BOLD, RED-FACED CONTRADICTIONS

Iraqi death squads doing America's dirty work? Why would you think that? The U.S. regime has distanced itself from the Sunni genocide, hasn't it? In public, of course. But yesterday's story in the Los Angeles Times, "Police Tied to Death Squads" shows, possibly without meaning to, how contradictory and difficult the distancing is:

A 1,500-member Iraqi police force [the highway patrol] with close ties to Shiite militia groups has emerged as a focus of investigations into suspected death squads working within the country's Interior Ministry. ...

"We don't train them, we don't give them equipment, we don't conduct site visits over there. They are just bad, criminal people," said a high-ranking U.S. military officer who advises the Interior Ministry. [But now hear this:] The officer was one of three who each spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they wanted to maintain relationships with Iraqi police officials and avoid retaliation by U.S. military superiors. ...

"Who knows who they all are? Nobody controls them but the minister," the officer said, referring to Interior Minister Bayan Jabr.

Jabr, a Shiite with close ties to the Badr Brigade, a paramilitary group, has been at the center of allegations of abuse at the hands of Iraqi security forces. The minister's notoriety rose last year as the bodies of hundreds of men -- mostly Sunni Arabs -- started appearing in sewage treatment plants, garbage dumps and desert ravines. ...

Leading Sunni figures have blamed the reprisals on Jabr. ...

In a recent interview, Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, who is leading the multibillion-dollar effort to train and equip Iraq's police forces, vigorously defended the minister and said he was heartened by Jabr's pledge to investigate the abuse fully.

"Death squads -- they're a real issue," said Peterson. "I can tell you, we caught our first death squad," he said, referring to the unit that was apprehended last month. "The minister of Interior is elated that we caught them," he added. ...

Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch [above], a U.S. military spokesman, said that the Interior Ministry was leading the investigation into the suspected death squad.

Ali Hussein Kamal, the Interior Ministry's intelligence chief, said, in an interview Sunday that investigators were also trying to determine whether the Iraqi general in charge of the highway patrol was linked to the squad.

"If we find that these allegations that he is involved are true, we will be taking very firm measures against him," Kamal said. "But generally speaking, high-ranking officers are usually ignorant of what their lower-ranking officers are doing."

By golly, you betcha. That's just what Rummy said about Abu Ghraib: The torturers were a bunch of low-ranking bad apples, thass all.