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The U.S. didn’t inform the Iraqi PM Malaki … because he couldn’t be trusted to keep the operation secret. The democratically installed parliament is furious and demands answers from Iraqi leadership. Perhaps they should just send their questions higher-up to 1000 Pennsylvania Ave or the bunker occupant under the White House.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested the Iraqi deputy health minister Thursday morning in a raid on the Health Ministry complex in Baghdad, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said.
Deputy Health Minister Hakem Abbas al-Zamili is a senior member of the political group loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia has been blamed for much of the sectarian violence in Iraq.
Boots for knocking ...
Iraqi Health Minister Ali al-Shammari criticized the way forces seized his deputy, calling the raid a humiliating blow to the dignity of the ministry and the official seized.
Al-Shammari said he should have been notified and that he would have cooperated. He asserted that legal channels should have been followed, with the proper papers from justice officials.
“We know that American people and their government respect the law. So they should respect the law here,” al-Shammari said.
“We know that American people and their government respect the law. So they should respect the law here,” al-Shammari said.
I wonder where he got that idea?
Deputy Death Minister.
The morgue became so dangerous that it was made off-limits to journalists: “Sunni families risk being killed when they go to retrieve the bodies of loved ones from the Shiite-run facility.”
U.S. officials, too, no longer visit the ministry, it’s so dangerous. The L. A. Times report on the Zamali arrest adds:
Why would the Health Ministry forbid publicity over data on death squad killings, if it weren’t complicit?
Last March, the director of the Baghdad morgue who had released the figures that over 7,000 people had been killed in a few months by death squads, execution-style, fled after receiving death threats. Of about 16,000 bodies received at the morgue in 2006, 80% were victims of violence. The UN human rights chief in Iraq said that of 4,731 people killed in Baghdad in November and December, most died of gunshot wounds (not car bombs). That would mean death-squad killings.
Iraq’s Health Minister al-Shammari is full of it. There is no dignity in his ministry to be concerned about, in the first place.