Andreas Schafer

Remember Andreas Schafer, the New Zealander who spent three months in coalition custody in Iraq? His story is in Salon. It's not particularly flattering to the Americans, who Schafer says couldn't imagine that anyone would "come to a country less pleasant than their own, unless they're invading it" and at one stage after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke threatened to transfer him there with the implication that he would be abused. And the IPs don't exactly come across well either. While they treated him well,

Schafer says that Iraqi police under coalition authority tortured suspects regularly. He claims to have seen beatings by police and, after he was transferred to a more brutal prison in Kut, at least one instance of an Iraqi electrocuted to the point of unconsciousness lasting three days. Americans, he says, visited the prison regularly and did nothing to stop or discourage the torture.

Which provides some confirmation of the allegations of torture by the Iraqi regime originally carried in the Oregonian, as well as a powerful reason why we should not be providing aid or assistance to the Iraqi regime.