One recent study was sparked by one of the country's darkest days in recent memory. Last Aug. 31, nearly 1,000 Shiite Muslim pilgrims died -- some trampled in a crush of humanity, others by drowning -- when a religious procession across a Baghdad bridge became a lethal stampede.

Months after the dead were buried and the wounded had begun to heal, a team of psychiatrists at the Health Ministry established a psychological outreach facility in Sadr City, a teeming Shiite slum in the capital, to assess and treat the damage inflicted on victims, witnesses and their families. What they found surpassed even their worst fears. More than 90 percent of the people surveyed suffered from psychological disorders, including depression, insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

"The people we've identified as troubled are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the mental health situation in this country," said Ali Abdul Razak, 55, who runs the clinic in a dank corner of Sadr City's Imam Ali Hospital. "I don't consider this post-traumatic, I consider it 'continuous traumatic,' because the trauma they have is ongoing."

Resources for treatment are scarce. Only about 75 psychiatrists remain in a country that has endured a brutal eight-year war with Iran and two wars with the United States, along with crippling economic sanctions in the 1990s and the bloody insurgency today. Many fled along with other professionals to escape kidnappings and threats from insurgents. As a result, there is one psychiatrist for about every 300,000 Iraqis, compared with about one for every 10,000 Americans. There are currently no child psychiatrists in this country of about 25 million, Razak said.

This year the Health Ministry declared mental health a top priority and opened two psychological outreach centers in Baghdad (the second is in the city's main teaching hospital in the predominantly Sunni Muslim neighborhood of Yarmouk). In addition to studying those affected by the bridge collapse, the ministry has begun collecting data on the population as whole.

In a survey of just over 1,000 randomly selected people across five Baghdad neighborhoods, completed this month by psychiatrists at Baghdad's Mustansariyah University, about 890 reported having experienced a violent incident firsthand, including all 27 children under 12 in the sample.

Most alarming, according to the physicians who analyzed the data, was that exposure to trauma has grown dramatically more common since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The people in the study recalled 3,504 violent incidents between 1979, when Hussein came to power, and 2003. Since the invasion, they have recorded 6,463.

In the survey, the psychiatrists adapted an Iraqi version of the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire, a research tool once used to evaluate the mental health of Southeast Asian refugees displaced by war.

Among the 42 yes-or-no queries, Iraqi subjects were asked to indicate whether they had been "oppressed because of ethnicity, religion or sect," "witnessed the desecration or destruction of religious shrines," "witnessed mass execution of civilians," been "used as a human shield," "witnessed rotting corpses," or been "forced to pay for a bullet used to kill a family member."

Those at the greatest risk, psychiatrists say, are people who came of age during Hussein's reign and have rarely known a life without trauma.

"For more than 40 years, everything in our country said to be a hero you must be violent. Violence was how we survived, by identifying with aggressors," said Muhammad Lafta, the deputy national adviser for mental health and a psychiatrist at al-Rashid Hospital, one of two dedicated psychiatric hospitals in the country. Under Hussein, he said, elementary school students were made to assemble at least once a week to watch their principals fire AK-47 assault rifles into the air.

The damage to Hussein Ali Saoud's mind is reflected in the molten-looking, purplish scars that rend the skin of both his forearms. An Iraqi soldier during the 2003 invasion, he said he watched two of his platoon mates die from gunshot wounds as U.S. troops invaded Baghdad. Since then, he has sought relief by taking drugs and slicing jagged lines in his flesh with a razor.

"I get nervous and start to feel like someone is suffocating me," said Saoud, 30, joined by his younger brother in a recent visit to the outreach center at the Yarmouk hospital, where doctors diagnosed PTSD. "When I see myself bleeding it helps me relax, even though I know it is wrong."

International advisers and experts say Iraq's mental health system has a long way to go, despite about $25 million in aid, including a $6 million grant from the Japanese government.

"It's pretty small beer, compared to the scope of the problem. You're probably talking about epidemic levels of PTSD," said Keith Humphreys, a psychiatrist and associate professor at Stanford Medical School who is helping train Iraqi doctors in modern practices. "The health system was pretty good, including mental health care. But in the last 25 years or so, they've virtually been kept in the dark. They weren't allowed to go to conferences or even read the medical journals."

Humphreys and other American and European psychiatrists have led conferences for their Iraqi counterparts in the region, although not in Iraq because security is tenuous, a fact he said complicates the psychiatrists' work.

"The thing with psychiatric work, though, is that to make progress you first have to have a functioning society," Humphreys said. "You need to have peace."

Another barrier to progress is a strong stigma attached to psychiatric care in Iraq. "It's unacceptable to say you need mental help, so you have people making appointments with surgeons and then telling them they are depressed," Lafta said.

Muhammed Ata, 44, said he sought treatment at the Yarmouk center only because his sister made him. A policeman, he was patrolling the western Baghdad neighborhood of Khadra three months ago when a pair of improvised bombs exploded, killing two of his fellow officers.

"I looked for my friends, 'Where is Ayad? Where is Fuad?' No Ayad and no Fuad. I just saw a neck here and a hand there," Ata said. "We were like one family, my friends who died and me."

His sister, Nisreen Ata, who attended a recent appointment with him, said he has been too afraid to return to work. "He gazes at police cars and hums," she said.

Most patients are not victims of violence but witnesses to horrific events, Iraqi psychiatrists say.

Khadija Murad's older brother died fighting in the Iran-Iraq war, months before the end of the brutal conflict that consumed nearly a million lives during the 1980s. Her house burned to the ground five years ago, taking with it all her savings at a time when Iraq was under economic sanctions.

Since last January, when a car bomb exploded near an Iraqi army patrol passing by her house, Murad, 40, has been unable to banish from her mind the images of smoke and screaming and charred flesh. Overwhelmed by nightmares and thoughts of suicide, she said, she made her way to the center at Yarmouk Hospital.

"Every other day I feel fine, but then it always comes back," said Murad, clutching her year-old son Hussein, as she described bouts of depression and anxiety that have twice caused her to leave her husband and four children to move in with her parents. "I stop eating. I cry. I just want to go to sleep and not wake up."

Asked how long it would take for the country's collective psyche to recover from the turmoil of recent years, Lafta, the psychiatrist at al-Rashid Hospital, predicted "a generation or more, from the time the fighting here stops."

"The damage was done over a long period," he said, "and it will take decades to heal."

Another Iraqi general told Reuters it was an assassination that needed inside information and proved the army, recruited by U.S. officers over the past two years, had been infiltrated by factional militia groups ready to turn on fellow soldiers.

"The outsiders have hands on the inside," the general said.

