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Tales of Saddam's Brutality [lengthy, graphic, White House websight]
White House -> various press. ^ | Updated regularly, latest - June 3, 2003

Posted on 06/11/2003 6:10:41 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl


June 3, 2003

Tales of Saddam's Brutality

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Christopher Graham
U.S. Marine Corps photo by
Lance Cpl. Christopher Graham
Remains found at mass gravesites, located near a farm on the outskirts of Al Mahawil, Iraq, May 7, 2003.
The cruelty of Saddam's regime is most evident by its brutality toward citizens of Iraq. Today, mass grave sites have been identified in Iraq, providing further evidence of Saddam Hussein's atrocities against the Iraqi people. The Coalition is working to help grieving families search for lost relatives and preserve evidence for future prosecutions by the new Iraqi government against the perpetrators. Some activities include:

 


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Extended News; Foreign Affairs; Front Page News; Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: unspeakable
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
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To: All
Saddam's Surgeons: First, Do Harm
..The state wanted them to have "dirty hands," said one senior surgeon, who told us that they acted on a government mandate ordering all surgeons to participate in cutting off the ears and branding the foreheads of army deserters. In one hospital, all surgeons -- general, orthopedic, plastic, cardiac and neurosurgeons -- were reportedly required to perform the mutilation.
~~~

41 posted on 06/12/2003 6:31:34 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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To: All
 
Did the Iraq War Help al-Qaeda? By Christopher Hitchens
Slate | May 21, 2003
 
~~~
Thus if nothing has been found so far, and if literally nothing (except the mobile units predicted and described by one defector) is found from now on, it will mean that the operation was a success. The stuff must have been destroyed, or neutralized, or work on it must have been abandoned during the long grace period that was provided by the U.N. debates. One senior U.N. inspector adds a caveat to that, which is worth stressing. The intention of the regime to acquire weapons at some point, or to reacquire them, should not be doubted. There are many blueprints and many brains and many computer discs full of know-how. These would be nearly if not actually impossible to discover, and they will now not be reassembled by a Baathist government. Thus if you take my line of the "long short war," and a timeline of 1990 to 2003, Saddam Hussein went from being a threshold nuclear potentate with the capacity to invade Kuwait to an ex-potentate unable even to deploy his Republican Guard. This was the outcome of a series of measures, from sanctions to bombing, designed to create the conditions for regime change or to make regime change (desirable for numberless other reasons) possible. The anti-war movement opposed even the sanctions at first and the military part of the operation at all times. But Iraq is now disarmed, and who will argue that it was not the believable threat of intervention that brought this about?
~~~

42 posted on 06/12/2003 6:33:10 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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Marines free 123 from Iraq hellhole

FOR three days, American tanks have been shelling a military intelligence building in the posh Al-Khathamia area in west Baghdad.

The dozen or so tanks are not here to pound intransigent fighters but to break down concrete beams and steel, to reach bunkers deep underground at the Al-Istikhbarat Al-'Askariya facility.
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The Marines found 123 prisoners, including five women, barely alive in an underground warren of cells and torture chambers.

Being trapped underground probably kept them safe from the bombing of Baghdad by the coalition.

Severely emaciated, some had survived by eating the scabs off their sores. All the men had beards down to their waists, said onlookers.

Most looked absolutely dazed when they emerged, said Mr Sadoun Mohamed, 37, who lives in the area.

'They had not seen sunlight for a long time,' he said. 'They kept blinking and covering their faces.' He said they were taken to the Saddam Hospital for treatment.

Their names were posted on the walls of the Al-Hajabehia Mosque in west Baghdad, as were names of some 40 others known to have been executed or murdered in prison.

Hundreds of anxious locals wait for word of their family, relatives and friends, some of whom were taken away more than 10 years ago.

Outside Al-Istikhbarat Al-'Askariya, Mr Sadeq Al Saeed, 24, a construction worker, has been waiting sleepless for the last 36 hours. He said he had heard the facility had five levels below ground.

He said his father, an Iraqi army captain, was killed in 1991 during the first Gulf War, and his cousins Amer and Jasem and some 50 others were picked out by the secret police for chanting anti-Saddam slogans during the funeral procession.

'That was the last I saw of them,' he said.

'In the night, people raided their houses, blindfolded them and took them away.'

He hopes against hope that the Marines will be able to find his cousins, who were brought here to be interrogated.

This hellhole is believed to be one of many for Iraq's political prisoners. Thousands may still be behind bars though the regime released many criminals from prisons before the war.

Original link Apr.16
~~~

43 posted on 06/12/2003 8:10:24 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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Yasser Alaskary
Media affairs director, Iraqi Prospect Organisation
Wednesday May 21, 2003, UK Guardian
 
"I am feeling quite low at the moment; I did think that people opposed to the war were genuinely concerned for the Iraqi people and the losses we might have suffered. Now I realise that people's opinions of this war were based almost entirely on a hatred of American policy.
 
