How does this fit in with spreading freedom?

Days after Iraq's new Shiite-led government was announced on April 28, the bodies of Sunni Muslim men began turning up at the capital's central morgue after the men had been detained by people wearing Iraqi police uniforms.

Faik Baqr, the director and chief forensic investigator at the central Baghdad morgue, said the corpses first caught his attention because the men appeared to have been killed in methodical fashion. Their hands had been tied or handcuffed behind their backs, their eyes were blindfolded and they appeared to have been tortured. In most cases, the dead men looked as if they'd been whipped with a cord, subjected to electric shocks or beaten with a blunt object and shot to death, often with single bullets to their heads.

I seem to remember isolated stories about roving bands of Shiite vigilantes who were going around maiming Sunnis in Iraq, but now this has apparently graduated from under the radar incident to official policy:

The Interior Ministry, which oversees the Iraqi police, denies any involvement in the killings. But eyewitnesses said that many of the dead were apprehended by large groups of men driving white Toyota Land Cruisers with police markings. The men were wearing police commando uniforms and bulletproof vests, carrying expensive 9-millimeter Glock pistols and using sophisticated radios, the witnesses said.

Predictable denials all around from US officials on this one. But human nature suggests that the persecuted minority, once installed in the seat of power, typically sets out to do some persecuting of their own. It's exactly what happened in Rwanda and plenty of other places on the globe. And this particular excuse doesn't pass the smell test:

"The small numbers that we've investigated we've found to be either rumor or innuendo," said Steven Casteel, a senior U.S. adviser to the ministry and former Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence chief. "You can buy a police uniform in 20 different places in the market."

Show me where in the market you can buy Toyota Land Cruisers and Glocks and maybe I'll start to believe you.

Unfortunately, you can simply add this to the allegations of detainee abuse in Iraqi-run prisons, and you get the general idea that the fog of war is starting to make everybody over there mad. The attorney general of the country as much as said so:

Ghathanfar al Jasim, who sits on Iraq's national judicial council and functions as an attorney general, said it's difficult to discuss extrajudicial murder.

"We cannot admit that our police are doing it; it would make them look weak," Jasim said, adding that Sunni insurgents often target Iraqi security forces, especially commando units such as the Interior Ministry's Wolf Brigade.

"When a man kills another man (from their group), what do you think will be the result?" he said. "How do you think the Wolf Brigade would behave? If you arrested (Osama) bin Laden, what would you do with him?"

So much for spreading freedom and democracy; this sounds more like a gang war.