Victory
Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad major crimes unit just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim Government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the executions.
They say the prisoners — handcuffed and blindfolded — were lined up against a wall in a courtyard next to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amriyah security centre, in the city’s north-western suburbs.
Abuse of human rights in Iraq is as bad now as it was under Saddam Hussein, if not worse, former prime minister Iyad Allawi said in an interview published on Sunday. “People are doing the same as (in) Saddam Hussein’s time and worse. It is an appropriate comparison,” Allawi told British newspaper The Observer.
“We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated,” said Allawi in an apparent reference to the discovery of a bunker at the Shi’ite-run Interior Ministry where 170 men were held prisoner, beaten, half-starved and in some cases tortured. “A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations.”
Can we declare victory and move on yet? David Broder likes the Democratic plan. Regular readers will find it pretty familiar.
