This morning’s Today’s Papers piece in Slate highlights a piece in the New York Times, which reports the discovery of a “secret torture chamber” in an Iraqi Ministry of the Interior building in Baghdad. 170 prisoners were confined within, at least some of whom were apparently malnourished, and some of whom showed signs of extreme ill-treatment.
This isn’t the first time that proof of torture by the current Iraqi government has been brought forward; it is, perhaps, a little more dramatic than prior demonstrations.
I’m a little bit stuck, though, on the fact that the “ineffective” and “unprepared” Iraqi police force apparently managed to arrest 170 people, stick them into a secret prison, and torture them — and managed to do so without the (many) US troops in the capital knowing about it. I mean, sure, it’s not all that many people, but the point remains.
In context: Baghdad is a city of 6 million plus people (Wikipedia says 5.77 million in 2003; the Encyclopedia of the Orient gives 7.4 million as a 2005 estimate). That puts it around the size of Chicago with inner suburbs included. And apparently, within this rather large city, 170 people were taken from their homes, thrown into a secret prison, and tortured over the span of months. And no one noticed. No one in the US detail in the city heard a word about this, no journalist heard about it, they just…disappeared.
Try to imagine, if you will, 170 people being picked up in Chicago, being thrown into a secret prison, and bring tortured, all without anyone figuring out that they were gone, or that the prison existed, and without anyone telling the police, or a journalist, or anyone else.
This story shows that the US troops in Baghdad are farther removed from the populous than we’ve been led to believe. How little trust must there be when it’s assumed that going to the people tasked with protecting the population would not care, or help?
And that worries me more than stories of bombs exploding on the Airport Road. This isn’t a failure to get information out of a small group of insurgents; this is a failure to get information from anyone. Not a single relative of these 170 men thought to ask the US troops where they had gone, not a single neighbor said anything about the guys in the pickup truck who dragged off the man down the street.
So what are we doing in Baghdad, then, if the population of the city thinks that we don’t care to make them safer?
Update, at 8:50 PM: Jeff’s comment on this post is worth reading. Mostly because he’s right, and I’m not. (In all seriousness, he does a great job of improving the analogy, such that it fits the situation better…and once that’s done, what I’m saying above begins to look a little bit silly.)
November 16th, 2005 at 1:49 pm
Suppose the mayor of Chicago grows a mustache and becomes a dictator. He puts his people in power and dominates the entire city. Now let’s say that the NYPD comes in and overthrows him and the Chicago PD. They take over the city and patrol with armored cruisers with machine guns mounted on the roof. The NYPD also recruits a large number of the city gangs to help with policing the population and they become the new chicago PD. ~10% of the population is actively resisting this occupation. The new CPD secretly arrests 170 of these resisters and tortures them. These 170 people have no love for the NYPD, nor, likely, do their family or friends. In fact, they see the NYPD as being in league with the new CPD who have kidnapped these 170 people. Would the NYPD really hear anything about this?
Baghdad is not Chicago and is significantly more fucked up than Chicago. You have an inherent trust and respect for the police department and the government (Ok, maybe not the government). But many of those in Baghdad do not. If you were a member of the Black Panthers in America in the 60s, and one of your fellow group members was kidnapped by the FBI or CIA or secret service. Would you go to your local police department to report this crime?
You can’t turn Baghdad into Chicago in three years. And assuming that Baghdad will react to us as Chicago might is wrong. What are we doing in Baghdad? Not what Bush thinks we’re doing.
November 16th, 2005 at 8:53 pm
[...] ation of the city thinks that we don’t care to make them safer? Update, at 8:50 PM: Jeff’s comment on this post is worth reading. Mostly because he’s right, and I’m [...]