Disturbin' Dick Durbin is an actor, who dons the mask of a devout choir boy...just like many other sociopaths do.
Posted on 06/17/2005 7:04:26 AM PDT by conservativecorner
"First of all, with Sen. Durbin, I'd be very careful about taking quotes off the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Yeah! I never have trusted them. I like to go to Newsweek, CBS, NY TIMES....where they never make mistakes.
Unfazed by his error, Leahy blasted the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq, suggesting that the U.S. had done just as much damage to Iraq as Saddam Hussein.
Right
Saddam's chambers of horrors
By MARGARET WENTE
Toronto Globe and Mail Saturday, November 23, 2002
Abu Ghraib, 30 kilometres west of Baghdad, is Iraq's biggest prison. Until recently, it held perhaps 50,000 people, perhaps more. No one knows for sure. No one knows how many people were taken there through the years and never came out.
For a generation, Abu Ghraib was the centrepiece of Saddam Hussein's reign of torture and death. Yahya al-Jaiyashy is one of the survivors.
Mr. Jaiyashy is an animated, bearded man of 49 whose words can scarcely keep up with the torrent of his memories. Today he lives in Toronto with his second wife, Sahar. This week, he sat down with me to relate his story. With him were his wife, a lovely Iraqi woman in her mid-30s, and a friend, Haithem al-Hassan, who helped me with Mr. Jaiyashy's mixture of Arabic and rapid English.
"Nineteen seventy-seven was the first time I went to jail," he says. "I was not tortured that much."
He was in his mid-20s then, from an intellectual family that lived in a town south of Baghdad. He had been a student of Islamic history, language and religion in the holy city of Najaf, but was forced to quit his studies after he refused to join the ruling Ba'ath party. His ambition was to write books that would show how Islam could open itself up to modernism.
In Saddam's Iraq, this was a dangerous occupation, especially for a Shiite. Shia Muslims are the majority in Iraq, but Saddam and his inner circle are Sunni. Many Shiites were under suspicion as enemies of the state.
"My father was scared for me," says Mr. Jaiyashy. " 'You know how dangerous this regime is,' he told me. 'You know how many people they kill.' "
Mr. Jaiyashy continued his studies on his own. But, eventually, he was picked up, along with a dozen acquaintances who had been involved in political activity against the regime. They were sent to Abu Ghraib. The others did not get off as lightly as he did. One was killed by immersion into a vat of acid. Ten others, he recalls, were put into a room and torn apart by wild dogs. Several prominent religious leaders were also executed. One was a university dean, someone Mr. Jaiyashy remembers as "a great man." They drove a nail through his skull.
For three decades, the most vicious war Saddam has waged has been the one against his own people. Iraq's most devastating weapon of mass destruction is Saddam himself. And the most powerful case for regime change is their suffering.
Sometimes, it is almost impossible to believe the accounts of people who survived Saddam's chamber of horrors. They seem like twisted nightmares, or perhaps crude propaganda. But there are too many survivors who have escaped Iraq, too many credible witnesses. And Mr. Jaiyashy's story, horrible as it is, is not unusual.
Saddam personally enjoyed inflicting torture in the early years of his career, and he has modelled his police state after that of his hero, Stalin. According to Kenneth Pollack, a leading U.S. expert on Iraq, the regime employs as many as half a million people in its various intelligence, security and police organizations. Hundreds of thousands of others serve as informants. Neighbour is encouraged to inform on neighbour, children on their parents. Saddam has made Iraq into a self-policing totalitarian state, where everyone is afraid of everybody else.
"Being in Iraq is like creeping around inside someone else's migraine," says veteran BBC correspondent John Sweeney. "The fear is so omnipresent, you could almost eat it."
To Stalin's methods of arbitrary arrests and forced confessions, Saddam has added an element of sadism: the torture of children to extract information from their parents.
In northern Iraq -- the only place in the country where people can speak relatively freely -- Mr. Sweeney interviewed several people who had direct experience of child torture. He also met one of the victims -- a four-year-old girl, the daughter of a man who had worked for Saddam's psychopathic son Uday. When the man fell under suspicion, he fled to the Kurdish safe haven in the north. The police came for his wife and tortured her to reveal his whereabouts; when she didn't break, they took his daughter and crushed her feet. She was 2 then. Today, she wears metal braces on her legs, and can only hobble.
"This is a regime that will gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents," writes Mr. Pollack in his new book, The Threatening Storm. "This is a regime that will hold a nursing baby at arm's length from its mother and allow the child to starve to death to force the mother to confess. This is a regime that will burn a person's limbs off to force him to confess or comply. This is a regime that will slowly lower its victims into huge vats of acid. . . .
"This is a regime that practises systematic rape against the female victims. This is a regime that will drag in a man's wife, daughter or other female relative and repeatedly rape her in front of him." And if he has fled the country, it will send him the video.
