Horror in Iraq: who is mimicking who?

Two Iraqi businessmen report, as a part of their lawsuit in US court, that they were thrown into the lion cage in one of Saddam's palaces, shortly after the invasion of their country, by US troops. They were beaten repeatedly and asked where Saddam was and about weapons of mass destruction, and experienced numerous "mock executions."

And this same week US troops burst into the putrid basement of a building of the Ministry of the Interior in a Baghdad suburb, to discover 173 undocumented, tormented, tortured prisoners. There were teenagers in the group, and according to some, the vast majority were Sunni Arabs. (This discovery did not surprise many Iraqis, especially Sunni.)

The Deputy Ministry of the Interior, Hussein Kamal, after inspecting the prisoners, which he claims he was totally unaware were in the Ministry's custody, said to CNN, "I saw signs of physical abuse by brutal beating, one or two detainees were paralysed and some had their skin peeled off various parts of their bodies."

In the past year numerous reports, by Sunnis, Iraqi human rights groups, Western human rights groups, and major western media have detailed the brutal free reign of certain elements Iraqi defense forces.

The building in question was reportedly run by "police commandos" and the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior has vehemently denied their connection to a group with links to Iran called the Supreme Council for Iraqi Revolution.

The Iraqi government consented to these raids after meetings with the American ambassador and military commanders, according to American officials.

In a rather ironic twist, after Abu Ghraib and last week's allegations of secret CIA detention facilities in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, Brigadier General Karl Horst of the 3rd Infantry Division, the commander of the raid, stated to the LA Times that he would "hit every last one" of the secret detention facilities.

It seems clear that any investigation into this discovery will prove that the combination of torture and impunity that the Bush administration has cultivated during the occupation has indeed provided fertile ground for the Iraqi version to flourish.