Last week, the Los Angeles Times published a glowing piece about the turnaround in Fallujah, site of a grisly massacre of American private security workers early in the war.
The comeback of Fallouja, the site of two major battles between Marines and insurgents in 2004, surprises even the most optimistic U.S. planners.
"It continues to outpace all expectations," said Navy Capt. John Dal Santo, part of a State Department-funded effort called the Provincial Reconstruction Team for Fallouja.
City Council leader Sheik Hamed Ahmed said that he was pleased with the city's progress but that he needed more generators for his neighborhood. Ahmed's three predecessors were assassinated by insurgents, but he has refused to back down.
"Fallouja is alive again," he said.
The Washington Post, though, had a different take on the security gains and the brutal police chief, Col. Faisal Ismail al-Zobaie, behind them:
The U.S. military showcases Fallujah as a model city where U.S. policies are finally paying off and is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the region to promote the rule of law and a variety of nation-building efforts.
But the security that has been achieved here is fragile, the result of harsh tactics recalling the rule of Saddam Hussein, who was overthrown five years ago. Even as they work alongside U.S. forces, Zobaie's men admit they have beaten and tortured suspects to force confessions and exact revenge.
In the city's overcrowded, Iraqi-run jail, located inside a compound that also houses a U.S. military base and U.S. police advisers, detainees were beaten with iron rods, according to the current warden. Many were held for months with no clear evidence or due process. They were deprived of food, medical care and electricity and lived in utter squalor, said detainees, Iraqi police and U.S. military officers, who began to address the problems three weeks ago. Last summer, the warden said, several detainees died of heatstroke.
In Zobaie's world, to show mercy is to show weakness. In a land where men burn other men alive, harsh tactics are a small price to pay for imposing order, he said.
"We never tortured anybody," he said. "Sometimes we beat them during the first hours of capture."
Comments
[March 24, 2008 5:48 PM]
C RamseyI don't think you could have done a better job of demonstrating that newspapers don't really tell the news. Instead they spin yarns to favor the political perspectives of editors.
It's too bad Joe Friday's tagline doesn't apply to newspapers. Sadly, you have suffer through the colorful prose and politically driven hyperbole to find the facts, if any are present, in a newspaper these days.