US abuse worse than Saddam's, say inmates

From the Sydney Morning Herald via J. Orlin Grabbe:

The photographs of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib have reinforced the long-held view that the US occupation is intent on humiliating the Iraqi people.

Other Iraqis have given similar accounts of what goes on inside the prison that was a centre of torture and execution under Saddam Hussein's rule.

Dhia al-Shweiri spent several stints in the prison, twice under Saddam and once under the Americans. He preferred Saddam's torture to the humiliation of being stripped naked by his US guards, he said. Now Mr Shweiri, 30, is a diehard fighter in the Mehdi Army, the anti-US militia of a Shiite Muslim imam

Mr Shweiri said that while jailed by Saddam's regime he was electrocuted, beaten and suspended from the ceiling with his hands tied behind his back.

"But that's better than the humiliation of being stripped naked," he said. "Shoot me here," he added, pointing between his eyes, "but don't do this to us."

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Obviously, treating POWs in this way is immoral and wrong. Furthermore, such behavior utterly undermines what slim hopes may still exist for anything good eventually coming out of this ill conceived Bush administration adventure. Throw in the recent wave of uprisings and the steady rise in US casualties and it becomes clear that the occupation is an utter disaster.

What blows my mind, however, is how whoever's in charge of interrogations over there could so easily forget about the Islamic world's higher level of sexual Puritanism, and the taboos on nudity that come with it. I mean, this whole thing is just awful, but it's pretty damned stupid, too: it seems like the Pentagon is still finding new ways to piss off the Iraqi population. The situation in Iraq is getting worse, not better, and it seems like this is exactly how the President wants it.

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