The ElSalvadore Option

British-trained police in Iraq

'killed prisoners with drills'

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British-trained police operating in Basra have tortured at least two civilians to death with electric drills, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defence, admits that he knows of "alleged deaths in custody" and other "serious prisoner abuse" at al-Jamiyat police station, which was reopened by Britain after the war.

Militia-dominated police, who were recruited by Britain, are believed to have tortured at least two men to death in the station. Their bodies were later found with drill holes to their arms, legs and skulls.

The victims were suspected of collaborating with coalition forces, according to intelligence reports. Despite being pressed "very hard" by Britain, however, the Iraqi authorities in Basra are failing to even investigate incidents of torture and murder by police, ministers admit.

The disclosure drags Britain firmly into the growing scandal of officially condoned killings, torture and disappearances in Iraq. More than 170 starving and tortured prisoners were discovered last week in an Interior Ministry bunker in Baghdad.

American troops who uncovered the secret torture chamber are also said to have discovered mutilated corpses, several bearing drill marks.

Continues.....If you can stomache it.

Then there is this...
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The Dirty War: Torture and mutilation

used on Iraqi 'insurgents'

Amid the acrid smoke and dust, the cries of the injured being dragged out of the rubble, General Adnan Thabit arrived at the Hamra hotel bomb site in sunglasses, pressed fatigues and a crimson beret.

"Well, gentlemen," he said to me and another journalist who had just been blasted out of our hotel rooms by suicide bombers, "this is what happens when terrorists carry out terrorism - a lot of people dead, a lot of people hurt. Now you can see what we are up against."

The general was savouring his moment. His special forces have been accused by the media and others of carrying out the worst human rights abuses against "suspected insurgents" in what is becoming an ever more savage and dirty war.

Behind the daily reports of suicide bombings and attacks on coalition forces is a far more shadowy struggle, one that involves tortured prisoners huddled in dungeons, death-squad victims with their hands tied behind their backs, often mutilated with knives and electric drills, and distraught families searching for relations who have been "disappeared".

This hidden struggle surfaced last week when US forces and Iraqi police raided an Interior Ministry bunker only a couple of hundred yards from where we were standing. They found 169 tortured and starving captives, who looked like Holocaust victims. The "disappeared" prisoners were being held, it is claimed, by the Shia Muslim Badr militia, which controls part of the ministry. Bayan Jabr, the Minister of the Interior, is himself a former Badr commander, but the ministry's involvement does not end there: General Adnan's commandos come under its control. So does the Wolf Brigade, which vies with the commandos for the title of most feared.