The main book market, in Baghdad’s Mutanabi Street, was a hive of angry chatter this week. Bespectacled traders, complaining about new censorship laws, shouted, “This is not freedom of expression,” and talked of holding a demonstration like one last month, when journalists protested against new restrictions.

But would the booksellers dare? They said they were already worried that plainclothes policemen had been taking their names. Perhaps they should go instead to court and fight censorship with the help of lawyers. “Not a chance,” said one book-dealer. “This is the new Iraq.” Legal protections, he noted, count for little. “Power”, he added, “is held by the men with the guns.”

He had a point. The Shia-led government has overseen a ballooning of the country’s security apparatus. Human-rights violations are becoming more common. In private many Iraqis, especially educated ones, are asking if their country may go back to being a police state.

Old habits from Saddam Hussein’s era are becoming familiar again. Torture is routine in government detention centres. “Things are bad and getting worse, even by regional standards,” says Samer Muscati, who works for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby. His outfit reports that, with American oversight gone (albeit that the Americans committed their own shameful abuses in such places as Abu Ghraib prison), Iraqi police and security people are again pulling out fingernails and beating detainees, even those who have already made confessions. A limping former prison inmate tells how he realised, after a bout of torture in a government ministry that lasted for five days, that he had been relatively lucky. When he was reunited with fellow prisoners, he said he saw that many had lost limbs and organs.

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