The former U.S. commander in Baghdad said the killing of Major General Mubdar Hatim al-Dulaimi, a Sunni Muslim who commanded the 10,000-strong 6th Division in Baghdad, could be part of a move to establish Shi'ite control of the capital.

The division, among the best equipped and strongest of Iraq's new forces, has been on the frontline of preventing a civil war after sectarian bloodshed erupted two weeks ago over the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in the Sunni city of Samarra.

U.S. forces have handed operational control of about 70 percent of the city of Baghdad to Iraqi forces as part of a plan under which the 133,000 Americans now in Iraq will gradually withdraw as Iraqi forces are trained to take over.

Sectarian violence could jeopardize that strategy.

Dulaimi, a Saddam Hussein-era general who had a reputation for personal bravery, was in a convoy of 14 armored vehicles in an area of western Baghdad where Sunni insurgents are active, the Defense Ministry official said. He had driven out from his headquarters in late afternoon to investigate a gun battle.

"PRECISE INFORMATION"

The general was wearing body armor, the ministry official said. He opened the door of his four-wheel drive vehicle and a single bullet struck his head as he was putting on his helmet.

"The gunmen had very precise information," he said.

A security source at Baghdad's Yarmuk hospital said the bullet entered the right side of the general's head.

The ministry official, the Iraqi general and an Interior Ministry source all said one bullet was fired, apparently by a sniper in a high building. However, a second Defense Ministry official said many shots were fired and other troops wounded.

The hospital source said no wounded soldiers were admitted.

The Iraqi general said the killing could be the work of many groups, from Sunni insurgents to pro-government Shi'ite militias out to control the new armed forces in any civil war.

Senior U.S. officers have complained about efforts by the Shi'ite-led government to impose commanders in the city in the face of U.S. objections about their competence. Dulaimi is the most senior officer killed in Iraq since the U.S. invasion.

Major General William Webster, until January U.S. commander in Baghdad, told the Washington Post: "Losing a strong commander for even a little while in Baghdad could cause a further power shift toward what looks like the Shia control of the city."

The U.S. commander in Iraq, General George Casey, said in a statement: "This tragic incident will neither impede the 6th Iraqi Army Division from continuing its mission of securing Baghdad nor derail the formation of the government of Iraq."

The U.S. occupying authority disbanded Saddam's 300,000- strong armed forces after the 2003 invasion, a move blamed by some for chaos and turning Sunni ex-soldiers into insurgents.

Since recruiting began for a new army, vetting has excluded many of Saddam's Sunni-dominated senior officer corps.

President George W. Bush says U.S. troops will pull out of Iraq as local security forces, now numbering some 230,000, take over. But despite U.S. efforts to ensure a sectarian and ethnic mix, many Sunnis see the security forces as hostile to them.

NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, it depends. It is recognised to be revolutionary. Henry Kissinger for example described it as a revolutionary new doctrine which tears to shreds the Westphalian System, the 17th century system of International Order and of course the UN Charter. But nevertheless, and has been very widely criticised within the foreign policy elite. But on narrow ground the doctrine is not really new, it's extreme.

JEREMY PAXMAN:
What was the United States supposed to do after 9/11? It had been the victim of a grotesque, intentional attack, what was it supposed to do but try...?

NOAM CHOMSKY:
Why pick 9/11? Why not pick 1993. Actually the fact that the terrorist act succeeded in September 11th did not alter the risk analysis. In 1993, similar groups, US trained Jihadi's came very close to blowing up the World Trade Center, with better planning, they probably would have killed tens of thousands of people. Since then it was known that this is very likely. In fact right through the 90's there was technical literature predicting it, and we know what to do. What you do is police work. Police work is the way to stop terrorist acts and it succeeded.

JEREMY PAXMAN:
But you are suggesting the United States in that sense is the author of Its own Nemesis.

NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, first of all this is not my opinion. It's the opinion of just about every specialist on terrorism. Take a look, say at Jason Burke's recent book on Al-Qaeda which is just the best book there is. What he points out is, he runs through the record of how each act of violence has increased recruitment financing mobilisation, what he says is, I'm quoting him, that each act of violence is a small victory for Bin Laden.

JEREMY PAXMAN:
But why do you imagine George Bush behaves like this?

NOAM CHOMSKY:
Because I don't think they care that much about terror, in fact we know that. Take say the invasion of Iraq, it was predicted by just about every specialist by intelligence agencies that the invasion of Iraq would increase the threat of Al-Qaeda style terror which is exactly what happened. The point is that...

JEREMY PAXMAN:
Then why would he do it?

NOAM CHOMSKY:
Because invading Iraq has value in Itself, I mean establishing...

JEREMY PAXMAN:
Well what value?

NOAM CHOMSKY:
What value? Establishing the first secure military base in a dependant client state at the heart of the energy producing region of the world.

JEREMY PAXMAN:
Don't you even think that the people of Iraq are better off having got rid of a dictator?

NOAM CHOMSKY:
That, they got rid of two brutal regimes, one that we are supposed to talk about, the other one we are not suppose to talk about. The two brutal regimes were Saddam Hussein's and the US-British sanctions, which were devastating society, had killed hundreds of thousands of people, were forcing people to be reliant on Saddam Hussein. Now the sanctions could obviously have been turned to weapons rather than destroying society without an invasion. If that had happened it is not at all impossible that the people of Iraq would have sent Saddam Hussein the same way to the same fate as other monsters supported by the US and Britain. Ceausescu, Suharto, Duvalier, Marcos, there's a long list of them. In fact the people, the westerners who know Iraq best were predicting this all along.

JEREMY PAXMAN:
You seem to be suggesting or implying, perhaps I'm being unfair to you, but you seem to be implying there is some equivalence between democratically elected heads of state like George Bush or Prime Ministers like Tony Blair and regimes in places like Iraq.

NOAM CHOMSKY:
The term moral equivalence is an interesting one, it was invented I think by Jeane Kirkpatrick as a method of trying to prevent criticism of foreign policy and state decisions. It has a meaning less notion, there is no moral equivalence what so ever.

JEREMY PAXMAN:
Is it a good thing if it is preferable for an individual to live in a liberal democracy, is there benefit to be gained by spreading the values of that democracy however you can?

NOAM CHOMSKY:
That reminds me of the question that Ghandi was once asked about western civilisation, what did he think of it. He said yeah, it would be a good idea. In fact it would be a good idea to spread the values of liberal democracy, but that I would be a good idea to spread the values of liberal democracy. But that's not what the US and Britain are trying to do, it's not what they've done in the past, I mean take a look at the regions under their domination. They don't spread liberal democracy. What they spread is dependence and subordination. Furthermore its well- known there is a large part of the reason for the reason the great opposition to the US policy within the Middle East. In fact this was known in the 1950's.

