Back in May 2004, William Saletan published a
helpful chronology in Slate of Bush administration statements regarding the elimination of torture in post-Saddam Iraq. It appears that the first mention of "rape rooms" was in September 2003, in a speech by Paul Bremer, at the time the US proconsul in Baghdad. Bremer reportedly said:
The Iraqi people are now free. And they do not have to worry about the secret police coming after them in the middle of the night, and they don't have to worry about their husbands and brothers being taken off and shot, or their wives being taken to rape rooms. Those days are over.
Based on today's news, it appears the Iraqi people may still have something to worry about.
More on the flip...
According to multiple news accounts (though I'm taking this off the
CNN site), soldiers from the US 3rd Infantry Division entered a building owned by the Iraqi Interior Ministry while searching for a missing teenager. While there, they found:
signs of physical abuse by brutal beating -- one or two cases were paralyzed, and some cases of skin peeled off various parts of the body.
An Interior Ministry official blamed what happened to the prisoners on "a lack of jail cells." He told CNN:
A major problem we face is that there are not enough places to contain these detainees after the preliminary investigation is through with them.
The same official also admitted that the Interior Ministry knew of
previous abuse cases where human rights were broken during the past two years.
According to the man who promised to restore integrity to the White House:
One thing is for certain: There won't be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms.
We all know we can trust George Bush...