From Tena:

Riverbend put up a post a couple of days ago about the recent discovery of another torture house overseen by the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. The entire post definitely should be read, but one part of it jumped out at me:

And another thing- you know when they say ‘men dressed in Ministry of Interior uniforms’ or ‘men in official cars claiming to be from the Ministry of Interior’, etc. when describing some horror committed by the new Iraqi security forces in the news? Here’s a thought: they aren’t ‘claiming’ and they aren’t in costume- they actually ARE from the Ministry of Interior! One would think they’d do this covertly so as not to enrage Iraqis or humanitarian organisations, except that it doesn’t matter to them because SCIRI and Da’awa aren’t out to win hearts and minds. They have American favor- what more does one need in the New Iraq?

For over a year corpses have been turning up all over Baghdad. Corpses of people who are taken from their homes in the middle of the night (lately they’ve been more brazen- they just do everything in the light of day), and turn up dead somewhere. That isn’t as disturbing as the reports about the bodies- the one I can’t get out of my head is that many of the corpses are found with holes in the skull left by an electric drill.

[snip]

I remember distinctly how in the run-up to the invasion, the entire MSM was awash in stories about the torture that Saddam Hussein’s regime was subjecting people to in Iraq. The most disgusting stories centered on Uday and Qusay. Stories of their sadism ran in every publication at the time, and one of the major hair-raising things that was reported was how the Husseins tortured people with electric drills. I remember the outrage: this kind of thing had to be stopped! This was barbaric and brutal and the Iraqis would welcome the United States as their saviors from it, never mind that the United States had already imposed sanctions on the country for years because of this barbarism and brutality.

Well, where is this fabulous improvement we’ve been told the U.S. would make in the lives of everyday Iraqis? They voted, but what did that accomplish? They no longer are ruled by a tyrant named Saddam Hussein, who tortured people with electric drills. Now they are ruled by an unstable government held together only nominally by an occupying force, which tortures people with electric drills. But wait! There’s more – not only does the new Iraqi government engage in the same brutality that the old Iraqi government engaged in, the occupiers are running their own prisons, where more Iraqis are tortured. It’s a fucking two-fer!

What the hell are we doing in Iraq? We sure as shit aren’t bringing it up to a higher standard of government or everyday life. Instead, the administration that got us into this war of occupation is drawing the United States down into becoming the kind of country we used to sanction. You know, like we once sanctioned Iraq. This is what Americans are dying for. They are dying so that Iraqis can continue to torture other Iraqis with electric drills. And so Americans can torture Iraqis, too.