As Bill Bennett shoves another blueberry pie down his gob and looks for an excuse not to wash his fingers, his allies in the Iraqi government are busy modifying other body parts.

The New York Times reports:

Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged in recent weeks, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation.

Some Sunni men have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies apparently made by electric drills. Many have simply vanished.

Some of the young men have turned up alive in prison. In a secret bunker discovered earlier this month in an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad, American and Iraqi officials acknowledged that some of the mostly Sunni inmates appeared to have been tortured.

I think Iraqis are bit more worried about bullets in their skulls than where (else) an obese gambling addict sticks his finger.

Update (11/29): The L.A. Times also takes a piss on Bennett's parade -- assuming, for the sake of metaphor, that Bennett doesn't enjoy such things.

U.S. officials have long been concerned about extrajudicial killings in Iraq, but until recently they have refrained from calling violent elements within the police force "death squads" — a loaded term that conjures up the U.S.-backed paramilitaries that killed thousands of civilians during the Latin American civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s.

But U.S. military advisors in Iraq say the term is apt, and the Interior Ministry's inspector general concurs that extrajudicial killings are being carried out by ministry forces.

Probably makes Bill mist up and think of St. Ronnie.