Polling Sites Soldiers Electoral

Polling Sites, Soldiers, Electoral Workers Targeted

Guerrillas bombed a polling site in Sharqat north of Baghdad, destroying it but causing no casualties.

In Baghdad, a policemen, two Iraqi soldiers and a civilian were killed in separate incidents.

In Mosul, guerrillas detonated a car bomb as a US convoy went by, but no word on whether they did any damage. Other Sunni Arab guerrillas killed 5 Kurdish fighters or Peshmerga and wounded three others. The guerrillas in Mosul resent the Kurds for being willing to fight alongside the US in Fallujah and elsewhere against other Iraqis.

West of Baghdad, guerrillas shot another election official, the eighth to have been murdered in recent weeks.

Meanwhile, in the US soldier Charles Graner was found guilty of torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The conviction afforded al-Jazeera the opportunity to do a retrospective of the torture scandal.

Graner is small potatoes, and it seems clear that the torture policies came from much higher up, but this is probably as far as the investigation will go. If Congress had been in the hands of the Democrats, you might have had serious hearings on all this (not that everyone in Congress wasn’t appalled). But we in the US now live in what is virtually a one-party state, and such states don’t investigate themselves.

The most disturbing aspect of the Graner trial was his defense attorney’s attempt to compare the torture techniques used on the prisoners with the pyramids that US cheerleaders form for their routines. It was a callous thing to say, and the Arab world knew it.