Many aspects of the government in Baghdad have spiraled out of control since the end of the U.S. military occupation, but the rate of state executions has skyrocketed. In January, 51 prisoners were put to death, and 14 more on February 8.

“The Iraqi government seems to have given state executioners the green light to execute at will,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The government needs to declare an immediate moratorium on all executions and begin an overhaul of its flawed criminal justice system.”

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s security forces have detained and brutally tortured more than 1,000 political opponents in secret prisons and denied them access to legal counsel. Ayad Allawi, a political opponent of Maliki, has alleged that Maliki aims to extract false confessions that implicate his political rivals and justify taking legal action against them.

Indeed, some of the confessions obtained through torture in the last few months have been the basis for trying to detain Maliki’s Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi on trumped up terrorism charges, in a broader effort to marginalize Sunni leaders in the country.

Maliki’s turn towards dictatorship sharpened almost immediately after U.S. occupation forces left in December. He has circumvented Parliament, consolidated illegitimate power in a long trend of quasi-dictatorial behavior, harshly cracked down on peaceful activism, harassed and even attacked journalists that were critical of his regime, and recently betrayed an agreement that would have limited his ability to marginalize his Sunni rivals.

Despite all this, the Obama administration is planning to negotiate with the Iraqi government on a new long-term defense agreement that may include an expanded number of U.S. troops and U.S. support in the form of money and weapons continue to flow.

In Iraq, which US troops have already left, the massive CIA presence in Baghdad has been re-purposed. Once focused chiefly on tackling al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and other insurgents, the spies are now “monitoring developments in the increasingly antagonistic government.”

In many ways thing have come full circle for the CIA, which had a presence on the ground spying on the Saddam Hussein regime before the 2003 US invasion. Now, having spent the last eight years helping the military prop up the Maliki regime, the agency again finds itself there spying.

In Afghanistan — though exactly what sort of government the occupation will leave behind remains up in the air — the expectation is much the same as with Iraq, only moreso. The deployment will be even bigger, characterized by more aggressive operations and constant drone strikes.

An agreement pushed by the U.S. with the Iraqi government delayed the closure of Camp Ashraf, where up to 3,200 members of the MEK have been living for years. The U.S. also got Baghdad to agree to ensure safe treatment of MEK, since the group’s anti-Tehran views don’t fly with the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The facility has been officially renamed Camp Hurriya (Arabic for “freedom”) and the first MEK members can now go there on a temporary basis to decide whether to return to Iran or move on to a third country, if they have residency there. MEK leaders have not yet decided to move, however.

The Iranian dissident group has a history of terrorism, including being implicated in the deaths of Americans, and currently advocates the overthrow of the Iranian government, making Washington’s quiet support of them rather suspect. There has been a big money push by many influential people in Washington to get them removed from the State Department’s terrorist list, presumably to make them eligible for U.S. funding.

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Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued an arrest warrant against Hashemi on charges of “terrorism” in mid-December, claiming the Vice President was secretly running an assassination ring. The Kurdistan Regional Government has refused to hand over Hashemi, saying it wants certain assurances of  a fair trial for him.

Hashemi’s own take on the matter was consistent with what his party has indicated in the past, saying it was an effort to disenfranchise Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority and citing Maliki’s recent efforts to move against fellow Sunni Arab Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq. He also pointed to Maliki’s office’s announcement of the warrant against him days before any judges actually signed it as evidence that the move originated in the prime minister’s office, and not the judiciary. He further speculated that the United States has given Maliki a “green light” for such a move.

Terming his past support for Maliki – he endorsed his nomination for PM twice in 2006 and 2011 – as “probably the biggest mistake of my life,” Hashemi faulted his own Iraqiya bloc for its willingness to accept unity government. He said it retrospect the unity government was too willing to overlook worsening security problems and a crumbling economy.

Hashemi was a particularly harsh critic of Iraq’s current economy, warning that too much of Iraq’s economy was based around oil and there was no effort to develop alternative industries. He warned that a Western war with Iran that obstructed the Strait of Hormuz would bankrupt Iraq almost immediately. He also added that the government “should feel ashamed” at the massive levels of poverty.

The Vice President even commented on the status of secret prisons being operated by the Iraqi government. Despite his office being nominally in charge of overseeing detentions in the country, Hashemi conceded that even now he has been unable to come up with good numbers on how many people have been “disappeared” or how many secret prisons still operate. He warned that the human rights situation in Iraq was getting worse, not better, and that the recent reports on the situation by Human Rights Watch and others “bring shame to us all.”

The U.S. has heaped harsh economic sanctions on Iran and has managed to convince the European Union to go along with a complete ban on Iranian imported oil, measures that are already having detrimental effects on the Iranian economy.

“We have a huge relation financially between the private sectors” of “Iraq and Iran, as Iran is the main supplier for many of the foodstuff and the other commodities here in Iraq,” said Iraqi spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh.

Trade between Iraq and Iran is substantial and includes Iranian exports of electricity, fuel, food, and various commodities. Participating in U.S. sanctions on Iran would make ordinary Iraqis suffer at a time when the economy is weak and the country is unstable.

“It is not possible for Iraq to follow such sanctions,” Dabbagh said. “We are looking for our own interests. In a few days we are going to submit a request to the United States to exempt us.”