I have always said that declaring war on the basis of the presence of weapons of mass destruction was stupid, but I would have supported anything that got rid of Saddam. It is only now that people living in Iraq can say that they supported the war."
~~~
Yasser Alaskey, Feb. 2003:
 
"The authorities came to find my parents in the middle of the night - they suspected my father of being involved in the opposition. My uncle pretended to be my father to give him time to run away. My father was taken to the Iranian border by a friend while my mother was driven to Sulaymaniyah, northern Iraq. She was hiding in a small village when she gave birth to me in August 1980. She later fled with me to Syria with fake documents, before coming to Britain.

When Saddam's men come after one person they hunt the whole family. My mother's sister and her family were also suspected of supporting the opposition. In Iraq, mere suspicion of something is enough to get you taken in for questioning. Reports from people released from prison say they saw the authorities burning my two-year-old cousin alive in front of her parents to get them to talk. As they refused my aunt was raped in front of my uncle and executed. Eventually my uncle was also executed. My grandparents managed to hide their one-year-old son; he was later smuggled to Iran."

~~~


44 posted on 06/12/2003 8:11:22 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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(2003/01/27): "How Many People Has Saddam Hussein Killed?"


By JOHN F. BURNS

In the unlit blackness of an October night, it took a flashlight to pick them out: rust-colored butchers' hooks, 20 or more, each four or five feet long, aligned in rows along the ceiling of a large hangar-like building. In the grimmest fortress in Iraq's gulag, on the desert floor 20 miles west of Baghdad, this appeared to be the grimmest corner of all, the place of mass hangings that have been a documented part of life under Saddam Hussein.

At one end of the building at Abu Ghraib prison, a whipping wind gusted through open doors. At the far end, the flashlight picked out a windowed space that appeared to function as a control room. Baggy trousers of the kind worn by many Iraqi men were scattered at the edges of the concrete floor. Some were soiled, as if worn in the last, humiliating moments of a condemned man's life.

The United States is facing a new turning point in its plans to go to war to topple Mr. Hussein, with additional American troops heading for the Persian Gulf, while France and Germany lead the international opposition. But the pressure President Bush has applied already has created chances to peer into the darkest recesses of Iraqi life.

In the past two months, United Nations weapons inspections, mandated by American insistence that Mr. Hussein's pursuit of banned weapons be halted, have ranged widely across the country. But before this became the international community's only goal, Mr. Bush was also attacking Mr. Hussein as a murdering tyrant. It was this accusation that led the Iraqi leader to virtually empty his prisons on Oct. 20, giving Western reporters, admitted that day to Abu Ghraib, a first-hand glimpse of the slaughterhouse the country has become.

In the end, if an American-led invasion ousts Mr. Hussein, and especially if an attack is launched without convincing proof that Iraq is still harboring forbidden arms, history may judge that the stronger case was the one that needed no inspectors to confirm: that Saddam Hussein, in his 23 years in power, plunged this country into a bloodbath of medieval proportions, and exported some of that terror to his neighbors.

Reporters who were swept along with tens of thousands of near-hysterical Iraqis through Abu Ghraib's high steel gates were there because Mr. Hussein, stung by Mr. Bush's condemnation, had declared an amnesty for tens of thousands of prisoners, including many who had served long sentences for political crimes. Afterward, it emerged that little of long-term significance had changed that day. Within a month, Iraqis began to speak of wide-scale re-arrests, and officials were whispering that Abu Ghraib, which had held at least 20,000 prisoners, was filling up again.

Like other dictators who wrote bloody chapters in 20th-century history, Mr. Hussein was primed for violence by early childhood. Born into the murderous clan culture of a village that lived off piracy on the Tigris River, he was harshly beaten by a brutal stepfather. In 1959, at age 22, he made his start in politics as one of the gunmen who botched an attempt to assassinate Iraq's first military ruler, Abdel Karim Kassem.

Since then, Mr. Hussein's has been a tale of terror that scholars have compared to that of Stalin, whom the Iraqi leader is said to revere, even if his own brutalities have played out on a small scale. Stalin killed 20 million of his own people, historians have concluded. Even on a proportional basis, his crimes far surpass Mr. Hussein's, but figures of a million dead Iraqis, in war and through terror, may not be far from the mark, in a country of 22 million people.

Where the comparison seems closest is in the regime's mercilessly sadistic character. Iraq has its gulag of prisons, dungeons and torture chambers — some of them acknowledged, like Abu Ghraib, and as many more disguised as hotels, sports centers and other innocent-sounding places. It has its overlapping secret-police agencies, and its culture of betrayal, with family members denouncing each other, and offices and factories becoming hives of perfidy.

"Enemies of the state" are eliminated, and their spouses, adult children and even cousins are often tortured and killed along with them.

Mr. Hussein even uses Stalinist maxims, including what an Iraqi defector identified as one of the dictator's favorites: "If there is a person, then there is a problem. If there is no person, then there is no problem."

