US interrogation centers in Iraq till 2009!


Posted by Helena Cobban
April 12, 2005 11:28 AM EST | Link
Filed in Iraq

Rosa Prince of London Daily Mirror has reported that:

    THE US Army plans to remain in Iraq until at least 2009, secret documents obtained by the Mirror reveal.

    Contract tender forms for civilian workers disclose a huge expansion of interrogation and detention centres in Iraq to remain in place for a minimum four more years.

(Chapeau to Friendly Fire of Today in Iraq for the lead.)

Prince adds that:

    According to the documents from the Assistant Chief of Staff, Multi-National Forces, US chiefs plan a £70 million expansion in holding centres for suspects. They will be staffed by 300 civilian recruits aiding intelligence.

    In a sign the US has learned from the Abu Ghraib jail scandal, in which prisoners were abused, the civilian interrogators will be trained in the Geneva Convention.

    Warning of the dangers of the job, the document says: "No persons supporting operations will be allowed to reside off a US secure facility, or travel unless in a military secured convoy."

    ... The Army plans emerged the day after tens of thousands of Iraqis marched in Baghdad demanding the US quit.

Americans definitely need to start reading the history of the terrible campaigns mounted by various European nations 50 years or so ago to retain the vast overseas colonies they had managed to get ahold of throughout the centuries...

Not just the French in Algeria (though that might be one place to start.) But the British in Malaya or Kenya, or any number of other places where the decaying colonial power wrought mayhem, crimes against humanity, and human tragedy on an almost unimaginable scale.

I see there are a couple of good new books out on Kenya. Including this one, by Caroline Elkins, on the desperate and extremely violent efforts the Brits made to hang onto colonial rule in Kenya... One of their main tools in this was a horrific, mass-scale detention system called mere "the 'Pipeline'."

It didn't work. Kenya became independent. But how many scores of thousands of human lives were lost or blighted forever along the way?

People around the world need to learn or re-learn the terrible history of such ventures.

A new 'Pipeline' in Iraq?? It's an outrage.



Comments
Comment from... Salah, at April 13, 2005 06:27 AM:

-Rumsfeld to Iraqis With Optimism and Warnings

"We don't really have an exit strategy. We have a victory strategy. We are here for a mission to set the country on the path of democracy, freedom and representative government."

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12841928-23109,00.html

-U.S. minders, known as "inspector-generals" appointed for five-year terms in every Iraqi ministry, with oversight power - and although Iraqi interim ministers nominally have the authority to ignore their advice or even fire them, the utter dependence of the interim government on U.S. political and economic backing makes such a move virtually unthinkable.
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Left_behind_the_false_070904.htm


Is there any doubt Helena?

Just one day before this surprise visit by Rumsfeld
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's top deputy arrived in Iraq on Wednesday on an unannounced mission to meet with the country's newly elected leaders, the second high-ranking Bush administration official to drop in this week.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apmideast_story.asp?category=1107&slug=US%20Iraq

What’s going there is it this a real Sovereignty or fake? Rumsfeld should asking Paul Bremer III about the corruption in his term before Warning the Iraqi let know where $US9.0Billon gone missing!! It’s hard to trace it...

Comment from... Salah, at April 13, 2005 11:10 AM:

No Exit
By Danielle Pletka
“So it is understandable, amidst instability and gunfire, for focus--and talk--to turn to a way out. But there is only one way out; Iraqis must be liberated from occupation, free to live under leaders of their own political choosing. President Bush has said that "the failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the globe, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the Middle East." President Bush clearly gets the theory; the time has come to make Iraqi democracy real. Then we can exit.”

I READ IT NO EXIT


http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.20507/pub_detail.asp

Comment from... edq, at April 15, 2005 06:42 PM:

I wonder how the human rights situation in Iraq today compares with what existed under Hussein's regime?

Comment from... Salah, at April 16, 2005 05:01 AM:

edq
What you talking about, who cares now about Human Right and these things and all this rubbish, this only been highlighted when you do not like some body or you like to lie on all of us, Right isn't?
Did you read in the news that the close friends to US the Qatari Government what they did with 5000 of there citizens! They stripped there citizenship from them and thorough them out of the country, one of these guys said he serviced 30 years in the military serving the country (No sorry serving Al Thani family) now his citizenship taken off from him and through him on Saudi border, OK where is Human Right Human Watch, Human,,,,,, Human, where is US Administration? 5000 people throughout there country no single word in any western news paper or TV or radio and any UN agency did mentioned or concerned about this case!

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