41 rescued from Al Qaeda torture facility in Iraq

AP/Fox News:

U.S. forces rescued 41 Iraqi civilians Sunday from an Al Qaeda hide-out northeast of Baghdad, including some who showed signs of torture and broken bones, a senior U.S. official said.

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the top U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said it was the largest number of detained Iraqis ever found in a single Al Qaeda hide-out. Some among the 41 had been held as long as four months, he said.

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U.S. forces previously have found a number of houses used by Al Qaeda for detention, including some where prisoners showed signs of torture. But the hide-out raided Sunday in Diyala province was the largest, Caldwell said in a telephone interview. He declined to be more specific about the location, citing security reasons.

Caldwell said a tip to U.S. forces from Iraqis in Diyala led to the rescue operation.

"The people in Diyala are speaking up against Al Qaeda," he said. Caldwell said U.S. troops have been engaging more directly with Iraqi civilians in Diyala in recent weeks since an additional 3,000 U.S. troops entered the province.

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Where will this story fit in the media torture narrative? Will it be generally ignored like the story on the torture manual are will someone investigate to see if al Qaeda was following the manual procedures on these Iraqis?

It should also be noted that this operation was the result of the Iraqi tip line. This is a major metric of winning the war that the media generally ignores. It indicates that the population is own our side and wants to help us get rid of the al Qaeda forces that are oppressing them. Note too that the successful operation was in Diyala where al Qaeda has retreated to after being chased from Anbar and Baghdad.

Update: The Belmont Club adds:

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I've always wondered what tactical utility the al-Qaeda obtained from its "slaughterhouses". The Iraqi captives -- and certainly the 14 year old boy -- could not have had any information of military value. And what information they had would have gone stale in the four months. Moreover the operational danger to maintaining these dungeons must have been immense, as the al-Qaeda who may now be in US custody after the raid must now realize. So what was the purpose of the "slaughterhouses"? The answer I suspect, will largely resemble the answer to the question of why the Nazis made lampshades out of human skin, soap out of gas-chamber victims or performed medical experiments on live inmates when there was very little practical use in it. The utility was in the brutality itself; in the psychological benefit which the Nazis somehow derived.

Al-Qaeda, like all the evil vapors of the world through history, inevitably comes to resemble its predecessors. Soldiers of the dark eventually find themselves wearing the same livery. Flowers bloom in myriad ways, but evil, like pornography, is repetitive....

And yet much of the world yawns at this evil, and others turn their eyes away as if conscience avoidance was a cure.