Juan Cole has picked up the Oregon National Guard prisoner abuse story.
Meanwhile, Mike Francis of the Oregonian reports that Senator Ron Wyden is demanding an investigation into a June 29 incident in which Oregon National Guards in Iraq witnessed Iraqi police torturing prisoners, intervened to stop it, and then were ordered by US officers to withdraw.
snip
The Allawi caretaker government has shown a penchant for Baathism Lite, using techniques similar to those of Saddam but much less brutally. It has brought back the death penalty, kicked satellite news service al-Jazeerah out of the country for a month, authorized an American invasion of the shrine of Ali, and may be marginalizing potential rivals via the courts. How the Iraqis run their affairs should ordinarily be their business. But the US more or less put Allawi in power and supports him, so this story is disturbing. Nearly 1000 US troops haven't died in Iraq so that some unelected government could torture people.
The Bush administration had its own prisoner torture scandal, of course, but so far is maintaining that the mistreatment was the work of a small handful of rogue pfc's.
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