Saddam kept torture chamber in basement of Iraqi mission in NYC

What I'm not sure of is why we're only hearing about this now. It seems to me that as much heat as the Bush Administration took for the Iraq invasion, they would have told us about this at the time. Maybe they were concerned that it would look bad to have something like this going on right under their noses, even though they were the ones who ultimately put a stop to it. But lest you have fallen into the thinking that we should have kept Saddam around because he "stablized" the Middle East or whatever, you might want to know what was happening on East 79th Street:

The Mission of Iraq, which sits on a wealthy Upper East Side block near Central Park, has a dark secret: it’s basement was used as a jail equipped for torture under Saddam Hussein’s regime, The Post has learned

When he rose to power in 1979, the despot had the terrifying “detention room” installed inside the five-story building at 14 East 79th Street — right across from billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s home, according to two Iraqi officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. Saddam’s henchmen – known as Mukhabarat agents — frequently imprisoned local Iraqis in the basement for up to 15 days at a time, using them as leverage to get their relatives back in the homeland to surrender and cooperate with the tyrannical government, the officials said. “It was a dark room. The doors were reinforced in a way that nobody could break in or out. You didn’t need to sound proof it,” one official said. The other official added, “You’re not going to hear someone screaming down there.” The prison chamber was similar to detention rooms in Iraqi embassies around the world, including Eastern Europe and Arab countries, where evidence of torture was uncovered, the officials said.

Some of the “Gestapo”-like tactics employed by the Mukhabarat involved the use of copper wire, rubber hoses and wooden planks. They would also pull out prisoners’ nails and beat them to a pulp, one official said.

The Post story goes on to say that the U.S. quickly shut it down after become Iraq's de facto government following the 2003 invasion. I recall at the time being terribly frustrated with the Bush Administration's obsessive focus on weapons of mass destruction, and the need to "find them" to prove the stated rationale for the invasion. When they sent Colin Powell to the UN to make the case, it was all about WMDs, presumably because they believed no other piece of information would sway the members of the Security Council. Saddam was in violation of the 1991 Gulf War cease fire in multiple ways, and that alone gave us the right to go in and take him out. But there were too many people on the Bush team who thought it was politically untenable to go in without a new Security Council resolution. So Powell went to the UN with his big WMD presentation, which failed to get the resolution they sought (the vote was 9-7 in favor but it couldn't hold up to permanent member vetoes), and ultimately we invaded without UN support. And later, of course, much of Powell's presentation turned out to be at worst wrong and at best unprovable.

They knew about the torture chamber in New York and kept it a secret

Yet they knew about the torture chamber in New York and kept it a secret. That I do not understand. Today people would have you believe that Saddam may have been a bad guy but was no threat to his neighbors and, if he was around today, there probably would be no ISIS. Listen: Saddam was ISIS. He was a sadistic bastard with few equals, and he was so brazen about it that he was doing it right here in the United States without a care in the world about anyone finding out or stopping him. And while the Iraq War was more difficult than we expected it to be, and we made a lot of mistakes in the post-invasion administration of Iraq, we had the damn thing won by the time Bush left office in 2009. Then Obama decided to lose it by prematurely withdrawing all troops because he couldn't get over the fact that he had always hated the war in the first place. Obama thought we should have just left Saddam in power. If he had been the decision-maker in 2003, that torture chamber on East 79th Street would probably still be operating.

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