Shiites torturing Sunnis -- Why didn't anybody look?

The important thing about the newly uncovered Iraqi torture centers is not that they existed, which was almost predictable, but that they were discovered by accident by people who weren't looking for them.

Reuters is reporting that not only were people being tortured, but they were being released back into society. Evidently, the Iraqi Interior folks weren't too worried about being found out, or the consequences if they were. A quote from the story:

Sunni politician Omar Hujail, of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said it was not the only place where Sunni Arabs were held and tortured. "We have been telling them for ages that there are people wearing the uniforms of the interior ministry raiding houses at night and arresting people but everybody denied it."

There now isn't much doubt that the Sunnis were generally right. There may be questions about specific stories, but not the general outline. Several questions arise immediately.

Why weren't the people doing the torturing worried about letting torturees back out? Obviously, they were going to tell people. Sunnis would be outraged. Did these people care? Did they ever conceive of a society in which Sunnis would be able to take such grievances into a judicial system and get fair treatment. Obviously not. And just as obviously, the Sunnis have known so, which is why they don't believe this "constitution" is going to do anything to protect them.

But this is only surprising to those Americans who have believed for two and a half years that things were going to somehow work out. We can't do much about it. But as Americans, we ought to consider this. We are spending conservatively $50 billion on this war per year, not counting its unbudgeted aftermath. We have an intelligence establishment that sucks up $30 billion or more. It may be $40 billion, but let's use 30 to avoid arguments. The primary mission for that $30 billion should be to learn whether things are going properly in our expenditure of $50 billion to execute the war.

Yet, if they knew, they didn't tell us. We have two possibilities. They didn't know, in which case we should send all our overpaid spooks home and devote the $30 billion to deficit reduction. In the past, they have made excuses about not being able to find where Saddam had WMD in a country the size of Texas (or Alaska or California, I don't recall). But this place was in the ministry's compound in Baghdad. Not hard to find. People were reporting the stuff in the popular press. Not hard to get a lead.

The second possibility is more likely. We knew. How could we not know? We have satellites that can show a man reading a newspaper and this could have escaped our notice? Not damned likely.

So if we knew and didn't stop it, why? Surely not because we thought this was a good way to reconcile the Sunnis. The only explanation is that we have lost all control over this government, we know it and they know it, and we're just hoping like hell that something turns out right and we can leave.