JEREMY PAXMAN:
But there is a whole slur of countries in eastern Europe right now that would say we are better off now than we were when we were living under the Soviet Empire. As a consequence of how the west behaved.

NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, and there is a lot of countries in US domains, like Central America, the Caribbean who wish that they could be free of American domination. We don't pay much attention to what happens there but they do. In the 1980s when the current incumbents were in their Reganite phase. Hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered in Central America. The US carried out a massive terrorist attack against Nicaragua, mainly as a war on the church. They assassinated an Archbishop and murdered six leading Jesuit intellectuals. This is in El Salvador. It was a monstrous period. What did they impose? Was it liberal democracies? No.

JEREMY PAXMAN:
You've mentioned on two or three occasions this relationship between the United States and Britain. Do you understand why Tony Blair behaved as he did over Afghanistan and Iraq?

NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, if you look at the British diplomatic history, back in the 1940s, Britain had to make a decision. Britain had been the major world power, the United States though by far the richest country in the world was not a major actor in the global scene, except regionally. By the Second World War it was obvious the US was going to be the dominant power, everyone knew that. Britain had to make a choice. Was it going to be part of what would ultimately be a Europe that might move towards independence, or would it be what the Foreign Office called a junior partner to the United States? Well it essentially made that choice to be a junior partner to the United States. US, the leaders have no illusions about this. So during the Cuban missile crisis for example, you look at the declassified record, they treated Britain with total contempt. Harold McMillan wasn't even informed of what was going on and Britain's existence was at stake. It was dangerous. One high official, probably Dean Atchers and he's not identified, described Britain as in his words "Our lieutenant, the fashionable word is partner". Well the British would like to hear the fashionable word, but the masters use the actual word. Those are choices Britain has to make. I mean why Blair decided, I couldn't say.

JEREMY PAXMAN:
Noam Chomsky, thank you.

The exact figure of deaths is unknown; estimates range from about 300 to more than 1,000. According to Iraqi novelist Haifa Zangana, writing in the Guardian last month, Baghdad universities alone have lost 80 members of their staffs. These figures do not include those who have survived assassination attempts.

Intellectuals from all regions of Iraq have been killed. They include specialists in physical education, journalism, Arabic literature, and the sciences. Physicians have also been targeted at a high rate.

The victims have been Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, Kurds, and Turkomans, and they have held a variety of political views. They have been shot down at work, at home, and in their cars or have simply disappeared.

Zarngana writes that Abdul Razaq al-Na'as, a Baghdad University professor, was murdered on January 28 when two cars blocked his entrance and gunmen fired on him. He was a vocal opponent of the occupation on al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya television.

Dr. Abdullateef al-Mayah, a well-known academic, was killed in 2004, 12 hours after he criticized the Iraqi Governing Council on al-Jazeera television.

In the Independent over a year ago, Robert Fisk had already noted the growing trend. "The dean of the college of law in Mosul, murdered last month, was the most gruesome killing. 'She was in bed with her husband when they came for her,' a Baghdad colleague told me yesterday. 'They coolly shot both of them in their bed. Then they cut off both their heads with knives.'"

The BRussells Tribunal website (www.brusselstribunal.org) contains a number of letters from Iraq about the situation. One describes the murder of Professor Nawfal Ahmed from the Institute for Fine Arts in Baghdad on December 26, 2005:

"Unknown armed men had assassinated a university professor of the institute of fine arts, on Monday morning in Toopchy district in Baghdad. A source from the ministry of defense said that; armed men fired a stream of bullets towards professor Nawfal Ahmed, on eight morning, while he was getting out of his house, heading to his working office."

Another letter from Tara Al-Hashimi, the daughter of the late Dr. Wissam Al-Hashimi, a geologist and internationally known expert in carbonates, says:

"[M]y father (Dr. AL- Hashimi) has died. He was kidnapped early in the morning on the 24th Aug 2005 while going to work, his recent papers were stolen. A ransom was given but unfortunately he was shoot twice in the head and died. May his soul rest in peace. As his ID was taken from him it took us about 2 weeks to find his body in one of Baghdad's hospitals."

The murders have forced Iraqi professionals to leave the country in large numbers. Death threats, often letters accompanied by a single bullet, are common.

In January, the Washington Post reported the case of a leading Iraqi cardiologist, Dr. Omar Kubasi, now an exile in Amman, Jordan:

"Kubasi left Baghdad after he and nine other doctors received letters, written in a childish hand, telling them they would be killed if they did not stop working in their native Iraq. He and his colleagues had been objects of threats before, but the last carried a foreboding urgency."

No one has been prosecuted or even arrested in any of the murders. No group has claimed responsibility. A variety of organizations are widely suspected by Iraqis, including the Israeli Mossad (which assassinated Iraqi scientists working on the country's nuclear program in the 1970s and 1980s), the American military (which has harassed and beaten Iraqi academics) and, in the north, the Kurdish Peshmerga.

There are clearly a variety of groups operating, but the evidence points to a leading role of death squads organized by the supporters of the pro-American government, especially in the Interior Ministry, in conjunction with Shiite fundamentalist militias such as the Badr Brigade.

The same groups, believed to be responsible for the recent anti-Sunni pogroms, are popularly called the "black crows" because of their black uniforms.

"They're also called the men in black. Nobody dares identify them although everybody knows who they are. They are groups selected by some political parties that have infiltrated the Interior Ministry and directly report to it," remarked Mutahana Hareth Al-Dari, a spokesman of the Iraqi Association of Muslim Scholars, in this week's issue of the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly Online.

The immediate reason is not hard to find: most of these intellectuals opposed the American occupation of their country.

As Haifa Zangana notes: "Most were vocally opposed to the occupation.... Like many Iraqis, I believe these killings are politically motivated and connected to the occupying forces' failure to gain any significant social support in the country. For the occupation's aims to be fulfilled, independent minds have to be eradicated."

This is a part of a program of cultural destruction, and it emanates from Washington.

The appearance of death squads in Iraq stepped up after the installation of John Negroponte as ambassador to Iraq in June 2004. Negroponte was the ambassador to Honduras at the height of the American-sponsored counter-insurgencies in Central America in the 1980s. He is an experienced operative in creating and managing extra-judicial killings, the so-called Salvador option.

Similarly, veterans of US "dirty wars" in Latin America-James Steele, who oversaw counterinsurgency operations in El Salvador during the height of the killing there 20 years ago, and Steve Casteels, who worked with US anti-guerilla and anti-drug operations in Colombia, Peru and elsewhere-were brought in to oversee the Iraqi Interior Ministry's operations.

