What we have accomplished, three

A little over a month ago, paramilitary police commandos arrested Hassan an-Ni'ami, a senior official of the Muslim Clerics Association, at a family home in northern Baghdad. TV news in Iraq described it as the capture of a senior "terrorist commander."

Perhaps Ni'ami was a terrorist; he surely was a supporter of resistance to the occupation. Or maybe he was just someone who was a little too vocal in his opinions. We'll never know: There was no trial, no presentation of evidence, no jury. Instead, twelve hours later, 24 hours after his arrest,

his body turned up in the morgue. ...

There are police-issue handcuffs still attached to one wrist, from which he was hanged long enough to cause his hands and wrists to swell. There are burn marks on his chest, as if someone has placed something very hot near his right nipple and moved it around.

A little lower are a series of horizontal welts, wrapping around his body and breaking the skin as they turn around his chest, as if he had been beaten with something flexible, perhaps a cable. There are other injuries: a broken nose and smaller wounds that look like cigarette burns.

An arm appears to have been broken and one of the higher vertebrae is pushed inwards. There is a cluster of small, neat circular wounds on both sides of his left knee. At some stage an-Ni'ami seems to have been efficiently knee-capped. It was not done with a gun - the exit wounds are identical in size to the entry wounds, which would not happen with a bullet. Instead it appears to have been done with something like a drill.

What actually killed him however were the bullets fired into his chest at close range, probably by someone standing over him as he lay on the ground. The last two hit him in the head.

The admittedly "gruesome detail" was provided in an important article in yesterday's Sunday Observer (UK), which says that "evidence is emerging that appears to substantiate" charges that such torture is "increasingly prevalent in the new Iraq."

Six months ago, Human Rights Watch (HRW) laid out a catalogue of alleged abuses being applied to those suspected of terrorism in Iraq and called for an independent complaints body in Iraq. ...

To add to HRW's allegations of beatings, electric shocks, arbitrary arrest, forced confessions and detention without trial, The Observer can add its own charges. These include the most brutal kinds of torture, with methods resurrected from the time of Saddam; of increasingly widespread extra-judicial executions; and of the existence of a 'ghost' network of detention facilities - in parallel with those officially acknowledged - that exist beyond all accountability to international human rights monitors, NGOs and even human rights officials of the new Iraqi government.

What is most shocking is that it is done under the noses of US and UK officials, some of whom admit that they are aware of the abuses being perpetrated by units who are diverting international funding to their dirty war. ...

[W]hat is extraordinary is the sense of impunity with which the torture, intimidation and murder is taking place. ...

It is not just in Baghdad. Credible reports exist of Arab prisoners in Kirkuk being moved to secret detention facilities in Kurdistan, while other centres are alleged in Samarra, in the Holy Cities and in Basra in the south.

While the Observer says that the only open question is the level of official coordination of the torture - is it official policy or the actions of the always-convenient "rogue elements" - it seems clear to me that this question is also already answered:

- The methods in different examples are strikingly similar.

- The various facilities where torture is claimed to have occurred all connect back to a central focus, a single agency: the Ministry of the Interior.

- The ministry, which certainly could take some action against "rogue elements" not only has failed to act on or even respond to the charges, senior officials there refuse to meet with international organizations concerned with human rights.

- It gets worse: Not only can't human rights groups gain access, even other Iraqi officials can't. One is quoted by the Observer as saying "There are places we can get to and know about. But there are dozens of other places we know about where there is no access at all."

- Iraq's own deputy minister of human rights, Aida Ussayran,

concedes that abuses by Iraq's security forces have been getting worse even as her ministry has been trying to re-educate the Iraqi police and army to respect detainee rights.

That is yet another battle that seems to be being lost in the new, shiny, free, democratic Iraq. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss - including being supported by a US government that is willing to turn its head so long as the boss is useful.