It was revealed in the Guardian, that US troops found an estimated 173 prisoners in a “bunker”, which is used by the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad and that detainees were badly starved and beaten. Some had shown signs of torture and according to one source; “one or two of the detainees were paralysed and some had their skin peeled off.”

The Guardian published a report from Baghdad, which stated that there might have been “mutilated corpses” and “instruments of torture” also present in the Government building. It was also claimed that bodies had been found alongside the captives, which showed signs of having “electric drill holes in their heads.”

According to the Iraqi Islamic Party, the victims were from Sunni backgrounds and apparently the Islamic Party had informed the Iraqi prime minister, along with other government officials about the torture that was going on in the offices of the democratic government.

Apparently the government “routinely dismissed the complaints, calling the prisoners “former regime elements.”

Talking to a London based, former member of the once prominent Campaign Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq (CARDRI),* she believes that “What is happening now is what we accused Saddam of through out the 1980’s, but in a way its worse.”

“I protested, along side those same parties who are now in the Interim Government, at the murder and use of torture against those who opposed Saddam. I also protested with them, against the use of chemical weapons during the US backed war with Iran and on the Kurds in Halabja.”

“When I think about the past, I can’t believe we used to tell people in Britain, that human rights were being violated by a dictatorship in Iraq, when you think about the “democracy”, that now exists.”

A similar feeling of betrayal has also spread as far as the Middle East, where talking to an Iraqi man, who fled the Saddam regime in the early nineties for anti-government activity and now lives in Dubai, stated that he felt a “competition” was being held at “who could be worse, Saddam or the new government?”

Hussein Al-alak,
The Iraq Solidarity Campaign

*CARDRI was chaired by the now British human rights envoy to Iraq and INDICT leader, Ms Ann Clwyd MP