The goal, however, is not simply to silence critics of the puppet regime. The assassination policy is an attempt to create a tractable population.

It includes weakening Iraqis even on the physical level. The murders and emigration of physicians have been particularly devastating in a country once known for the high quality of its health care system that now confronts electricity shortages at hospitals and skyrocketing incidences of infectious disease and traumatic injury.

But the killing of art historians, geologists, and writers must be explained as an attempt to destroy the intellectual health of Iraq.

The loss of academics "is causing a drop in the quality of higher education," according to the UN's IRINnews.org. " 'The best professors are leaving the country and we are losing the best professionals, the real losers are the next generation of students-the future of Iraq.' Abbas Muhammad, a student of Pharmacology at Baghdad University said."

The country's intelligentsia was already depleted in the period from 1990 to 2003, when an estimated 30 percent had left the country for economic reasons.

The goal now, encouraged or allowed by Bush administration, and implemented by its stooges in Iraq, is to destroy the historical consciousness of the Iraqi people, as a means of further subjugating them to US imperialism and its Iraqi supporters.

According to the UN's International Leadership Institute, "84% of Iraq's higher learning institutions have been burnt, looted or destroyed." The thefts from the Iraqi Museum of April 2003, the untrammeled looting of hundreds of archaeological sites and the burning of libraries place Iraqi's access to culture, history, and science in grave danger. The assassinations and the flight of Iraqi professionals are the most criminal part of this process.

The political crisis revolves around the decision by the main Shiite bloc to extend the rule of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. He edged out his rival by just one vote with the support of anti-US Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Last week, an alliance of Sunni Arabs, Kurds, and others called for Mr. Jaafari to step down and a new candidate to come forward. The call for a new premier followed shortly after the deadly bombing of an important Shiite shrine in Samarra sparked a rash of the sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunni Arabs, sliding Iraq further into civil conflict.

"The most likely scenario is the worst," says Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Queen Mary, University of London. "[Jaafari] staggers through, with Kurds and Sunnis and others undermining him. So you get a vastly weaker prime minister, backed by radicals."

The crisis has laid bare a deepening divide within Iraq's majority Shiite community. The other contender was Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi, backed by the faction of Sadr rival Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who has portrayed himself as a technocrat and centrist who can get the job done.

Forming a stable government is seen by US officials as a key step to enabling the start of any military withdrawal. A more distant goal, but one required before any US exit, is to ensure that Iraqi police and security forces are 2capable of halting sectarian violence and coping with the insurgency.

Jaafari has been widely blamed in Iraq for permitting the violence to erupt out of control - yielding a week of sectarian killings and attacks on mosques that mostly targeted Sunni Arabs - after the gold roof of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra was destroyed on Feb. 22.

Days of curfew finally brought relative calm. But insurgent violence continued Monday, with eight car bombs - five of them in Baghdad alone - that took at least 28 lives, according to news agencies. One morning blast struck a packed market in Baquba, 40 miles northeast of Baghdad, killing six, including two children. Two of the car bombs, one driven by a suicide bomber, struck at Mahmudiyah, 25 miles south of the capital.

Sunni Arabs blame the lethal result on Jaafari's inability to control Shiite militias and Shiite-dominated security forces, as well as a strategic inability to come to grips with the insurgency. Kurds further took issue with Jaafari's trip to Ankara, Turkey, without cabinet approval, which has strained relations with Iraqi Kurds.

Jaafari's entourage included no Iraqi Kurds, who hold top government positions in Baghdad, but some minority Iraqi Turkomen who are often at odds with ethnic Kurds, but have close ties to Turkey.

"The Jaafari government has a long history of failure," says Mustafa Alani, head of the Security and Terrorism program at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "Everything has deteriorated: security, basic services, corruption. There is no major achievement."

"Weak government contributes [to the violence], state infrastructure is disintegrating gradually, and militias are taking over," says Mr. Alani. "Those people [militiamen] are becoming more loyal to their parties than the state. I don't see how this can be changed."

The convening of parliament begins a 60-day period in which a new head of state must be elected, and a new prime minister and cabinet agreed upon. Lobbying has been fierce for weeks. On Sunday, President Talabani increased pressure against Jaafari, by sending an adviser to push the case with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's preeminent Shiite cleric, in Najaf.

"We reject Jaafari because we believe that Iraq needs a government of national unity and new faces," said envoy Barham Saleh, who is also planning minister, after the meetings.

Sunni Arab leaders have found unlikely champions in US diplomats, trying to ensure their place at the table of a unity government.

They have also been most recent targets of apparent revenge attacks. Gunmen on Sunday killed the nephew and cousin of Sheikh Harith al-Dari, leader of the main Sunni Arab religious group, the Muslim Clerics Association.

Last Thursday, Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of the Iraqi Accordance Front, part of the Sunni parliamentary bloc trying to oust Jaafari, survived an assassination attempt on his convoy that killed one guard and wounded five others.

In a separate incident the same day, a convoy of bodyguards for Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi, also a Sunni Arab, was attacked, killing one guard and wounding others.

"You can argue that Iraq has been without a government since the fall of the [Hussein] regime, and after three years we are in a very messy situation," says Hassan Bazaaz, an aide to Adnan al-Dulaimi. "We are on the brink of a civil war; in fact, we are in a civil war. The reason is because there is no government."

The December national election was meant to usher in Iraq's first postinvasion permanent government. But the hopes of Iraqis expressed on election day - almost as vociferous and hopeful as they had been when they first went to the polls in January 2005 - have faded with the passing of time, and amid political deadlock.

The result is growing, popular exasperation.

"What difference does [a new government] make?" asks an Iraqi political analyst who asked not to be named. "The real crisis is the daily killing of Iraqis, which no one writes about. This is because of the US occupation. Whether Jaafari gets back in is of no concern to Iraqis. Who is going to stop [the violence]?"

Any hope of effective rule will require real change, regardless of who holds the PM post.

"A new government along the old line will be weak, and divided on the sectarian side; they are only concerned about how much they can steal," says the Iraqi analyst. "The ministries of Interior and Defense tell you everything is fine and under control. If you listen to the minister of electricity, you would think people live in a state of full electric power. The minister of oil says Iraqis are living with everything."

That sentiment echoes Khalaf al-Olayan, another Sunni leader in parliament, who wrote on the Iraqi Accordance Front website that Iraq has gone from "bad to worse" with Jaafari.

"Jaafari's government failed to solve the chaos that followed the Samarra explosions and did not take any measures to solve the security crisis that could have pushed the country into civil war," wrote Mr. Olayan.

