We Were Warned About This

Robert Fisk back in September of last year pointed out that we were rehiring Saddam's torture thugs to work at the prison.

Zinni spoke of the "long hard" journey towards reconstruction and added--with ironic prescience--that "It isn't going to be a handful of people that drive out of the Pentagon, catch a plane and fly in after the military peace to try to pull this thing together."

But incredibly, that's exactly what happened. First it was Jay "pull-your-stomach-in-and-say-you're-proud-to-be-an-American " Garner, and then the famous "anti-terrorism" expert Paul Bremer who washed up in Baghdad to hire and then re-hire the Iraqi army and then--faced with one dead American a day (and 250 US troops wounded in August alone)--to rehire the murderous thugs of Saddam's torture centres to help in the battle against "terrorism".

In July 2003 he tried to warn us about The Ugly Truth of Camp Cropper, A Torture Story to Shame Us All.

In April 2003 he warned that we were likely hiring the worst of Saddam's thugs and the Iraqi people knew and he made this prediction:

It's easy for a reporter to predict doom, especially after a brutal war that lacked all international legitimacy. But catastrophe usually waits for optimists in the Middle East, especially for false optimists who invade oil-rich nations with ideological excuses and high-flown moral claims and accusations, such as weapons of mass destruction, which are still unproved. So I'll make an awful prediction. That America's war of "liberation" is over. Iraq's war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin. In other words, the real and frightening story starts now.