After nearly two years in prison, Mr. Jaiyashy was released and sent to do military service in the north. Then the security police decided to round up the followers of one of the executed clerics. In 1980, Mr. Jaiyashy was arrested again, along with 20 friends, and taken to a military prison. He was interrogated about criticisms he was supposed to have made of the regime, and urged to sign a confession. During one session, his wrists were tied to a ceiling fan. Then they turned on the fan. Then they added weights onto his body and did it again. Then somebody climbed on him to add more weight. "It was 20 minutes, but it seemed like 20 years," he recalls.
He was beaten with a water hose filled with stones. When he passed out, he was shocked back into consciousness with an electric cable. They hung him by his legs, pulled out a fingernail with pliers, and drove an electric drill through his foot.
Mr. Jaiyashy took off his right shoe and sock to show me his foot. It is grotesquely mutilated, with a huge swelling over the arch. There is an Amnesty International report on human-rights abuses in Iraq with a photo of a mutilated foot that looks identical to his. The baby finger on his left hand is also mutilated.
He didn't sign the confession. He knew that, if he did, they would eventually kill him.
They put him in solitary confinement, in a cell measuring two metres by two and a half, without windows or light. Every few weeks, they would bring him the confession again, but he refused to sign. He stayed there for a year.
In 1981, he was sent to trial, where he persuaded a sympathetic judge not to impose the death sentence. He got 10 years instead, and was sent back to Abu Ghraib. "They put me in a cell with 50 people. It was three and a half by three and a half metres. Some stood, some sat. They took turns."
There was a small window in the cell, with a view of a tree. It was the only living thing the prisoners could see. The tree was cut down. There were informants in the cells and, every morning, guards would come and take someone and beat him till he died. "This is your breakfast!" they would say.
Mr. Jaiyashy spent the next six years in that cell. His parents were told he was dead.
Abu Ghraib contained many intellectuals and professional people. Among them was the scientist Hussein Shahristani, a University of Toronto alumnus who became a leading nuclear scientist in Iraq. He was imprisoned after he refused to work on Saddam's nuclear program. He spent 10 years in Abu Ghraib, most of them in solitary confinement, until he escaped in 1991.
Saddam has reduced his people to abject poverty. He wiped out families, villages, cities and cultures, and drove four million people into exile. He killed between 100,000 and 200,000 Kurds. He killed as many as 300,000 Shiites in the uprising after the Persian Gulf war. He killed or displaced 200,000 of the 250,000 marsh Arabs who had created a unique, centuries-old culture in the south. He drained the marshes, an environmental treasure, and turned them into a desert.
In a recent Frontline documentary, a woman who fled Iraq recounted how she and others had been forced to witness the public beheadings of 15 women who had been rounded up for prostitution and other crimes against the state. One of the women was a doctor who had been misreported as speaking against the regime. "They put her head in a trash can," she said.
In 1987, Mr. Jaiyashy and a thousand other inmates were transferred to an outdoor prison camp. There, they were allowed a visit with their relatives, so long as they said nothing of their lives in prison. Mr. Jaiyashy's parents came, hoping he might still be alive. He remembers the day all the families came. "There was so much crying. We called it the crying day."
In 1989, he was finally released from prison. Then came the gulf war and, after that, the uprising, which he joined. It was quickly crushed. He fled with 150,000 refugees toward the Saudi border. But the Saudis didn't want them. "They are Wahhabis," he says. "They consider the Shia as infidels." The United Nations set up a refugee camp, where Mr. Jaiyashy spent the next six years. He began to paint and write again.
Finally, he was accepted as an immigrant to Canada. He arrived in Toronto in 1996, and is now a Canadian citizen.
Mr. Jaiyashy has a deep sense of gratitude toward his adoptive country. Canada, he says, has given him back his freedom and his dignity. He paints prolifically, and has taken courses at the art college, and is the author of three plays about the Saddam regime. He makes his living stocking shelves in a fabric store. "I'm a porter," he says. "No problem. I'm happy."
But Saddam's spies are everywhere. After one of his plays was produced here, his father was imprisoned. His first wife and three children are still in Iraq. He hasn't seen them since his youngest, now 12, was a baby. He talks with them on the phone from time to time, but it is very dangerous. One of his brothers is in Jordan, another still in Iraq.
Sahar, his second wife, is soft-spoken. She covers her head and dresses modestly, without makeup. Her face is unlined. She arrived in Canada with her two daughters the same year as Mr. Jaiyashy; they were introduced by friends.
She, too, has a story. I learned only the smallest part of it. "I was a widow," she told me. "My husband was a doctor in Iraq. He wanted to continue his education and have a specialty. But they didn't allow him. He deserted the military service to continue his education on his own. They beat him till he died."
Today, her daughters are in high school and she teaches at a daycare centre. Her new husband pushed her to study hard here. "ESL, ESL," she says affectionately.
Like many Iraqis, they are conflicted about the prospect of war. They want Saddam gone. But they do not want more harm inflicted on their country. "I want Saddam gone -- only him," says Mr. Jaiyashy.