There are rituals to make the end as terrible as possible, not only for the victims but for those who survive. After seizing power in July 1979, Mr. Hussein handed weapons to surviving members of the ruling elite, then joined them in personally executing 22 comrades who had dared to oppose his ascent.

The terror is self-compounding, with the state's power reinforced by stories that relatives of the victims pale to tell — of fingernail-extracting, eye-gouging, genital-shocking and bucket-drowning. Secret police rape prisoners' wives and daughters to force confessions and denunciations. There are assassinations, in Iraq and abroad, and, ultimately, the gallows, the firing squads and the pistol shots to the head.

DOING the arithmetic is an imprecise venture. The largest number of deaths attributable to Mr. Hussein's regime resulted from the war between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988, which was launched by Mr. Hussein. Iraq says its own toll was 500,000, and Iran's reckoning ranges upward of 300,000. Then there are the casualties in the wake of Iraq's 1990 occupation of Kuwait. Iraq's official toll from American bombing in that war is 100,000 — surely a gross exaggeration — but nobody contests that thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were killed in the American campaign to oust Mr. Hussein's forces from Kuwait. In addition, 1,000 Kuwaitis died during the fighting and occupation in their country.

Casualties from Iraq's gulag are harder to estimate. Accounts collected by Western human rights groups from Iraqi émigrés and defectors have suggested that the number of those who have "disappeared" into the hands of the secret police, never to be heard from again, could be 200,000. As long as Mr. Hussein remains in power, figures like these will be uncheckable, but the huge toll is palpable nonetheless.

Just as in Stalin's Russia, the machinery of death is mostly invisible, except for the effects it works on those brushed by it — in the loss of relatives and friends, and in the universal terror that others have of falling into the abyss. If anybody wants to know what terror looks like, its face is visible every day on every street of Iraq.

"Minders," the men who watch visiting reporters day and night, are supposedly drawn from among the regime's harder men. But even they break down, hands shaking, eyes brimming, voices desperate, when reporters ask ordinary Iraqis edgy questions about Mr. Hussein.

"You have killed me, and killed my family," one minder said after a photographer for The New York Times made unauthorized photographs of an exhibition of statues of the Iraqi dictator during a November visit to Baghdad's College of Fine Arts. In recent years, the inexorable nature of Iraq's horrors have been demonstrated by new campaigns bearing the special hallmark of Mr. Hussein. In 1999, a complaint about prison overcrowding led to an instruction from the Iraqi leader for a "prison cleansing" drive. This resulted, according to human rights groups, in hundreds, and possibly thousands, of executions.

Using a satanic arithmetic, prison governors worked out how many prisoners would have to be hanged to bring the numbers down to stipulated levels, even taking into account the time remaining in the inmates' sentences. As 20 and 30 prisoners at a time were executed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, warders trailed through cities like Baghdad, "selling" exemption from execution to shocked families, according to people in Iraq who said they had spoken to relatives of those involved. Bribes of money, furniture, cars and even property titles brought only temporary stays.

MORE recently, according to Iraqis who fled to Jordan and other neighboring countries, scores of women have been executed under a new twist in a "return to faith" campaign proclaimed by Mr. Hussein. Aimed at bolstering his support across the Islamic world, the campaign led early on to a ban on drinking alcohol in public. Then, some time in the last two years, it widened to include the public killing of accused prostitutes.

Often, the executions have been carried out by the Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary group headed by Mr. Hussein's oldest son, 38-year-old Uday. These men, masked and clad in black, make the women kneel in busy city squares, along crowded sidewalks, or in neighborhood plots, then behead them with swords. The families of some victims have claimed they were innocent of any crime save that of criticizing Mr. Hussein.

http://www.iraq.net/erica/news-e/archives/00001146.htm


45 posted on 06/12/2003 8:16:19 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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To: LurkedLongEnough
A bump and a ping
46 posted on 06/12/2003 8:18:26 AM PDT by leadpencil1
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To: All

Threat Gone, Iraqis Unearth Hussein's Nameless Victims

By IAN FISHER

BU GHRAIB, Iraq, April 24 — First the gravedigger found some teeth. "Please, just barely scrape the sand," Adel Rahaif Hani, whose brother, Satter, was arrested as a political prisoner in 1995, begged the digger. "I'm worried he's just below this layer."

Mr. Hani came to a cemetery here today, like dozens of other Iraqis, not with the name of his dead brother but with a number. Satter's number was 535. A cousin, Sagur, arrested at the same time, was 537.

These numbers were what was left of people convicted as enemies of Saddam Hussein and then made to disappear. Their graves were not dignified with names but with numbers painted on metal plates. The plates spread like rusty weeds, covering more and more feet of desert every year Mr. Hussein held power.

But now that he is gone, the families of the disappeared are finding the numbers, matching them to the metal plates and finally collecting their dead.

These were people executed — most by hanging in the fearsome Abu Ghraib prison a mile away — merely because the government considered them a threat. Many were Shiite Muslims more active in their religion than the Sunni-dominated government felt it could tolerate.

