TW: We have this as our current legacy in Iraq. Folks will reflect Friday on the 8th anniversary of 9/11. Hopefully, folks will also reflect on the cost and harm of misusing that legacy towards at best incompetent ends. Of course, Dick Cheney would fit in nicely as director of security in the "New" Iraq.
From Economist:
"THE main book market, in Baghdad’s Mutanabi Street, was a hive of angry chatter this week. Bespectacled traders, complaining about new censorship laws, shouted, “This is not freedom of expression,” and talked of holding a demonstration like one last month, when journalists protested against new restrictions.
But would the booksellers dare? They said they were already worried that plainclothes policemen had been taking their names. Perhaps they should go instead to court and fight censorship with the help of lawyers. “Not a chance,” said one book-dealer. “This is the new Iraq.” Legal protections, he noted, count for little. “Power”, he added, “is held by the men with the guns.
He had a point. The Shia-led government has overseen a ballooning of the country’s security apparatus. Human-rights violations are becoming more common. In private many Iraqis, especially educated ones, are asking if their country may go back to being a police state.
Old habits from Saddam Hussein’s era are becoming familiar again. Torture is routine in government detention centres. “Things are bad and getting worse, even by regional standards,” says Samer Muscati, who works for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby. His outfit reports that, with American oversight gone (albeit that the Americans committed their own shameful abuses in such places as Abu Ghraib prison), Iraqi police and security people are again pulling out fingernails and beating detainees, even those who have already made confessions. A limping former prison inmate tells how he realised, after a bout of torture in a government ministry that lasted for five days, that he had been relatively lucky. When he was reunited with fellow prisoners, he said he saw that many had lost limbs and organs.
The domestic-security apparatus is at its busiest since Saddam was overthrown six years ago, especially in the capital. In July the Baghdad police reimposed a nightly curfew, making it easier for the police, taking orders from politicians, to arrest people disliked by the Shia-led government. ..
...sentencing is getting harsher, with more people sentenced to death. On a single day in June 19 people were hanged in Baghdad. In a recent report Amnesty International, a British-based group, says that more than 1,000 Iraqis face execution, often on the basis of confessions, which, it says, are sometimes made under torture.
...The government recently announced plans to censor imported books as well as the internet, saying it wanted to ban hate screeds and pornography. But human-rights monitors fear this may presage a first step towards a wider web of censorship. Internet cafés face new rules that require them to register.
...[Maliki's] government is also seeking to tighten rules to regulate political parties and independent associations (including charities), causing still more alarm. “This is not how you build a democracy,” says Maysoon al-Damluji, a liberal member of parliament.
It is too soon to say Iraq will revert to Saddam’s heinous standards. Parliament is diverse and vigorous. The press still airs a range of opinion. The courts are not yet rubber stamps. But the trend is going the wrong way. “This will be a police state, no question,” says a Western diplomat with long experience of Iraq. “It’ll take two or three years. But it’s coming.”
http://www.economist.com/world/middleeast-africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14380249
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