Sunday, June 19, 2005

Fate of an America-Free Iraq

This is the fate that the get-out-now crowd would impose on all Iraqis if their calls to pull out of Iraq were to be listened to:

KARABILA, Iraq, Sunday, June 19 - Marines on an operation to eliminate insurgents that began Friday broke through the outside wall of a building in this small rural village to find a torture center equipped with electric wires, a noose, handcuffs, a 574-page jihad manual - and four beaten and shackled Iraqis.

The American military has found torture houses after invading towns heavily populated by insurgents - like Falluja, where the anti-insurgent assault last fall uncovered almost 20 such sites. But rarely have they come across victims who have lived to tell the tale.

The men said they told the marines, from Company K, Third Marines, Second Division, that they had been tortured with shocks and flogged with a strip of rubber for more than two weeks, unseen behind the windows of black glass. One of them, Ahmed Isa Fathil, 19, a former member of the new Iraqi Army, said he had been held and tortured there for 22 days. All the while, he said, his face was almost entirely taped over and his hands were cuffed.

In an interview with an embedded reporter just hours after he was freed, he said he had never seen the faces of his captors, who occasionally whispered at him, "We will kill you." He said they did not question him, and he did not know what they wanted. Nor did he ever expect to be released. "They kill somebody every day," said Mr. Fathil, whose hands were so swollen he could not open a can of Coke offered to him by a marine. "They've killed a lot of people."

The manual recovered - a fat, well-thumbed Arabic paperback - listed itself as the 2005 First Edition of "The Principles of Jihadist Philosophy," by Abdel Rahman al-Ali. Its chapters included "How to Select the Best Hostage," and "The Legitimacy of Cutting the Infidels' Heads."

Also recovered were several fake passports, a black hood, the painkiller Percoset, handcuffs and an explosives how-to-guide. Three cars loaded with explosives were parked in a garage outside the house. The marines blew them up.

This is Mr. Fathil's account of his ordeal.

He was having a lunch of lettuce and cucumbers in the kitchen of his home in the small desert village of Rabot with his mother and brother. An Opel sedan pulled up. Two men in masks carrying machine guns got out, seized him, and, leaving his mother sobbing, put him in the trunk of their car.

They drove to the house here. They taped his face, put cotton in his ears, and began to beat him. The only possible explanation for the seizure he could think of was his time in the new Iraqi Army. Unemployed and illiterate, Mr. Fathil signed up after the American occupation began.

But nine months ago, when continuing working meant risking the wrath of the Jihadists, he quit. In all, 10 friends from his unit have been killed, he said. So have his uncle and his uncle's son, though neither ever worked as soldiers.

The men tended to talk in whispers, he said, telling him five times a day, in low voices in his ear, to pray, and offering him sand, instead of water, to wash himself. Just once, he asked if he could see his mother, and one of them said to him, "You won't leave until you are dead."

When marines burst in, one of the captives was lying under a stairwell, badly beaten. At first, they thought he was dead. The others were emaciated and battered. Mr. Fathil had fared the best. The other three were taken by medical helicopter to Balad, a base near Baghdad with a hospital.

But he still had been hurt badly. Marks from beatings criss-crossed his back, and deep pocks, apparently from electric shock burns, were gouged in his skin. The shocks, he said, felt "like my soul is being ripped out of my body." But when he would start to scream, and his body would pull up from the shock, they would begin to beat him, he said.

His town has always been a good place, he said, but the militants have made it hell. "These few are destroying it," he said, his face streaked with tears. "Everybody they take, they kill. It's on a daily basis pretty much."

No word yet on whether his captors played loud rap music or turned the air conditioning way up like they do in real torture houses.

Leftist Low-Lifes

Wretchard at Belmont Club has a must read about Col. Nick Rowe. Rowe is a hero, but even more than Rowe, this account is about the kind of people who cooperated with the Communists during the Vietnam war. It would be interesting to know who, exactly, the people are who betrayed our POW's during the early seventies. It would also be interesting to know if Nick Rowe has any friends from his Special Forces days that might be waiting for Danilo Continente to be released from prison. Read the story at Belmont Club to find out why.

Deja Vu All Over Again

The case of the Downing Street memos that have Left-wing hearts everywhere all aflutter is beginning to sound strangely familiar. Even if the memos are legitimate they do very little to implicate Bush/Blair in some nefarious doings in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. We're not saying the memos are frauds, but they certainly are peculiar. Check out Captain's Quarters to find out why it seems we've been down this road before.