Hundreds 'tortured' in Iraqi prisons

By GottaLaff

What? They're not calling it "enhanced interrogation techniques"?

Iraq's Ministry of Human Rights has declared in a report that hundreds of people were tortured in Iraqi prisons last year.

According to the report published in Baghdad's al-Sabbah newspaper Sunday, of the 306 cases of torture and abuse in Iraqi prisons, 107 took place in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch has also declared that the torture or abuse of Iraqi prisoners is "routine and commonplace."

The group said that detainees were suspended for long periods of time with their hands tied behind their back, routinely beaten with cables and metal rods and had shocks administered to their earlobes and genitals by security officers, DPA reported.

But that's not torture. The Nation of Dick said so. Besides, "some say" (I just wanted to say "some say") only waterboarding is torture... but that's not torture either, "some say".

The word torture is undoubtedly reminder of the photos of the Abu Ghraib prison which provoked shock across the world, especially in the Muslim countries.

The word torture is undoubtedly a reminder that America, um, tortured under BushCo. The word torture is undoubtedly a reminder that prosecutions are in order.

Detainee Who Gave False Iraq Data Dies In Prison in Libya

By GottaLaff

More stomach-turning reminders of BushCo's toxicity:

A former CIA high-value detainee, who provided bogus information that was cited by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war, has died in a Libyan prison, an apparent suicide, according to a Libyan newspaper.

A researcher for Human Rights Watch, who met Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi at the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli late last month, said a contact in Libya had confirmed the death.

Libi was captured fleeing Afghanistan in late 2001, and he vanished into the secret detention system run by the Bush administration. He became the unnamed source, according to Senate investigators, behind Bush administration claims in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq had provided training in chemical and biological weapons to al-Qaeda operatives. The claim was most famously delivered by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his address to the United Nations in February 2003.[...]

The Defense Intelligence Agency and some analysts at the CIA had questioned the veracity of Libi's testimony, which was obtained after the prisoner was transferred to Egyptian custody for questioning by the CIA, according to Senate investigators.

In their book "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," Michael Isikoff and David Corn said Libi made up the story about Iraqi training after he was beaten and subjected to a "mock burial" by his Egyptian interrogators, who put him in a cramped box for 17 hours. Libi recanted the story after being returned to CIA custody in 2004.

When President George W. Bush ordered the 2006 transfer to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of high-value detainees previously held in CIA custody, Libi was pointedly missing. Human rights groups had long suspected that Libi was instead transferred to Libya, but the CIA had never confirmed where he was sent.

"I would speculate that he was missing because he was such an embarrassment to the Bush administration," said Tom Malinowski, the head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. "He was Exhibit A in the narrative that tortured confessions contributed to the massive intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war." [...]

The Libyan newspaper Oed reported Sunday that Libi was found dead in his cell after killing himself, but added that friends of the 46-year-old former preacher, who ran a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, questioned the alleged cause of death. [...]

Human Rights Watch called for an independent investigation of the death.

H/t: Babzter