Another Jaafari government would mean "much more of the same - a many headed hydra, without the power to nail down the [pro-Shiite and abuse] problems in the Ministry of Interior," says Mr. Dodge at Queen Mary.

Sadr supports Jaafari "not because of who he is, but who he is not," says Dodge. "They would nominate anyone, to get around Abdul Mahdi getting it."

Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told ABC News, "If you talk to U.S. intelligence officers and military people privately, they'd say we've been involved in low level civil war with very slowly increasing intensity since the transfer of power in June 2004."

Since the elections last year, Cordesman says, more radical Islamist insurgents have made "a more dedicated strike at the fault lines between Shiites and Sunnis." And they have succeeded.

In an interview on Fox News Sunday, however, U.S. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, disputed that.

"I think that the Iraqi people - Kurds, Shia, Sunni - walked up to the abyss, took the look in, didn't like what they saw, have pulled together, have pulled back from violence, and are working together to keep things calm and to find the right mix for their own government," Pace said.

Sectarian Violence Rages On

The sectarian violence over the weekend was lower in intensity than in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the Askariya Mosque - one of the holiest Shiite sites - in Samarra on Feb. 22. But still, the sectarian violence continued.

On Saturday night, gunmen mowed down four people - killing two of them - at the Shiite Ahl al-Beit mosque in Kirkuk, North of Baghdad. On Sunday, at least two others were killed in a gun battle at the Sunni al-Noor mosque in the al-Jihad neighborhood of West Baghdad.

Shakir Mahmoud, a cleric at al-Noor mosque, claimed the attackers came from the Interior Ministry itself, which is controlled by Shiites and has been accused of allowing, if not permitting, Shiite militias.

"The group consisted of 10 cars, care used only by the Interior Ministry," Shakir said. "The uniforms are only worn by the Interior Ministry. They attacked the mosque."

The Interior Ministry denied the charge.

Al Qaeda at Work?

On Saturday in Doha, Qatar, the head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid, claimed al-Qaeda was responsible for the bombing of the Askariya Mosque, saying that the blast indicated the group was changing its goal and trying to start a civil war in Iraq. He allowed that it had worked, to an extent.

"They got more of a reaction from that than they had hoped for," Abizaid told the Associated Press. "I expect we'll see another attack in the near future on another symbol. They'll find some other place that's undefended, they'll strike it and they'll hope for more sectarian violence."

Abizaid also noted that the attack had achieved its intended affect to disrupt the formation of an Iraqi government, saying, "The shrine bombing exposed a lot of sectarian fissures that have been apparent for a while, but it was the first time I've seen it move in a direction that was unhelpful to the political process."

But while Abizaid offered a fairly glowing assessment of the performance of the Iraqi military and police, others noted that the body count hovered in the hundreds, if not surpassing a thousand, and that in some cases the largely Shiite forces had created problems as well.

'Serious Lack of Realism'

Nash told ABC News, "The vast majority of the personnel in the army come from the Shiite and the Kurd population. And what we need to understand is that a political settlement - not brokered, but insisted upon by the U.S. - that gives equitable treatment to all factions is what we need."

Cordesman, who is also an ABC News consultant, noted that when military leaders speak publicly, "They have to spin the issue - particularly for American and European audiences - and there's often a rather serious lack of realism."

Whether or not this is civil war, the fighting is not yet a broad national conflict, since an overwhelming majority of the attacks are in just four out of Iraq's 18 provinces. The question is whether it will spread.

Zoe Magee and Mazin Faiq in Baghdad, and Sam Brooks in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

The senator, an opponent of the war, said the only solution to the surge of sectarian violence is to begin withdrawing U.S. forces.

"You keep hoping for the best," Harkin said. "And then after a while you say, wait a minute, this isn't working. This isn't working."

About 500 Iraqis have been killed in the violence unleashed by the Feb. 22 bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in central Iraq and reprisal attacks against Sunni mosques. The dramatic wave of violence has complicated negotiations for a new government after December parliamentary elections.

A national CBS News poll last week showed 30 percent of Americans approved of President Bush's handling of the situation with Iraq, with 65 percent disapproving, Bush's worst marks since the war began three years ago.

Harkin said the more than 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq could be repositioned in allied Arab nations, but withdrawal needs to begin immediately "in order to extricate ourselves from that quagmire over there."

White House spokesman Blair Jones said President Bush would make decisions about troop levels based on the advice of military advisers in Iraq, but that full withdrawal now would be irresponsible. "We would undermine the morale of our troops by betraying the cause for which they have sacrificed," Jones said. "To retreat before victory would be an act of recklessness."

The other day on Jerry Agar's radio show, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld responded to accusations about American atrocities at our prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He accused the detainees there of manipulating public opinion by lying about their treatment. He said, in part:

"They're taught to lie, they're taught to allege that they have been tortured, and that's part of the [terrorist] training that they received. We know that torture is not occurring there. We know that for a fact… The reality is that the terrorists have media committees. They are getting very clever at manipulating the media in the United States and in the capitals of the world. They know for a fact they can't win a single battle on the battlefields in the Middle East. They know the only place they can win a battle is in the capitol in Washington, D.C. by having the United States lose its will, so they consciously manipulate the media here to achieve their ends, and they're very good at it."

Statements like this have been commonplaces from an administration whose President repeatedly insists it doesn't do "torture," while its assembled lawyers do their best to redefine torture out of existence. Here's how, for instance, our Vice President has described the lives of detainees at Guantanamo Bay: "They're living in the tropics… They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want. There isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people."

As a matter of fact, the record of detainee abuse, humiliation, and torture at Guantanamo and elsewhere is by now overwhelming – and it's been laid out by a remarkably wide-ranging set of sources. In June 2005, for example, Time Magazine released excerpts from official interrogation logs on just one Guantanamo prisoner, Mohammad al-Qahtani, reputedly the 20th September 11th hijacker who never made it into the U.S. This stunning record of mistreatment over time so threatened the detainee's health that it should certainly have qualified as torture under this administration's definition ("must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death") in its famed "torture memo" of 2002.

Or let's remember two years' worth of blistering memos and e-mails by disgusted FBI agents stationed at Guantanamo Bay (obtained and released by the American Civil Liberties Union) who laid out styles of detainee mistreatment that should have staggered someone's imagination:

"'On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water,' the FBI agent wrote on Aug. 2, 2004. 'Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more.' In one case, the agent continued, 'the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.'"

