Iraqis Tell of a Reign of Torture and Maiming

The New York Times ^ | April 24, 2003 | CRAIG S. SMITH

[sarcasm]

AGHDAD, Iraq, April 23 — In the Abu Chair neighborhood on the city's outskirts, Ali Kadhem Ghanem answers the door to his family's house with a sheepish smile. He is a handsome man of 29, until he turns his head to reveal the monstrous approximation of an ear, like something a child might fashion out of clay.

It is the result of two attempts at reconstructive surgery to replace an ear sliced off as punishment for leaving his army unit without permission for seven days. Young men by the hundreds, he said, lost ears for deserting the military after the policy was put into effect in 1994.

Thousands of people are missing in Iraq, victims of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, but a more visible legacy are the parts that are missing from people who survived. Missing eyes, ears, toenails and tongues mark those who fell into the hands of Mr. Hussein's powerful security services.

A network of Baath Party informers, intelligence service investigators, secret police operatives and the feared Fedayeen Saddam preyed on the populace to snuff out dissent before it could spread. One man encountered in Baghdad in recent days said he had his hand cut off and a cross carved in his forehead for dealing in dollars.

Many of the victims were Shiite Muslims, who make up some 60 percent of the roughly 25 million Iraqis and presented a constant potential threat to Mr. Hussein's secular but Sunni-dominated government.

Kadhim Sabbit al-Datajji, 61, a resident of the poor Shiite neighborhood known as Saddam City under Mr. Hussein, said his trouble began when the eldest of his seven sons became old enough to join the Baath Party, but did not. "Some Baathists in the neighborhood began asking why no one in my family was a party member and saying that with so many children, my family could cause trouble," he said. "They asked, `Why don't you or your sons join? We think you are in an opposition party.' "

He now has a walleyed stare to show for eight years in prison. He is quick to pop out his glass eye for a visitor — and to tell of how he lost the real one to torture.

Farris Salman is one of the last victims of Mr. Hussein's rule. His speech is slurred because he is missing part of his tongue. Black-hooded paramilitary troops, the Fedayeen Saddam, run by Mr. Hussein's eldest son, Uday, pulled it out of his mouth with pliers last month, he said, and sliced it off with a box cutter. They made his family and dozens of his neighbors watch.

"I thought they were going to execute me," said Mr. Salman, sitting on the floor in his family's small house in a run-down neighborhood of the capital a week after being freed by a frightened prison warden as Americans took control of the city. "When one of the fedayeen said they were going to cut my tongue out, I said, `No, please, just kill me.' "

The tales of torture burn fresh in the memory, regardless of how many years have passed since the damage was done.

Mr. Datajji said he was detained for questioning after the country's 1991 Shiite uprising. In 1994, the secret police kicked in his door and rounded up the 14 males in his extended family. All were eventually released — except for Mr. Datajji and a 24-year-old nephew. The nephew was hanged after eight months in jail.

Mr. Datajji spent over two years in a lightless, six-foot-square cell from which he was summoned for what he said were countless sessions of torture. Sometimes they hung him by his arms from behind, pulling his shoulders out of joint. Sometimes they beat him with a thick wooden club and sometimes jolted him with electricity. Sometimes, he said, they did all three. One day, they pulled out four of his toenails.

"At the beginning, I was afraid, but it became normal," he said. "Of course you scream, but it is normal to scream."

Some people died; he does not know why he survived.

"I can't even imagine it now," he said. "It's something like watching a video for me."

After two and a half years, he was sentenced to 15 years for sedition and moved to Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, sharing a 15-foot square cell with 30 to 40 other prisoners. When cellmates fought, he said, everyone was punished with more torture.

After a few years, his right eye became swollen from so many beatings. A doctor in the prison hospital promised an operation.

"I thought they were going to fix my eye," he said, "but when I woke up I had just one eye left. They had cut the other one out."

[Frapster]

"At the beginning, I was afraid, but it became normal," he said. "Of course you scream, but it is normal to scream."

*speechless*

[MEG33]

I cried OH aloud when reading this. It's the personal stories that bring it home.How I wish the torturers could be brought to justice.

[hmmmmm]

The NYT is reporting this? How on earth was this allowed to continue; it belies all common sense that we didn't have intelligence on these atrocities during the 90s.

[Jeff Chandler]

All this is fine and dandy, but irrelevant compared to the possible loss of access by CNN, or the unthinkable horror of a Bush victory.

Why, of why did we invade when we did? What was the rush, when the entire world was against it?

After all, inspections work, war won't.

[backhoe]

Cross-link:

-When the Dungeon Doors Swing Open...--

[shamusotoole]

But the NYT will from now on call this "old news", not worthy of mentioning again. Whereas, if we don't find a forgotten, loaded, nerve-agent-tipped Cornet or long range Scud with numerous grimy palm prints on the red button while being accompanied by a sufficiently Liberal, Eastern Media Elite presstitute, the war will be illegitimate due to no smoking gun. I think this may be only phase one, the buildup before the put-down, and there is another shoe to drop.

Again, I hope I worry too much.