‘We will find them and bring them to justice. And at the same time we will spread an ideology of hope and compassion that will overwhelm their ideology of hate,’ Bush said.

Bush uttered these words this morning, after the terrorist attacks in London. He’s spreading something, alright, but it doesn’t smell much like hope or compassion.

IRAQI security forces, set up by American and British troops, torture detainees by pulling out their fingernails, burning them with hot irons or giving them electric shocks, Iraqi officials say. Cases have also been recorded of bound prisoners being beaten to death by police.

All of this is a familiar nightmare to Iraqis, and there is good reason:

In their haste to put police on the streets to counter the brutal insurgency, Iraqi and US authorities have enlisted men trained under Saddam Hussein’s regime and versed in torture and abuse, the officials told The Times. They said that recruits were also being drawn from the ranks of outlawed Shia militias

These men were not deemed appropriate to be in the army but were just the ticket for the Rapid Intrusion brigades, the most nefarious of which is the Wolf Brigade of ‘Abu Walid’.

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.

But as the insurgency has grown hotter, so too, it appears, have been the methods employed in the dirty counter-insurgency war.

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.

Western support for tyranical and repressive regimes is one of the reasons so many people hate us. Now, not only are the US and UK turning a blind eye to these torture and death squads, it’s our tax money that is funding these groups. There are many who believe that John Negroponte helped to set up these “Rapid Intrusion Brigades”. Personally, I would be shocked if Negroponte wasn’t behind it. Democracy, my ass…

Revealed: grim world of new Iraqi torture camps from the Guardian UK
West turns blind eye as police put Saddam’s torturers back to work from the Times online UK
US “democracy” in Iraq: death squads, torture and terror from Uruknet

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