"This is all because of Saddam!" shrieked Ali Majid al-Shamali, in tears, as he waved his arms at the long rows of graves marked with metal signs, well over 1,000 of them. "My brother! My brother!"

He sat on the ground and stroked the dirt on the grave of his only brother, Walid, arrested in October, 1993. A man from another family at the graveyard tried to comfort him. "You lost only one person?" the man asked. "We lost eight here."

Two women in black wailed. Both men started to cry.

"Why these innocent people?" Mr. Shamali yelled. "Why?"

The thousands of Iraqis executed as political prisoners — more probably tens or hundreds of thousands — might have been unidentified forever, except that the Hussein government, which was as bureaucratically efficient as it was cruel, kept records of most everyone it killed. These were not available to ordinary Iraqis. But now a new organization, the Committee for Free Prisoners, says it has received millions of documents from the custodians of the nation's graveyards for executed political prisoners. The numbers are contained in these documents.

The head of the group, Ibrahim Raouf Idrisi, who says he spent 6 of his 35 years in prisons because he joined a Muslim party, has opened the records to family members to find what happened to their loved ones, and they are coming here every day.

Sitting today in the abandoned house in Baghdad of a Hussein general, whose rooms are now piled with fat green record books of torture and execution, Mr. Idrisi mused at the hundreds of millions of dollars Mr. Hussein spent jailing and killing his enemies. "If he had spent only half that money on the people, they would have loved him," he said. "He is a terrorist, the only terrorist in the universe."

The documents represent only a small part of what existed on cemeteries around Iraq, he said, before the government went on a spree of paper shredding in its last hours.

Much survived. Mr. Hani, for example, now has the death certificate of his brother, which states plainly that on Aug. 23, 1997 he was "executed by hanging."

A slightly broader picture of what happened has emerged from the chief gravedigger, just 21 years old. He is Muhammad Muslim Muhammad and he said he began digging graves here when he was 14 to fulfill his military service.

He said he received the bodies every Wednesday at about 11 a.m., after the weekly hangings at around 5 a.m. There were never fewer than nine bodies to bury. During one especially bad time in 2001, he said, the numbers rose. One day he buried 18 people. He said he had never told anyone the details of his job.

"I didn't open my mouth, or I would have ended up with these poor people here," he said.

The oldest graves in the cemetery, he said, date to 1983, four years after Mr. Hussein took power. The most recent, he said, was from six months ago, about the time that Mr. Hussein declared an amnesty for prisoners at Abu Ghraib as the threat of an attack by the United States rose.

He said he personally helped bury 700 people, but he has no idea how many bodies are in the cemetery, a walled-off part of the huge Islamic cemetery here. The area is sizable, measuring about 130 graves by 25 graves, which if full might hold more than 3,000 bodies.

Slowly, the area is emptying of corpses. In the two weeks since the government fell, the families have been coming, but they were not able to find their relatives until the documents were recovered. So far, Mr. Muhammad said, 80 bodies have been removed.

It is not easy, even for families who have the numbers. Today, a 40-year-old tailor named Hassan Jassim arrived with a scrap of paper scrawled with the number 849, which was supposed to mark the grave of his brother, Selim.

A student in the Hawsa, the Shiite religious school in Najaf, about 85 miles south of Baghdad, Selim was arrested in 1998 at the family's home in Baghdad. The military then destroyed the house.

What Mr. Jassim wanted was to provide his brother with a proper Islamic burial, in which the body is ritually washed and wrapped in white linen. But he could not find the grave: The numbers ran from 847 to 848, then skipped up to 853.

They decided to dig anyway. "Do you want me to dig up everything or just the head," the gravedigger asked. Mr. Jassim decided just to see the head, because he believed he could identify his brother by his two missing back teeth.

"There are so many graves that don't have numbers," he said. "We don't know what to do."

The dirt was dry and easily dug and soon the gravedigger held up a skull. "It's not him," Mr. Jassim said. "The teeth are complete."

At grave No. 444, a large family worked together to unearth Hamid Omran, who was 31 when he was arrested in 1994. As the family carefully lifted the bones onto fresh linen, his cousin, Farhan Jassim, 47, exploded in anger.

"I don't think there was a regime in the world that treated political prisoners the way Saddam did," he said. "You can't imagine such exaggerated injustice."

The jaw surfaced. Mr. Hussein, the cousin said, "hated every Iraqi. Believe me, he hated all Iraqis."

Then the family found the skull, which showed a crack in a temple. A guard kicked him when he was arrested, the family said.

Another cousin, Thaer Ghawi, 27, wept as he smoked a cigarette once the bones were out of the grave. "We are just people who opposed the regime," he said. "Why couldn't he just put political prisoners in prison?"

Mr. Hani, the man whose brother disappeared in 1995, spent three hours picking through the grave of his brother. It was laborious. After the teeth, a few small bones, perhaps from the feet or hands, were found. Finally, Mr. Hani had found enough to fill a small coffin. He did not find the skull.

"It is enough for me," he said as he loaded the coffin onto a truck. "I feel relieved. What worried me before was I didn't know if he was alive or dead. Now I know."


