In my report on Adil Abdul Mahdi's visit to Washington, below, I described how blithely the SCIRI official dismissed allegations of Shiite abuses, death squads, and other charges. Now we learn how accurate those charges are. If the story of the secret torture prison run by Iraq's ministry of the interior and its Badr Brigade commandos gets the proper play in the media, it will be the final nail in the coffin for the U.S.-backed regime in Baghdad. And it ought to hasten the withdrawal of U.S. forces. The right question to ask is: How is it possible that the United States is committing its blood and treasure to a regime whose minions peel the skin off captives and use electric drills on them?

The Washington Post reports that allegations of the torture prison have been known since last summer. Where has the Post's coverage been? If you read the Post story, you will see that the allegations included a report that the prison was "run with the help of intelligence agents from neighboring Iran."

The Post also reports something that I've been following closely, but which has mostly been ignored by the mainstream media, namely, Shiite death squads. From the same Post article:

On Tuesday, Col. Abdulhadi Hussein of the Interior Ministry police confirmed the discovery of 28 bodies at the town of Jassan, near the Iranian border. When police found the men Monday, Hussein said, they all were dressed in civilian clothes and had been shot in the head and chest.

Separately, police patrolling a south Baghdad neighborhood on Sunday found 18 men who had been handcuffed, blindfolded and shot in the head and chest, Hussein said.

All 46 were believed to have been Sunni Arabs, he said.

As with previous mass killings of Sunnis, Sunni leaders questioned how killers could have moved dozens of corpses through Iraq's many road checkpoints without discovery by security forces.

This is a stunning scandal. It far exceeds Abu Ghraib in importance. It is a catastrophic embarrassment to the United States and its failed policy in Iraq.