Stop it, You're Killing Me

The Turkish Press has details on today's bombings in Iraq:

At least 40 people have been killed in violence in Iraq since Thursday night, security and medical sources said, including 26 in anti-Shiite attacks.

In the deadliest incident, 17 people died and at least 25 were wounded when a man wearing an explosives belt blew himself up in a Shiite mosque in the southern Baghdad district of Dura.

I thought the Bush policy of tough interrogation, i.e., torture, was supposed to put a stop to that sort of thing. I dunno--maybe they haven't refined the technique, although apparently they're still working on it:

A cache of documents disclosed Thursday provides several instances of prisoner abuse by American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq that appeared to have been investigated only briefly. The documents, released by the American Civil Liberties Union, include one file in which an Iraqi detainee asserted that Americans in civilian clothing beat him repeatedly, dislocated his shoulder, stepped on his nose until it broke, choked him with a rope and hit him in the leg with a bat. Medical reports in the file confirmed the broken nose and fractured leg...

Another file concerns the discovery of a compact disk during an office clean-up in Afghanistan in July 2004 that contained images of what appeared to investigators to be abuse of detainees.

The report said the pictures showed uniformed soldiers pointing rifles and pistols at the heads of hooded detainees and posing detainees in awkward positions. A statement from a sergeant says that many such photos were destroyed after the April 2004 disclosure of mistreatment at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad...

Another case still under investigation by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency involves the death in 2003 of a prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, who had been in C.I.A. custody at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Mr. Jamadi's corpse was wrapped in plastic and packed in ice before being smuggled out of the prison, in an apparent effort to evade notice from military guards. The Jamadi case is not part of the cache of documents released by the civil liberties union.

An Associated Press article on Thursday cited investigative reports in saying that Mr. Jamadi had been found suspended by his wrists, which had been handcuffed behind his back. The dispatch said that soldiers who found his body said Mr. Jamadi's arms had nearly been pulled from their sockets...

The latter case refers to something known as "Palestinian hanging," which the Israeli government uses on, you guessed it, Palestinians. Funny, but I don't think it works there either. However, it certainly takes away any moral imperative, as well as opens up the possibility that we might slip up and torture the wrong folks. I guess they're supposed to understand if that happens.

And, as Bob Herbert points out, sometimes it does.