In the last three weeks, I've written about both newly revealed Abu Ghraib torture photos and the bombing of the Askari mosque at Samarra, both of which added fuel to the fires of expanding sectarian civil war in Iraq and the enmity of both Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq for occupying U.S. and U.K. forces.

Now comes still more gasoline: a new report, released Monday by Amnesty International U.K., which confirms in dreadful detail what many Iraqis already believed: that prison system abuses by occupying forces and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government have continued apace since Abu Ghraib. The 48-page "Beyond Abu-Ghraib: Detention and Torture in Iraq" was virtually ignored by U.S. media, and that's a shame. Its findings, based on extensive interviews with (among others) Iraq's prisoners, former prisoners, and their families, directly implicate Washington in current human rights abuses, and go a long way toward explaining why a continuing U.S. troop presence in Iraq, far from keeping a lid on civil war, is actually making the violence, sectarian and otherwise, far worse.

Amnesty's report has two broad components. The first focuses on the current detention by U.S. and U.K. forces, without charges or trial, of an estimated 14,000 Iraqis. Amnesty compares both the lack of due process and the conditions under which such prisoners live to the infamous U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. An estimated 4,000 Iraqis have been held in such a fashion for over a year, and some for more than two years. While Iraqis have been complaining about such practices consistently since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, this is the first extensive documentation of the widespread scope of the problem.

Most of these prisoners are young Sunni men, caught up in indiscriminate military sweeps of neighborhoods thought to harbor Iraqi insurgents. Most of them, by the reckoning of virtually all observers, are not actually insurgents, nor guilty of any particular crime. But the net effect of these detentions -- both the detentions themselves and the conditions prisoners live under during them -- is to act as a powerful anti-American recruiting device for the Sunni-led insurgency. And just as the Sunni insurgents fighting occupying forces overlap with the Sunni violence directed at Shiite targets, the resentment of abuses by the occupying coalition's prisons overlaps with resentment of the abuses of prisons run by the U.S.-installed Shiite government, particularly its infamous Interior Ministry.

The second focus of the Amnesty report mentions occupying force abuses but singles out the extensive and growing reports of torture and death squad executions being carried out by factions within the Shiite-controlled government. As Kate Allen, Amnesty UK's director, notes, "Allegations of torture continue to pour out of Iraq." The relationship of the Interior Ministry to the highest levels of Iraq's government is unequivocal: the leadership of the Interior Ministry, and the torture, are associated primarily with the Badr Brigade, the private militia of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). SCIRI is the largest of the fundamentalist Shiite political parties controlling the government, and is closely aligned with the hardline mullahs of Iran. The Badr Brigade has largely been trained by Iran's infamous Revolutionary Guards.

Such private sectarian militias are increasingly what Iraqis are turning to for protection from Iraq's violent chaos, security that is not being adequately provided by either outnumbered occupying military forces or the Iraqi government. Washington, after initially deciding to disband the secular Iraqi army and national bureaucracy and to redistribute power along sectarian lines, has continued to pursue policies which have hastened Iraqis' embrace of sectarian identities. Before the invasion, Iraq was a largely secular country with extensive ethnic and religious intermingling. Now, the security threat from opposing sectarian groups is so great that in recent months, and especially in the weeks since the Samarra bombing, Sunnis and Shiites living in each other's majority towns and neighborhoods have begun to be forced out. It's an exodus similar in nature (though not yet scale) to the Balkans after Yugoslavia's breakup, pre-civil war Lebanon, or India and Pakistan after their 1948 partition, and it is both a product of and a prescription for more violence.

Few of the ordinary people caught in Iraq's crossfire seem to want civil war; the post-Samarra sectarian violence provoked a backlash display of impressive nationalist unity among clerics, government officials, and in popular demonstrations across the country. But even with that backlash, in the days since the initial wave of violence that killed at least 1,400, the country has settled back into a level of sectarian violence far higher than before Samarra. During these recent days, the director of Baghdad's morgue has fled the country after revealing that death squad executions of Sunnis were far more extensive than previously revealed, numbering in the thousands. Iraq is now on the verge of explosion. Anything could set it off.

After the Samarra bombing, it's hard to find anyone among either Sunnis or Shiites who want the occupying Americans and Brits in their country. Sunnis believe the Americans are conspiring, along with the Shiite-led government it controls, in the death squads, torture, and other abuses of Sunnis. Shiites, in turn, resent U.S. pressure to include Sunnis in some sort of "national unity" government, and some believe the U.S. itself was behind the Samarra bombing. Nobody outside America believes that Washington is either a legitimate mediator or can help prevent an escalation in civil war by keeping its troops in place. Quite the opposite. America's presence is actively inflaming the violence.

The Amnesty report reinforces all of this. It casts a light on just how desperate a situation Iraqis find themselves in, and just how much of the quicksand of violence is directly attributable to Bush administration decisions and policies -- starting, of course, with the invasion itself, but also including decisions carried out ever since.

Bush has, effectively, turned the old strategic chestnut on its head. First, America conquered. Then we divided. Both the still-growing anti-American insurgency and the unfolding civil war are the inevitable results.

Geov Parrish is a Seattle-based columnist and writes the daily "Straight Shot" for WorkingForChange. He can be reached by email at geovlp@earthlink.net -- please indicate whether your comments may be used on WorkingForChange in an upcoming "letters" column.

© 2006 WorkingForChange.com

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