Diary 
Patrick Cockburn
The publication of pictures showing what may happen to Iraqi prisoners at the hands of their captors allowed the outside world to see what Iraqis had known for some time: the occupation is very brutal. In Baghdad, stories had been circulating for months about systematic torture in the prisons. In the US the impact of the photographs was all the greater thanks to the administration’s previous success in controlling news from Iraq. Last October I wrote a piece about US soldiers bulldozing date-palm groves near Balad, north of Baghdad, to punish local farmers after an ambush; I immediately received a flood of outraged emails from the US denying that American soldiers would do such a thing.
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Patrick Cockburn is a foreign correspondent on the Independent and has been visiting Iraq since 1977. Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq was published in April.
Other articles by this contributor:
Diary · The End of Iraq
Diary · Patrick Cockburn reports from a divided Iraq
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