47 posted on 06/12/2003 8:22:52 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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To: All

WARNING: Graphic

http://www.indict.org.uk/targets.php

And now for Qusay's torture crimes:

"On that day which followed the visit of QUSAY SADDAM HUSSEIN to the prison, 180 prisoners were executed. The guards walked up and down the corridors calling out names. They took some prisoners from nearly every cell...when QUSAY SADDAM HUSSEIN visited a prison, mass executions would often follow and so we all realised what it meant when they began calling out the names of prisoners..."

"On several occasions I saw QUSAY SADDAM HUSSEIN walk along the row of cells, open the slot in the door and spray what I believe to be something like mustard gas into the cell...The bodies of the dead were bloated by the gas. They foamed at the mouth and were bleeding from the eyes...The prisoners were screaming. I remember one of them was only about twelve years old. I remember QUSAY shouting something like "Put this bastard in - he's a member of the [X] family'...The little boy was screaming. He was already bleeding from previous beatings. QUSAY killed him along with all the others...The little boy screamed out "I am sorry, I don't want to die, I want my father." QUSAY said, "Your father is in the cell next door", which was true. QUSAY then proceeded to spray him with gas and he died after about ten minutes of agony. We could hear them screaming... I estimate that QUSAY SADDAM HUSSEIN personally murdered between 1200-1300 people during this period."

"There was a machine designed for shredding plastic. Men were dropped into it and we were again made to watch. Sometimes they went in head first and died quickly. Sometimes they were put in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 people die like this. Their remains would be placed in plastic bags and we were told they would be used as fish food.... On one occasion, I saw QUSAY SADDAM HUSSEIN personally supervising these murders."

"QUSAY SADDAM HUSSEIN went into the torture room...screaming..."I'll put an end to you with my own hands"...[the prisoner] was brought back into the cell with his right foot covered in filthy bandages. It had been cut off during his torture...the amputation had been carried out with a power saw during his torture under the direct supervision of QUSAY SADDAM HUSSEIN...it had not been done cleanly and it had taken some time to cut the foot off."

173 posted on 04/17/2003 8:52 AM EDT by BagCamAddict


48 posted on 06/12/2003 8:24:04 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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Press "objectivity":

'Something of a Loose Cannon'
Time magazine has a fascinating story about Saddam Hussein's evil spawn, Uday and Qusay, which opens with this horrifying account:

At his first outing [after an assassination attempt] in 1998, at the posh Jadriyah Equestrian Club, [Uday] used high-powered binoculars to survey the crowd of friends and family from a platform high above the guests. He saw something he liked, recalls his former aide Adib Shabaan, who helped arrange the party. Uday tightened the focus on a pretty 14-year-old girl in a bright yellow dress sitting with her father, a former provincial governor, her mother and her younger brother and sister.

Uday's bodyguards picked up the signal and walked through the darkened room, flicking cigarette lighters as they approached the girl's table. Uday, then 33, flipped on his too, confirming they had identified the right one. When the girl left the table for the powder room, Uday's bodyguards approached her with a choice, says Shabaan, who was Uday's business manager. She could ascend the platform now and congratulate Uday on his recovery, or she could call him on his private phone that night. Flustered, she apologized and said her parents would allow neither. One of the guards replied, "This is the chance of your life" and promised she would receive diamonds and a car. "All you have to do is go up there for 10 minutes," he urged. When she demurred again, the bodyguards pursued Uday's backup plan. They maneuvered the girl in the direction of the parking lot, picked her up and carried her to the backseat of Uday's car, covering her mouth to muffle her screams.

After three days the girl was returned to her home, with a new dress, a new watch and a large sum of cash. Her parents had her tested for rape; the result was positive. According to Shabaan's account, Uday heard she had been tested and sent aides to the clinic, where they warned doctors not to report a rape. Furious, the father demanded to see Saddam himself. Rebuffed, he kept complaining publicly about what Uday had done. After three months, the President's son had had enough. He sent two guards to the man to insist that he drop the matter. Uday had another demand: that the ex-governor bring his daughter and her 12-year-old sister to his next party. "Your daughters will be my girlfriends, or I'll wipe you off the face of the earth." The man complied, surrendering both girls.

The Associated Press describes Uday as "known for being cruel and something of a loose cannon." And Hitler is said to have been a tad overbearing.

James Taranto - Opinion Journal


49 posted on 06/12/2003 8:27:07 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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Committee of the Missing (Saddam's victims may number eight million)
Newsweek via MSNBC.com ^ | 5/8/03 | Rod Nordland

50 posted on 06/12/2003 8:29:00 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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March 18, 2003

See men shredded, then say you don't back war
By Ann Clwyd
“There was a machine designed for shredding plastic. Men were dropped into it and we were again made to watch. Sometimes they went in head first and died quickly. Sometimes they went in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 people die like this. Their remains would be placed in plastic bags and we were told they would be used as fish food . . . on one occasion, I saw Qusay [President Saddam Hussein’s youngest son] personally supervise these murders.”