Some also point to Baghdad’s increasingly friendly ties with Tehran in recent years as the reason for Iraqi defiance of U.S. wishes, a somewhat unintended consequence of the American invasion. But Iraqi’s certainly know what it’s like to have unnecessary, crippling sanctions placed on them, as Iraq’s experience with it in the 1990′s created a humanitarian catastrophe.

Washington is imposing sanctions on Iran primarily as a political power play, since even U.S. officials widely admit there is no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program and enrichment for peaceful purposes is perfectly within their rights.

Hashemi is in hiding in Iraq’s semi-autonomous northern Kurdish region after Shi’ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered him detained on trumped up terrorism charges, in a broader plan to marginalize Sunni authorities in government.

“Interior ministry security forces detained 16 members of Vice President of the Republic Tareq al-Hashemi’s guard, who were practicing assassinations with silenced rifles and pistols targeting interior ministry officers and judges,” the ministry said in a statement posted on its website on Monday.

Hashemi’s office denounced the detentions and said the government’s claims do “not represent anything new in the series of fabricated accusations, and will not attract the attention of the Iraqi people.”

Maliki’s security forces have detained and brutally tortured more than 1,000 political opponents in secret prisons and denied them access to legal counsel. Ayad Allawi, another political opponent of Maliki, has alleged that Maliki aims to extract false confessions that implicate his political rivals and justify taking legal action against them. Indeed, some of the confessions obtained through torture made allegations against Allawi and Hashemi.

Maliki’s turn towards dictatorship sharpened almost immediately after U.S. occupation forces left in December. He has circumvented Parliament, consolidated illegitimate power in a long trend of quasi-dictatorial behavior, harshly cracked down on peaceful activism, harassed and even attacked journalists that were critical of his regime, and recently betrayed an agreement that would have limited his ability to marginalize his Sunni rivals.

This has coincided with rising sectarian violence in Iraq, with dozens of deadly attacks between Sunni and Shia in the last weeks of December and throughout January. Allawi and many other prominent figures in the country have said Maliki is tearing the country apart, despite continuing to receive enthusiastic U.S. support.

“I want to make sure people understand actually drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” President Obama said in an hour long interview hosted by Google. “For the most part, they’ve been very precise, precision strikes against against al-Qaeda and their affiliates.”

The claim mirrors previous attempts to downplay the civilian casualties of the drone war. John Brennan, President Obama’s counter-terrorism advisor, told the public back in June that zero civilian casualties have occurred as a result of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.

This was an obvious lie, but the Bureau of Investigative Journalism helped prove it so in August by cataloguing their lengthy findings on civilian casualties in the drone war, counting hundreds of civilians by name who were killed in drone strikes, including at least 168 children. Investigative reporter Noor Behram, who had been on the ground in Pakistan tallying the dead, estimated that “for every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant.”

A Washington Post article last month explained that, although the government has dismissed “reports of collateral damage and the alleged killing of innocents” by claiming that drones “result in far fewer mistakes than less sophisticated weapons,” they have yet to provide any details to support those claims.

The Post report said that the drone war in Pakistan has resulted “in an estimated 1,350 to 2,250 deaths.” But the public simply doesn’t have a good idea of how many have been killed, because “the identities…remain classified, as does the existence of the drone program itself.”

In the same Google interview, President Obama also down-played the role of U.S. drones in Iraq, saying that “the truth is we’re not engaging in a bunch of drone attacks inside Iraq. There’s some surveillance to make sure that our embassy compound is protected.”

Both Pakistan and Iraq have publicly objected to America’s use of drones flying over their skies, saying it amounts to a violation of their sovereignty.

The scope and depth of the new defense relationship is not decided yet, but the Obama administration is reportedly “open to Iraqi suggestions.”

“One of the things we’re looking forward to doing is sitting down with the Iraqis in the coming month or two to start thinking about how they want to work with” the U.S. military, Michele Flournoy said.

The U.S. completed a “withdrawal” of most of the troops from Iraq in December after the Maliki government and the Iraqi parliament rejected repeated Obama administration proposals to keep a large contingency force there for the foreseeable future. Obama then dishonestly tried to take credit for ending the unpopular war and occupation.

That Obama would try to take credit for the withdrawal even as the U.S. was essentially kicked out was bad enough. But now it seems the administration simply waited for the lie to be written into the history books, only to dump more troops in once the dust settled.

In order to put more troops in, the Obama administration has had to be very supportive of the Maliki regime, despite a dramatic and violent turn towards dictatorship. American money and weapons continue to flow to Maliki, even as he dismantles the press, attacks political opponents, uses excessive force towards political dissent, and conducts mass arrests and widespread torture.

The U.S. wants extra troops in Iraq for several reasons, foremost of which is to serve as bulwark against neighboring Iran, recently the target of increasing aggression. The long-standing American tradition of propping up brutal client states in order to implement imperial designs seems to be repeating once again in Iraq.

For the Iraqi government, however, the unwelcome overflights amount to a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty, and they have a point. It is hard to imagine the US would give unfettered access to the whole of its airspace to any other nation’s surveillance drones, no matter how big its embassy was.

The State Department’s Diplomatic Security branch hasn’t exactly been keeping the drones a secret, but it hasn’t broadcast them very loudly either. Their mention is a single paragraph buried near the back of its recent annual report.

Contractors responsible for providing the drones say that it may be a growing industry, with the State Department reportedly planning to field similar fleets in countries like Indonesia which they consider “high threat.” No word yet on how the Indonesian government feels about that.