Just in the last week, the administration that doesn't do torture found itself in court fighting hard for a torture exemption from the McCain anti-torture amendment, thanks to extreme force-feeding methods being used on a prisoner on a Guantanamo hunger strike. According to Josh White and Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post, "Bush administration lawyers, fighting a claim of torture by a Guantanamo Bay detainee, yesterday argued that the new law that bans cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody does not apply to people held at the military prison. In federal court yesterday and in legal filings, Justice Department lawyers contended that a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, cannot use legislation drafted by Sen. John McCain... to challenge treatment that the detainee's lawyers described as 'systematic torture.'"

In the meantime, U.S. military officers, "breaking with domestic and international legal precedent," refused to rule out the admission of evidence obtained by torture at the military trials the Pentagon is now running at Guantanamo.

The week before, Jane Mayer wrote a thoroughly depressing New Yorker piece, "Annals of the Pentagon," about former U.S. Navy General Counsel Alberto J. Mora, a conservative military man who just happened to believe in the law. Hers was a gripping tale of Mora's losing battle to stop Donald Rumsfeld and his followers from circumventing the Geneva Conventions and instituting a "gloves-off" policy of torture and abuse at Guantanamo. Tim Golden and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times produced a front-page story that same week (Growing Afghan Prison Rivals Bleak Guantanamo), pointing out something well covered by the British Guardian almost a year ago: We now have a second Guantanamo on our hands, a prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan that may indeed make Guantanamo look like the "tropics." There, 500 or so detainees, beyond all law or oversight, have been kept under barbaric conditions, in some cases for two to three years.

The week before that, the latest Abu Ghraib photos were released, even grimmer than the previous batch – a huge story around the world – to largely "been there, done that" coverage in the United States. Each day, it seems, more and worse pours out, largely to no obvious effect here. It is in this context that Dahr Jamail, who began hearing of American torture practices while covering the war in Iraq in 2003 as an independent journalist, looks back on the last several years and considers the nature of our torture regime. Tom

Tracing the Trail of Torture
Embedding Torture as Policy from Guantanamo to Iraq

By Dahr Jamail

They told him, "We are going to cut your head off and send you to hell."

Ali Abbas, a former detainee from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, was filling me in on the horrors he endured at the hands of American soldiers, contractors, and CIA operatives while inside the infamous prison.

It was May of 2004 when I documented his testimony in my hotel in Baghdad. "We will take you to Guantanamo," he said one female soldier told him after he was detained by U.S. forces on September 13, 2003. "Our aim is to put you in hell so you'll tell the truth. These are our orders – to turn your life into hell." And they did. He was tortured in Abu Ghraib less than half a year after the occupation of Iraq began.

While the publication of the first Abu Ghraib photos in April 2004 opened the floodgates for former Iraqi detainees to speak out about their treatment at the hands of occupation forces, this wasn't the first I'd heard of torture in Iraq. A case I'd documented even before then was that of 57 year-old Sadiq Zoman. He was held for one month by U.S. forces before being dropped off in a coma at the general hospital in Tikrit. The medical report that came with his comatose body, written by U.S. Army medic Lt. Col. Michael Hodges, listed the reasons for Zoman's state as heat stroke and heart attack. That medical report, however, failed to mention anything about the physical trauma evident on Zoman's body – the electrical point burns on the soles of his feet and on his genitals, the fact that the back of his head had been bashed in with a blunt instrument, or the lash marks up and down his body.

Such tales – and they were rife in Baghdad before the news of Abu Ghraib reached the world – were just the tip of the iceberg; and stories of torture similar to those I heard from Iraqi detainees during my very first trip to Iraq, back in November 2003, are still being told, because such treatment is ongoing.

Institutionalizing Torture: Abu Ghraib

While President Bush has regularly claimed – as with reporters in Panama last November – that "we do not torture," Janis Karpinski, the U.S. Brigadier General whose 800th Military Police Brigade was in charge of 17 prison facilities in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib back in 2003, begs to differ. She knows that we do torture and she believes that the President himself is most likely implicated in the decision to embed torture in basic war-on-terror policy.

While testifying this January 21 in New York City at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration, Karpinski told us: "General [Ricardo] Sanchez [commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq] himself signed the eight-page memorandum authorizing literally a laundry list of harsher techniques in interrogations to include specific use of dogs and muzzled dogs with his specific permission."

All this, as she reminded us, came after Major General Geoffrey Miller, who had been "specifically selected by the Secretary of Defense to go to Guantanamo Bay and run the interrogations operation," was dispatched to Iraq by the Bush administration to "work with the military intelligence personnel to teach them new and improved interrogation techniques."

Karpinski met Miller on his tour of American prison facilities in Iraq in the fall of 2003. Miller, as she related in her testimony, told her, "It is my opinion that you are treating the prisoners too well. At Guantanamo Bay, the prisoners know that we are in charge and they know that from the very beginning. You have to treat the prisoners like dogs. And if they think or feel any differently you have effectively lost control of the interrogation."

Miller went on to tell Karpinski in reference to Abu Ghraib, "We're going to Gitmo-ize the operation."

When she later asked for an explanation, Karpinski was told that the military police guarding the prisons were following the orders in a memorandum approving "harsher interrogation techniques," and, according to Karpinski, "signed by the Secretary of Defense, Don Rumsfeld."

That one-page memorandum "authorized sleep deprivation, stress positions, meal disruption – serving their meals late, not serving a meal. Leaving the lights on all night while playing loud music, issuing insults or criticism of their religion, their culture, their beliefs." In the left-hand margin, alongside the list of interrogation techniques to be applied, Rumsfeld had personally written, "Make sure this happens!!" Karpinski emphasized the fact that Rumsfeld had used two exclamation points.

When asked how far up the chain of command responsibility for the torture orders for Abu Ghraib went, Karpinski said, "The Secretary of Defense would not have authorized without the approval of the Vice President."

Karpinski does not believe that the many investigations into Abu Ghraib have gotten to the truth about who is responsible for the torture and abuse because "they have all been directed and kept under the control of the Department of Defense. Secretary Rumsfeld was directing the course of each one of those separate investigations. There was no impartiality whatsoever."

Does she believe the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib has stopped?

"I have no reason to believe that it has. I believe that cameras are no longer allowed anywhere near a cellblock. But why should I believe it's stopped? We still have the captain from the 82nd airborne division [who] returned and had a diary, a log of when he was instructed, what he was instructed, where he was instructed, and who instructed him. To go out and treat the prisoners harshly, to set them up for effective interrogation, and that was recently as May of 2005."

Karpinski was referring to Captain Ian Fishback, one of three American soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division at Forward Operating Base Mercury near Fallujah who personally witnessed the torture of Iraqi prisoners and came forward to give testimony to human rights organizations about the crimes committed.