This is one of the many witness statements that were taken by researchers from Indict — the organisation I chair — to provide evidence for legal cases against specific Iraqi individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. This account was taken in the past two weeks.

Another witness told us about practices of the security services towards women: “Women were suspended by their hair as their families watched; men were forced to watch as their wives were raped . . . women were suspended by their legs while they were menstruating until their periods were over, a procedure designed to cause humiliation.”

The accounts Indict has heard over the past six years are disgusting and horrifying. Our task is not merely passively to record what we are told but to challenge it as well, so that the evidence we produce is of the highest quality. All witnesses swear that their statements are true and sign them.

For these humanitarian reasons alone, it is essential to liberate the people of Iraq from the regime of Saddam. The 17 UN resolutions passed since 1991 on Iraq include Resolution 688, which calls for an end to repression of Iraqi civilians. It has been ignored. Torture, execution and ethnic-cleansing are everyday life in Saddam’s Iraq.

Were it not for the no-fly zones in the south and north of Iraq — which some people still claim are illegal — the Kurds and the Shia would no doubt still be attacked by Iraqi helicopter gunships.

For more than 20 years, senior Iraqi officials have committed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This list includes far more than the gassing of 5,000 in Halabja and other villages in 1988. It includes serial war crimes during the Iran-Iraq war; the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds in 1987-88; the invasion of Kuwait and the killing of more than 1,000 Kuwaiti civilians; the violent suppression, which I witnessed, of the 1991 Kurdish uprising that led to 30,000 or more civilian deaths; the draining of the Southern Marshes during the 1990s, which ethnically cleansed thousands of Shias; and the summary executions of thousands of political opponents.

Many Iraqis wonder why the world applauded the military intervention that eventually rescued the Cambodians from Pol Pot and the Ugandans from Idi Amin when these took place without UN help. They ask why the world has ignored the crimes against them?

All these crimes have been recorded in detail by the UN, the US, Kuwaiti, British, Iranian and other Governments and groups such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and Indict. Yet the Security Council has failed to set up a war crimes tribunal on Iraq because of opposition from France, China and Russia. As a result, no Iraqi official has ever been indicted for some of the worst crimes of the 20th century. I have said incessantly that I would have preferred such a tribunal to war. But the time for offering Saddam incentives and more time is over.

I do not have a monopoly on wisdom or morality. But I know one thing. This evil, fascist regime must come to an end. With or without the help of the Security Council, and with or without the backing of the Labour Party in the House of Commons tonight.

The author is Labour MP for Cynon Valley.
 

51 posted on 06/12/2003 8:56:05 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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Iraqi mother hides sons from Saddam for 23 years
By Wafa Amr
BAGHDAD, June 1 — Two Iraqi brothers made their home a prison for 23 years to escape execution by Saddam Hussein's security forces, seeing daylight only after his fall.
 
She endured repeated interrogation and constant surveillance by security men looking for the two boys. Her husband, pregnant daughter and another son had already been executed as suspected members of the Shi'ite Muslim Daawa Party.
       ''For 23 years I lived in fear and anxiety. My tears never dried until Saddam was toppled,'' Zahra, 67, told Reuters at her humble home in a crowded quarter of Baghdad.
       Zahra hid her sons in a room inside the house, keeping the secret even from her closest relatives. She managed to convince the security forces they were in Iraqi jails.
       In 1989, a bureaucratic slip-up helped Zahra's cause: the security forces told her all her detained relatives, including Saad and Ibrahim, had been executed.

Excerpted - click for full article ^


52 posted on 06/12/2003 9:37:18 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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Saddam foe hid in wall for 21 years
New York Daily News ^ | 5/28/03 | Bill Hutchinson

Jawad Amir is the Anne Frank of Iraq.

At age 28, he squeezed into a hiding place between the walls of his parents' home in the village of Jobah after Saddam Hussein ordered that he be executed.

Now, at age 49, Amir has emerged to a very different country - one where he finally feels safe to step into the sunshine.

"I feel as if I had just given birth to him again," Amir's elated mother, Ramsya Haddi, told BBC News.

For 21 years, Amir lived in fear of being snatched by the dictator's henchmen. Only a few relatives and his mother knew he was living in the narrow slot between the walls.

His life-or-death game of hide-and-seek began when he angered Saddam by supporting an outspoken Shiite cleric....


