The UK Guardian posted a very important story, with accompanying videos, examining in details and with witnesses the extraordinary efforts by US military and civilian personnel to assemble, train, and direct Shi’a commando brigades in Iraq. These police brigades and paramilitary units unleashed a hellish reign of terror, with massive round-ups, torture, and death squad killings.

Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor at the UK Guardian are reporting that the widely heralded 2010 announcement of a British government official inquiry into UK torture is facing a boycott by British human rights and attorney groups. The reason is undue secrecy. The handwriting was on the wall for some time on this sham inquiry, but the British human rights and lawyer groups kept fighting to make something real out of it.

I had hoped the one good thing that would have come from idiotic war against Iraq, is that it would have taught a generation that foreign wars are never quick, easily or cheap. Sadly, that is a prediction I did get spectacularly wrong.

The New York Times has released a full unredacted version version of the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigation (OSI) “Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust.” According to NYT reporter Eric Lichtblau, “The Justice Department has resisted making the report public since 2006.” A “heavily redacted” version was released last month to the private National Security Archive, and now a leaked version of the entire document has been released to the public.

The evocation of words like “accountability” in the context of suppressed documents, leaks, and war crimes has an eerie resonance today for those fighting for accountability for U.S. torture.

On Monday, the UK Guardian reported that secret training materials used by the British military in recent years include actions and behaviors that are clearly abusive and outside the treatment of prisoners mandated by the Geneva conventions. The article emphasizes the use of humiliation and sensory deprivation as primary tools of the British interrogator. Even “recent training material says blindfolds, earmuffs and plastic handcuffs are essential equipment for military interrogators.”

A series of documents released on July 14 in the UK Binyam Mohamed civil case point to collusion by the UK government with the American torture rendition program. One of the revelations argues for the existence of extrajudicial murders as part of that system.