Karpinski, who was made the scapegoat for the atrocities which occurred at Abu Ghraib, went public as a whistle-blower, and retired with a demotion in rank after serving a quarter of a century in the Army. General Sanchez, on the other hand, was transferred to Germany where he is continuing his tenure as commander of the V Corps. However, he was reportedly relieved of his role and not promoted to a fourth star due to the fact that the Abu Ghraib scandal first broke during his watch.

But Abu Ghraib was – and remains – only a symptom of a much deeper problem.

The Guantanamo Treatment

"Since the start of the war on terror, the intelligence community, led by the CIA, has revived the use of torture, making it Washington's weapon of choice," writes Alfred McCoy in his new book, A Question of Torture.

When the infamous Abu Ghraib photo of the prisoner on a box draped in black, head covered with a sack, arms outstretched with electrical wires attached to his fingers, was made public, it had a deeper resonance for McCoy than simply documenting a war crime of the present moment.

"In that photograph you can see the entire 50-year history of CIA torture," McCoy told Amy Goodman in a Democracy Now! interview. "It's very simple. He's hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. And those are the two very simple fundamental techniques" that, as his book makes vividly clear, the CIA pioneered in breakthrough research on torture, funded to the tune of billions of dollars in the 1950s. In his book, he adds: "The photographs from Iraq illustrate standard interrogation practice inside the global gulag of secret CIA prisons that have operated, on executive authority, since the start of the war on terror."

Rather than placing blame merely on the handful of guards in Abu Ghraib who were reprimanded (and in a few cases jailed) for their crimes against humanity, McCoy believes that they – and the interrogators there – were simply "following orders" and, like Karpinski, considers that "responsibility for their actions lies higher, much higher, up the chain of command."

When I interviewed Ali Abbas in Iraq, his descriptions from Abu Ghraib bore a remarkable similarity to those given by detainees released from the American prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and from the little noticed American mini-gulag in Afghanistan.

"They shit on us, used dogs against us, used electricity and starved us," he told me. "They cut my hair into strips like an Indian. They shaved my mustache, put a plate in my hand, and made me go beg from the prisoners, as if I was a beggar."

Lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York in a statement on the detention experiences of three men they represent who were held in both Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay reveal, for example, similarly over-the-top treatment. And such treatment long preceded anything recorded at Abu Ghraib. Starvation rations were common and, in Sherbegan Prison in Afghanistan in December, 2001, one of the detainees, Shafiq Rasul, described the situation as follows: "We all had body and hair lice. We got dysentery and the toilets were disgusting. It was just a hole in the ground with shit everywhere. The whole prison stank of shit and unwashed bodies."

He would not be allowed to wash for at least six weeks. He would be transferred to a U.S. base in Kandahar and endure a "forced cavity search" while he was hooded, then go on to suffer countless beatings. When he was later transferred to Guantanamo Bay, he would witness the "Guantanamo haircut" where men would either have their heads shaved completely or have a cross shaved into their head in order to insult their faith. Denial of medical care and long stays in solitary confinement, along with sleep deprivation tactics, were the norm.

Other forms of treatment included:

* Gratuitous violence: Prisoners would be punched, kicked, and slammed to the ground.
* Exposure to the elements: Prisoners were locked in cage-like structures located in hangers with no heating.
* Denial of nourishment.
* Denial of religious rights including purposeful desecration of the Quran.
* The use of dogs to threaten prisoners.

And keep in mind, this was the norm. The extreme we know from the recorded deaths of at least 98 prisoners in American hands in these years.

Outsourcing Torture

Extraordinary renditions – the kidnapping of terror suspects and their transport to countries willing to torture them for the Bush administration – have been the rage (for the CIA) in Europe in recent years and have enraged European publics. But far less is often known about what happens to those kidnappees on the other end of the process. Craig Murray, however, knows more than most of us. He was the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, a time when that country's strong man, Islam Karimov, was described by Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld as an "important ally" of George Bush in his war on terror. Murray was dismissed by the British government in October 2004 when he made public his findings on extraordinary renditions to Uzbekistan and the torture by Uzbek security personnel of those rendered into their hands by the CIA.

Murray describes Karimov as having longstanding ties with Bush. These seem to have begun in 1997 when Bush was still governor of Texas. He then met with Uzbek Ambassador Sadyk Safaev, a meeting (for which there is documented evidence) organized by Ken Lay, CEO of Enron, in order to enlist the governor in brokering a two billion-dollar gas deal between the corporation and that oil-rich country. Karimov, says Murray, "was a guest in the White House in 2002. It's very easy to find photos of George Bush shaking Karimov's hand." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was, he added, "particularly chummy with Karimov" back then and, at the time, the administration was making use of the Karshi-Khanabad air base, also known as K2, in that country.

Murray is not alone in considering Karimov one of the most vicious dictators on the planet, a man personally responsible for the death of thousands. The ambassador helped uncover evidence of one detainee who "had had his fingernails extracted, he had been severely beaten, particularly about the face, and he died of immersion in boiling liquid. And it was immersion, rather than splashing, because there is a clear tide mark around the upper torso and arms, which gives you some idea of the level of brutality of this regime."

While not certain that detainees who had been rendered were boiled alive, about extraordinary rendition Murray said, "There is no doubt that George Bush and Condoleezza Rice have been lying through their teeth about extraordinary rendition for some time." As he put it, "The United States, as a matter of policy, is willing to accept intelligence got by torture by foreign agencies. I can give direct firsthand evidence of that and back it up with documents."

When asked why he decided to go public with his information, Murray replied, "I think it's just what any decent person would do. I mean, when you come across people being boiled and their fingernails pulled out or having their children raped in front of them, you just can't go along with it and sleep at night."

The U.S. vacated the K2 base as the result of political fallout from the massacre of over 600 demonstrators by Karimov's security forces in May 2005. Karimov has since moved back under Russian protection.

Nevertheless, Murray is convinced that the U.S. continues to rendition people to other grim and willing regimes around the globe to be tortured.

In addition to the degradation and inhumanity involved in torture, which afflicts those meting it out as well as those on the receiving end, both intelligence officials and law enforcement personnel believe that information obtained by torture is almost invariably useless. In addition, torture policies, seldom kept secret for long, invariably produce outrage and opposition on a large scale.

Here, for instance, is a typical response a rebel in Fallujah offered a colleague of mine in Iraq in January 2005:

"We are fighting in Fallujah first because we are defending our religion. Because they desecrate our Holy Quran. They put the Quran in the sewage. They rape our women. They rape them in Abu Ghraib. The raiding, the burning, the detentions, the evictions, the killing it is continuous, everyday and night. These are the reasons we resist the Americans."