53 posted on 06/12/2003 9:47:58 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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Iraqi Mass Graves (AP) Saddam Was Weapon of Mass Destruction
AP | 05/14/03 | Faramarzi

...Across Iraq, in fields and on hillocks, families are gathering to excavate sites they couldn't even approach while Saddam was in power. They pick through the bones for a thread of familiar clothing, an identification card, any clue to their identity.

~~~

54 posted on 06/12/2003 10:00:35 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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DoD News Briefing - ASD PA Clarke and Maj. Gen. McChrystal Mar.29, 2003

And finally, before I turn things over to General McChrystal, there's been some talk lately and some observations in the early days. People seem to have been surprised at the brutality, at what the Iraqi regime is doing to some of their people. And on the one hand, it's hard to understand that. It has been so well-documented. It has been so well-reported for years what the regime has done to its own people.

And we're going to show you a couple of clips here. The first one is an Iraqi woman whose name is Zainab Al-Suwaj, whose teenage cousin was tortured by the regime. And following that is a small clip from a BBC program about the chemical weapon attack on the town of Halabja.

(Begin videotape.)

ZAINAB AL-SUWAJ: I have a 16-year-old cousin. She was in high school. And one day she wrote in her notes something against the government, "I don't like Saddam." So the teacher saw what she wrote, and so the police came and they took her to prison with her mother, father, uncles, sisters and brother and cousin and her aunt.

This is a letter I received from her after she's been released, and she was telling me about "the day that started the series of my torture."

"It was not enough for them to hit me by their hands and by the sticks until my skin started to break. And they also started using electrical shock on my fingertips and my lips and my nipples. Also they used to hang me from my feet, and they used to make me walk on broken glass. One day they took all of my clothes off and they threatened my parents that they are going to rape me.

"This torture lasted for 11 months. And after that they sentenced me to be in jail for three years. And it was not only me, but because of me, my aunt and her daughter, they sentenced to nine months in jail. My brothers they sentenced to six months. My uncles from my mother's side, they were seven months. And my uncles from my father's side, they've been killed. For my father, he was sentenced for 15 years."

(End of videotape.)

(Begin videotape of BBC program.)

NARRATOR: Halabja was bombed with a cocktail of mustard gas and the nerve agents tabun and sarin. On that day, up to 5,000 people were gassed. And this was not -- (inaudible). Forty other villages across northern Iraq were poisoned. Cancer and birth defects have shot up since the war crimes, and every home contains its own horror story.

(To village resident.) So what happened to this poor lady?

VILLAGER: She was hit by the chemicals and her face went red. It was itching so badly that she started scratching it and scratching it, which led to this. (Image of woman's scarred face.)

(End of videotape.)

MS. CLARKE: So it is hard to imagine that people don't know, as I said, about the brutality of this regime. It has been going on for decades. It has been well-documented and well-reported.

What I can't imagine is what it must be like to be the Iraqi people now and living in that kind of environment and living under that kind of fear and torture and knowing that if you, for instance, so much as wave at coalition forces when they go by, you will be hung.

So I think it is perfectly understandable why so many of these people are afraid to rise up against the regime at this time. When they are certain, when they are as certain as we are about the end of this regime, I'm confident that they will do so.

~~~
June 2003: The press continues to exaggerate Coalition casualties and ignore Coalition successes daily, while hyping every new claim that Saddam's alive - as if this monster would ever rule the Iraqi people again after OUR military knocked out his loyal co-torturers and freed the Iraqi people who would tear him to bits before OUR troops finished off the job of exorcising his ghost.

55 posted on 06/12/2003 10:02:27 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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"One Iraqi described it to me as one mass grave." - Ann Clwyd on the nation of Iraq.  Link^

56 posted on 06/12/2003 10:03:58 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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Former Iraqi scientist speaks out about horrors of Saddam
Romeo Observer ^ | 4/30/03 | DENISE LETARTE

....I saw his torture chambers underground where people had been irradiated and injected with Ricin ... what I saw still haunts me to this day."

These are just some of the comments of Dr. Gazi George, a former high-ranking Iraqi scientist who spoke at a conference for the Michigan Tactical Officers Association. His speech dealt with the time he worked for Saddam Hussein and his eventual escape with his family from Iraq.

To a standing-room only audience of law-enforcement and the press, the scientist, who has a PhD with expertise in atomic energy and biochemistry, told the group how he once helped develop and conceal weapons for the fallen dictator.

Dr. George hopes that by telling his story and sharing his technical knowledge of biochemical-terrorism and its effects he can help battle terrorism.

~~~

Dr. George spent 5 years working for Hussein. As a young scientist he and others were lured back from abroad to work in Iraq with offers of tax-free salaries and rich life styles. In 1976, George met Hussein and he was impressed like everyone else by a charismatic man whose true nature was still unknown. By 1978, Dr. George again met Saddam but by this time his opinion of the ruler and his regime had changed.

Dr. George worked for Iraq's Atomic Commission in the radiation protection division. The scientist was given a secret assignment during which he witnessed first-hand evidence of the atrocities being committed.

At one time he was sent to assess a clean-up operation and had no clue what he would eventually find.

"I saw his torture chambers where anyone who was anti-Saddam or anti-government had been taken. There were syringes on a table where there was blood and restraints. I could tell by the blood and my meter that people had been irradiated and injected here."

"... in the next room there were five-by-five cages that had been quickly welded together. There was vomit and human excrement in them and shackles ...."

After this experience Dr. George said he "played the game," to stay alive. What he found had convinced him that he and his family must flee the country ... 20 years of narrow escapes from Hussein's long reach has left him and his family looking over their shoulders.

"I was tried in a kangaroo court and sentenced to death," he said.

