More on Iraq torture

While it hasn't yet been picked up by the major media, the Oregonian is continuing to push this, with an editorial entitled Iraq incident requires answers:

the United States government should make it clear to those in the Iraqi government that our massive support has some conditions regarding their human rights record.

Indeed, the only means that the United States has of promoting the future good conduct of the Iraqi regime is to apply real diplomatic and political pressure now.

That applies to us just as much as the Americans - yet we are staying silent. Why isn't Phil Goff issuing statements demanding that the Iraqi government respect human rights and prosecute those responsible for torture? Why are our troops still there? Will we be sending a reconstruction team to help out Mugabe in Zimbabwe as well?

The one good thing to come out of the whole Iraq debacle, the one thing that allows anyone to argue that the war was justified, is that Saddam is gone and his regime of torture ended. Now it turns out that the US killed 13,000 Iraqi civilians simply to replace one bunch of despotic torturing bastards with another - and is killing more every day to keep them in power. We should not be a part of this. Supporting torturers goes against everything our country is supposed to stand for. The only assistance we should be giving in Iraq now is to human rights NGOs and war crimes investigators.