Things are so much better now in Iraq
since Saddam Hussein was deposed:
Among the varied armed security men on Baghdad's streets these days, you cannot miss the police commandos. In combat uniforms, bulletproof vests and wrap-around sunglasses or ski masks, they muscle through Baghdad's traffic jams in police cars or camouflage- painted pickup trucks, clearing nervous drivers from their path with shouted commands and the occasional gunshot in the air.
The commandos are part of the Iraqi security forces that the Bush administration says will gradually replace American troops in this war. But the commandos are being blamed for a wave of kidnappings and executions around Baghdad since the spring. One such group, the Volcano Brigade, is operating as a death squad - under the influence or control of Iraq's most potent Shiite factional militia, the Iranian- backed Badr Organization, say Iraqi government officials and Baghdad residents.
Guess what else Badr has been doing?
In the past six months, Badr has heavily infiltrated the Interior Ministry under which the commandos operate, the sources said. Badr also was accused of running the secret Interior Ministry prison raided Sunday by US troops.
Is this the "good news" about Iraq we never hear?
About 2am on August 23, men in Volcano Brigade uniforms and trucks rolled into the streets of Dolay, a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood of western Baghdad, residents say.
"I got a call from my cousins" around the corner, said Ahmed Abu Yusuf, 33, an unemployed Sunni. "They told me to stay hidden because the Volcano were in the streets, arresting Sunnis."
For three hours, the raiders burst into Sunni homes, handcuffed dozens of men and loaded them into vans. They ended the assault and drove out of the neighborhood just before the dawn call to prayer, Abu Yusuf said.
Two days later and 145 kilometers away, residents of the desert town of Badrah, near the Iranian border, found the bodies of 36 of the men in a gully, their hands still bound and their skulls shattered by bullets.
Shiite death squads running secret prisons and carrying out summary executions of long hated enemies. Is this what democracy looks like? Negroponte was only in Iraq for six months, but the Volcano Brigade is too similar to the Honduran Battalion 316to be coincidence.