A second prison crammed with hundreds of maltreated Iraqis was uncovered last Thursday in Baghdad the Washington Post and The New York Times are reporting in Monday’s editions. Thirteen prisoners were in such bad shape they were immediately taken to a hospital. The Post’s story by Ellen Knickmeyer appeared late Sunday night on the newspaper’s Web site:

An Iraqi government search of a detention center in Baghdad operated by Interior Ministry special commandos found 13 prisoners who had suffered abuse serious enough to require medical treatment, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Sunday night.

An Iraqi official with firsthand knowledge of the search said that at least 12 of the 13 prisoners had been subjected to “severe torture,” including sessions of electric shock and episodes that left them with broken bones.

“Two of them showed me their nails, and they were gone,” the official said on condition of anonymity because of security concerns..

Edward Wong at the Times wrote, however, that the raid was a joint Iraqi-U.S. operation, led by the Ministry of Human Rights:  

The detention center raided Thursday, situated to the east of the Tigris River, is run by a commando unit from the Interior Ministry, which oversees the country’s police forces, said the senior American official, Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill, a spokesman for the American detention system in Iraq. When members of the search team entered the building, he said, they found “overcrowded” conditions that prompted them to begin transferring the prisoners. …

The Interior Ministry is run by Bayan Jabr, a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a leading religious Shiite party that has an Iranian-trained armed wing called the Badr Organization. Many Iraqi officials have said the ministry has recruited heavily from Badr and other Shiite militias, and there is growing evidence that such forces are abducting, torturing and killing Sunni Arabs.

Colonel Rudisill said he did not know the ethnic or religious make-up of the prisoners found Thursday, or whether the commandos running the center had been recruited from militias. The Interior Ministry employs a vast array of commando units, many shrouded in secrecy.

After the November 15 discovery of the first Iraqi prison brimful of malnourished, ill-treated prisoners, Brigadier General Karl Horst told The Los Angeles Times, “We’re going to hit every single one of them, every single one of them.” There are said to be 1,000 detention centers in Iraq. So far, two raids, two prisons filled with malnourished, ill-treated, and in the most recent case, obviously tortured prisoners. Nine hundred ninety-eight to go?

Since the discovery of that first secret prison, U.S. officials – including Donald Rumsfeld, General George W. Casey and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad – have made strong public statements decrying maltreatment at detention centers and declared that the United States will not stand for it.

Sort of. There was this telling exchange between Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Rumsfeld at a November 29 press conference:

Pace said then that it was “absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member if they see inhumane treatment being conducted to intervene to stop it.”

Rumsfeld said, “I don’t think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it’s to report it.”

Pace responded, “If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it.”

It still doesn’t seem to have dawned on anybody in the megamedia – at least not enough to say so aloud or in print – that perhaps the people in charge of these Iraqi detention centers thought their U.S. occupiers would have no objections since America is itself running torture chambers. What’s wrong with a little fingernail-pulling when your “liberator” is water-boarding and hanging prisoners upside-down in a secret global chain of prisons that – in one of those jaw-droppers which this Administration has given us so many of over the past five years – recycles gulags left over from the USSR?  Gulags about which even the chairpersons and deputy chairpersons of the Senate and House intelligence committees were not informed.

Save us your horrified hypocrisy, Ms. Rice, Mr. Rumsfeld and all you other Administration scofflaws. Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo set the standards for how the U.S. expects civilized people to behave in the post-9/11 world, and the dungeon-masters of Iraq have learned the lesson well.

[Cross-posted from The Next Hurrah].