"George Bush is the law"

Testimony from Afghan prisons and Guantanamo, the photos and video from Abu Ghraib, evidence of extraordinary renditions to the far corners of the planet – all of this doesn't even encompass the full reach of Bush administration torture policies or the degree to which they have been set in motion at the highest levels of the American government. But what simply can't be clearer is this: horrific methods of torture have been used regularly against detainees in U.S. custody in countries around the globe, while an American President, Vice President and Secretary of Defense, among others, openly advocated policies that, until recently, would have been considered torture in any democratic country. In the meantime, the Bush Administration has twisted the law just enough to allow authorities to potentially pick up more or less anyone they desire at any time they want to be held wherever the government decides for as long as its officials desire with no access to lawyer or trial – and now, for the first time, the possibility has arisen, at least in the military trials in Guantanamo, that testimony obtained by torture will be admissible.

All of this can also be seen as part of a desperate attempt by a failing superpower to ratchet up the use of force in the service of subjugation, as has happened time and time again in the past.

In A Question of Torture, McCoy quotes one CIA analyst, whose expertise was in the now long-departed Soviet Empire, this way: "When feelings of insecurity develop within those holding power, they become increasingly suspicious and put great pressures upon the secret police to obtain arrests and confessions. At such times police officials are inclined to condone anything which produces a speedy 'confession,' and brutality may become widespread."

Testifying at the same commission of inquiry as Karpinski, Michael Ratner, once head of the National Lawyers' Guild, now president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and an expert on international human rights law, caught the essence of our present situation:

"Let there be no doubt this administration is engaged in massive violations of the law. Torture is an international crime. What [George Bush] has done is basically lay the plan for what has to be called a coup-d'état in America. [His Presidential Signing Statement attached to the McCain anti-torture amendment] makes three points… First, speaking as the President, my authority as commander in chief allows me to do whatever I think is necessary in the war on terror including use torture. Second, the Commander in Chief cannot be checked by Congress. Third, the Commander in Chief cannot be checked by the courts. In other words… George Bush is the law."

Torture is usually defined as "infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion," or as "excruciating physical or mental pain, agony." No civilized society can accept laws which justify the use of torture. So it's not surprising that Ali Abbas was astonished to discover Americans willing to inflict such humiliating and inhumane treatment on him while he was in their custody in Abu Ghraib. "They cannot be human beings and do these things," was the way he put it. He concluded: "This, what happened to me, could happen to anybody in Iraq."

Unfortunately, what happened to him can now conceivably happen to anyone, anywhere in the world, according to George Bush.

One of the last things Abbas said as our interview ended was: "Saddam Hussein was a cruel enemy to us. Once I made it to Abu Ghraib though, I wished I had been killed by him rather than being alive with the Americans. Even now, after this journey of torture and suffering, what else can I think?"



Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] is editor of TomDispatch.com, a project of the Nation Institute. He is the author of several books, including The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel and The End of Victory Culture. Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting from occupied Iraq. He presented evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York City this January. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service, Truthout.org, Asia Times, TomDispatch, and maintains his own website.

Copyright © 2006 Dahr Jamail

In the absence of credible official figures, she first looks at estimations of casualties constructed using the deaths:total casualty ratio technique used by ourselves in our published estimates. However, rather than using previous published research data she chooses to go with data from the Iraq Casualty Count site and breaks down the casualty figures according to the different phases of the conflict.

She then points out some valid concerns with using the ratio estimation method and asks:

Against such statistical imperatives for improved accountability, who or what thwarts the UK's competent compilation and dissemination of statistics by which to monitor death rates and casualty rates for UK military personnel deployed to Iraq?

As she tries to collate the necessary data herself part of the answer starts to appear. Amazingly, the Defence Analytical Services Agency (DASA) could not even provide her with monthly or quarterly numbers (to the nearest 100) of military personnel deployed to Iraq, because, they claim, the figures are not held electronically. However, these data were in fact later revealed in Hansards as a written answer on Feb 13, 2006 to Jeremy Corbyn, a Member of Parliament who had asked the Secretary of State for Defence what the total strength of UK forces in Iraq had been.

Despite her efforts, no information on total casualties, as distinct from fatalities, was gained, and the rest of her Lancet letter is devoted to looking at differences in mortality rates at different phases of the conflict.

The apparent failure of the MOD to monitor casualty rates is truly breathtaking. While such apparent gross negligence appears unlikely to be the result of actual incompetence, the political convenience of shrouding casualty figures in a constructed fog of war is obvious.

Our attempts to gain information on casualties via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) appears now to be of even greater importance following the publication of these research findings. Whilst our approach has also been temporarily thwarted, this is not an issue that is going to go away. In principle, the tools exist within our democratic system to find this out - we intend to keep digging.

For background see:-

11th Sep, 2005: MOD figures reveal one thousand British casualties in Iraq to date

Feb 20, 2006: British casualties in Iraq: MOD stalls the release of figures under the freedom of information act

Feb 24th 2006: MOD letter reveals John Reid issued misleading figures on British casualties in Iraq

The parliamentary elections in December had produced a sharp gain in public optimism that the United States was making progress in Iraq, but the slide toward civil war has erased those gains just as quickly, ABC said.

More than seven in 10 Republicans and eight in 10 Democrats and political independents believe civil war is coming, showing that the public's assessment of the situation cuts across party lines, the Washington Post said.

About one third of Americans polled thought such a conflict was "very likely" to occur, the newspaper said.

The surge in violence has killed more than 500 people since the destruction of a major Shi'ite shrine in Samarra on February 22.

Fifty-five percent of poll respondents said the United States was not making significant progress restoring civil order in Iraq -- up 19 points from a poll shortly after the December elections.

Nearly half, or 49 percent, said they thought there has been progress in establishing a democratic government in Iraq. But that was down from 65 percent in December.

Nearly three months after Iraqis elected a parliament, Iraq's political leaders are still fighting over the post of prime minister, delaying the formation of a grand coalition government, which Washington promoted in the hope of fostering stability and allowing U.S. troops to begin withdrawing.

According to the poll, a record 65 percent of Americans believe the Bush administration lacks a clear plan for what to do in Iraq.

Despite the bleak views of the situation in Iraq, fewer than 20 percent of respondents support an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops, while a narrow majority, 52 percent, supported decreasing troop strength.

Fifty-nine percent of those polled said they disapprove of the way President George W. Bush is handling the situation in Iraq, compared to 40 percent approval -- nearly unchanged from the same poll's numbers in late January.

Bush's overall job approval rating was steady at 41 percent, unchanged, but two points above his career low in a poll last fall.

The telephone poll of 1,000 people was conducted March 2-5 and has a three point error margin.