~~~

Dr. George is convinced that the Iraqi government moved many of its weapons across the border into Syria before this last conflict. He says inspectors would never have found what they were looking for and that he fully supports the president`s actions.

"The burden of proof is on Iraq, not the U.S., said Dr. George. "Hans does not know what he is talking about. He was being duped by Saddam ... the inspectors were not experienced in what they were looking for."

Dr. George asserts that chemical weapons are what we are most vulnerable to because, "They are easy to make, are fast acting and can be made from common household items."

Dr. George devoted a portion of his presentation to the physical and psychological threats of bio-chemical terrorism. He hopes that the knowledge he can impart can be taken into the field.

~~~


57 posted on 06/12/2003 10:40:24 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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2 CACHES OF SUSPICIOUS WEAPONS FOUND; CHEMICAL, BIOLOGICAL TESTS UNDER WAY
Charlotte Observer ^ | Posted on Sun, Apr. 06, 2003 | ANDREA GERLIN, PETER SMOLOWITZ STEVEN THOMMA

(snip) Marines discovered at least two caches of Iraq military warheads in the Iraqi countryside that were being tested as possible chemical or biological weapons.

Military sources said that warheads were found in Aziziyah, about 55 miles southeast of Baghdad. They were being run through a battery of sophisticated analyses by the military.

Another stash of rockets was found in the central Iraqi town of Sayyid Abid, military sources said, each was equipped with clear vials containing an unknown substance. Military biological hazard teams are investigating.

~~~

Why would a rocket be equipped with clear vials for any other purpose, but to carry a chem or bio weapon? Most can be made duel-use chems and mixed on site. All that's necessesary is a delivery system - like the above rockets - equipped w/ vials. Like the rockets Saddam used before to gas the Kurds.

58 posted on 06/12/2003 11:07:41 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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Chemical victim weeps as Saddam's power crumbles
The Times of India ^ | April 09 2003 | Reuters

HALABJA, Iraq: Tears streamed down Fakhradeen Saleem's face on Wednesday as he watched television images of Saddam Hussein's government crumbling in Baghdad.

Listening to his devastating story of loss at the hands of the Baathist administration, it was not hard to see why.

The softly-spoken teacher, 54, took nearly two hours to explain what happened in this run-down northern Iraqi town on March 16, 1988, a date etched in the memory of millions of Kurds.

On that day Iraqi warplanes roared over the town, dropping chemical weapons including nerve agents which killed 5,000 people in the dying days of the war against neighbouring Iran.

Three of Saleem's seven children died of the agents they breathed in. He buried Sangar, a son of six, and Nigeen, a daughter of eight with his own hands before going with the rest of his family to the cemetery, where they lay down expecting to die.

During the panic in Halabja, his eldest daughter took away his infant son, but to this day he does not know if they survived.

"Every now and again people who lost each other that day come back to Halabja from Iran and elsewhere. I keep hoping that one day it will be me."

At the cemetery a second daughter died quietly in her sleep, but the rest of the family survived. The 10-year-old Hawreen was buried by a friend in his garden and reinterred by Saleem three years later.

Among his children, only Tara, a daughter who is now 27, and Bafreen, another daughter of 19, are known to have survived the attack, for which Saddam will be forever despised by Iraq's Kurdish minority.

~~~

59 posted on 06/12/2003 11:47:57 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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READER JOHN KLUGE EMAILS FROM IRAQ:

I am in Irbil in Kurdistan northern Iraq. Someone explained the history of this place to me today. The mountains here are bare and devoid of trees. They used be forested. Covered with trees. There used to be so many trees in Irbil that you couldn't see around corners. Now it looks like Kansas or really more like parts of Montana.

The reason is that Saddam cut down all of the trees in Kurdistan in 1988. He bulldozed 4000 of the 5000 villages in Kurdistan and the Kurds ran to the mountains for safety, so he cut down all of the trees on these mountains and killed all of the game, so that the Kurds would have no wood for fires and no food to eat. He was incredibly effective. The Kurds are now replanting the trees. You can see hundreds of tiny trees if you look closely at the mountains. I didn't notice them until they were pointed out to me. In Kirkuk they found a mass grave of Kurdish children. One of the U.N. guys offered to take us out and show it to us. I haven't taken him up on it. I have no reason to go there and I feel like it would be disrespectful to go and gawk. I guess some of the children were buried with their toys and dolls.

It makes me sick everytime I surf the net and see all these people in Europe and back home saying that the war was not justified because we haven't found 50 tons of sarin gas yet. I wish those people would come to this country and look at ruined villages between here and Kirkuk and the bare mountains. Anyone who protested against this war and defended Saddam ought to be ashamed of themselves. Its just unimaginable the things that went on here.


60 posted on 06/12/2003 12:51:16 PM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl ("The American people are proud of you and God bless each of you." Rummy to troops in Iraq)
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