdul Mahdi had this to say about Fallujah, the city that was obliterated by the U.S. armedforces a year ago. "It is one of the most peaceful areas in Iraq. I don't know whether the peopleare happy or not. But it is one of the most peaceful cities."Make no mistake. The gangsters now running Iraq are our creatures.Earlier this week, I was speaking with someone who was involved in the pre-2003 war planningeffort vis-àà-vis Iraq. As I mentioned in TPM Cafe , he told me that some of his colleaguesrealized that the New Iraq would probably be taken over not by Ahmed Chalabi, but by the Shiitefundamentalists. Those radical-right parties (along with the Kurds) were the real forces that tookpart in Chalabi's INC bloc. And the United States consciously supported the toppling of Saddamknowing that radical Shiites would be the chief beneficiaries. This was not an intelligencefailure. We knew it. This was an explicit decision by the neocon-dominated cabal to replaceSaddam with Shiite crazies. Now, we see that those crazies are running Saddam-like tortureprisons where they use electric drills and flay the skin off Sunni captives.The military in Iraq is scrambling to limit the damage from the stunning revelation about the menwho are running Iraq today. We toppled Saddam --- and in his place we've installed a hundredmini-Saddams.Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped UnleashFundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writerbased in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is acontributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent101