The exposure of a secret Iraqi government torture centre in the very heart of Baghdad is damning confirmation that the US-led occupation is being accompanied by a dirty war of extra-judicial killings and torture.

On Sunday, a squad of American troops from the Third Infantry Division and local police entered an Iraqi interior ministry building and searched its basement. Inside the complex, which was operated by a US-trained police commando unit, they discovered cells holding 173 men and teenagers. Many of the men were seriously malnourished or exhibited signs of having been tortured. The majority were Sunni Muslim Arabs who had been detained during various counter-insurgency operations aimed at crushing the Iraqi resistance to the occupation.

According to various reports, the Third Division had received information that an Iraqi teenager, who had been missing since September, was being held in the complex. A US soldier who took part in the search told the British BBC: “It’s not what we were expecting at all, we were looking for a 15-year-old boy.”

Most of the details about the state of the prisoners have come from Iraqi sources. A local police officer told the British Independent: “These men were in a very bad way. They have obviously been tortured, some have been there a very long time and they were very frightened.”

Hussein Kamal, the deputy interior minister, told journalists after visiting the scene: “I’ve never seen such a situation like this during the last two years in Baghdad. This is the worst. I saw signs of physical abuse by brutal beating, one or two detainees were paralysed and some had their skin peeled off various parts of their bodies.”

Mohammed Duham, the spokesman for a prisoners’ rights group in Iraq, told Reuters: “This is even worse than what was happening before (under Saddam Hussein). A lot of torture implements were found in the bunker, like saws to cut people’s limbs and also razors to peel the skin off people’s bodies.”

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/nov2005/iraq-n18.shtml