A few weeks ago, Saddam threw open the doors of Abu Ghraib and freed the prisoners there. Many families rejoiced, and many others, who did not find their loved ones, mounted a brief, unheard-of protest against the regime. The prison is a ghost camp now. Nothing is left but piles of human excrement that cake the razor wire.
Saddam's Iraq is a rebuke to anyone who may doubt that absolute evil dwells among us. No one has put it better than Mr. Sweeney, the BBC reporter. "When I hear the word Iraq, I hear a tortured child screaming."
The Senate Dems called in Howard Dean to, obstensibly, chastize him for being over the top.
Pot meet kettle, kettle meet pot.
"The GOP's response, including the President's lack thereof, is weak at best."
YOU ARE SO RIGHT!! The GOP in general and the President in particular have got to stop "playing nice" with these snakes. No more Mr. Nice Guy, no more "new tone", no more "getting along". The RATs do not want to "get along". They want their power back and will do anything to get it. The GOP better realize that SOON, cut the head off this snake, and start taking charge or they are done!
Rat SOP.
Lie.
Deny.
Lie.
Change the subject.
Lie.
Attack the critics.
Lie.
Repeat.
Lie.
Powerline
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/010760.php
June 17, 2005
The Durbin infecta
Senator Dick Durbin -- soon to be Turban Durbin -- stands pat. Hugh Hewitt has the quote (and much more):
I have heard my colleagues and others in the press suggest that I have said our soldiers could be compared to Nazis. I'd say to the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, I do not even know if the interrogator involved here was an American soldier. I didn't say that at any point. To suggest that I am criticizing American servicemen, I am not. I don't know who is responsible for this. But the FBI agent made this report, and to suggest that I was attributing all the sins and all the horro and barbarism of Nazi Germany or Soviet Republic or Pol Pot to Americans is totally unfair. I was attributing this form of interrogation to repressive regimes, such as those that I noted. And I honestly believe the Senator from Virginia, who I respect very, very much, would have to say that, if indeed this occured, it does not represent American values. It doesn't represent what our country stands for. It is not the sort of conduct we would ever condone. I would hope that the senator from Virginia would agree with that. That was the point I was making. Now sadly, we have a situation here, where some in the right wing media have said that I have been insulting men and women in uniform. Nothing could be further from truth. I respect our men and women in uniform. I have spent many hours, as I am sure the senator from Virginia has, at funerals of the servicemen who have been returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, writing notes to their families and calling them personally. It breaks my heart every day to pick up the newspaper and hear of another death. Now the total this morning, 1710. To suggest that this is somehow an insult to the men and women serving in the uniform, nothing could be further from the truth. But it is no credit to them or our nation for this sort of conduct to occur.
We give Durbin failing grades in attention, conduct, intelligence, knowledge, candor, logic, manners, loyalty and decency. He has put his manifold defects on display before an appreciative worldwide audience.
As the Senate Democrats' whip, his voice is his party's. No Senate Democrat has condemned him, the infantile leftists at the heart of his party support him, and he has given renewed prominence to the malady that should at least for a while be dubbed in his honor Durbin's Disorder.
Michelle Malkin elaborates. Professor David Gelernter renders judgment. And the whole wide world is watchin'.
The Dims have shit in their nest, and haven't the common sense to figure out where the stink is coming from. They have convinced themselves they can get by with anything.
Their friends in the MSM will pass it off with a wink and a nod; the pajamahadeen will not be so kind. Let's keep up the outrage until the slimy little dick in the senate is forced out into the street.
The problem is that most of Durbin's supporters are looking for more money and job benefits than they even care about what's going on in Gitmo.
Really, if journalists actually walked the streets and talked to people in the communities rather than quoting lawyers, politicians, and city workers all the time, then they would get a better understanding of what average people think.
Every Democrat I've talked to so far hasn't even heard this story yet. I get the same response from most of them... "yeah that sucks what he said" and that's about it. Fighting this won't do much for the Republicans. If they want to continue to win elections they need to continue to come up with good ideas for our economy and putting people to work. It's mostly the unemployed ones that sit at home all day with nothing to do that get out and get active supporting the Dems in elections. So yeah, blame the morons who elect the Dems, but blame ourselves for not doing a better job educating those morons.
Disturbin' Dick Durbin is an actor, who dons the mask of a devout choir boy...just like many other sociopaths do.
Perfectly consistent with Leahy's past words and actions. Commie to the core.
I think the most effective way is to email his contributers:
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.asp?CID=N00004981&cycle=2004
Hurt him where it counts!
You know, the Democrats just cannot handle winning in increments. Here Mel Martinez makes a dumb statement and just when conservatives get upset, Durbin et al. do something 1000 times worse.
we should remove any conservatives out of vermont and give it to canada.
Can ya guess who has all the guns and ammo? Hint...it ain't the liberals. :>)
Leahy is an example of how "out of it" Vermont voters really are. Leahy is a pompous moron.
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