Senators Satisfied With Their 'No' Vote On Iraq

By 1 a.m. that Friday morning, almost every senator had left the Capitol for home.

Three Democrats, though, were still on the Senate floor, waiting for the final vote count on a resolution that would allow President Bush to launch a pre-emptive strike on Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) — had voted against the resolution along with 18 other Democrats, one independent and one Republican early on Oct. 11, 2002.

The trio of Democrats stood listening to the final count — 77-23 in favor of war — and talked over their decision to vote no regardless of the political or personal consequences.

“We were all firmly convinced we’d done the right thing,” Durbin said last week.

In the nearly two years since that vote, the Senate has witnessed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a continuation of military and civilian casualties, and a fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction. Now that reports have been released from both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Sept. 11 commission faulting the intelligence used to convince the United States to go to war, some senators say there has been some soul-searching lately on the Hill.

But for many of the 23 senators who voted no on the 2002 resolution, the searching has only led them back to where they started.

In 2002, Sen. Mark Dayton (D-Minn.) had only been in the Senate for two years. He had never voted for or against a war, and the gravity of the vote was not lost on him.

“I took advantage of every time the Senate was offered a briefing,” Dayton said. “I gave it a great deal of time.”

Dayton rarely questioned the validity of the intelligence presented to him. He said he was mostly concerned with whether Iraq had acquired the capability to launch a nuclear weapons program.

Although he believed Saddam may have possessed both chemical and biological weapons, Dayton said, “There was never any suggestion in any briefings I attended that Iraq had or was about to acquire a nuclear weapons program,” he said.

With less experience than many in the Senate, the junior senator looked to the veterans for guidance, particularly Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.). In a floor speech before the vote, Byrd pleaded with the Senate to wait to authorize the president to go to war, saying a yes vote would give Bush too much power.

“This Constitution does not give to a president of the United States the right to determine when, where, how and for how long he will use the military forces of the United States,” Byrd said in the speech.

Dayton said that he still remembers those words and that he still believes Byrd was right in his assessment.

“I spent more time on that decision than on anything else,” he said. “If I had the vote to make over again today, I would vote the same way.”

Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.), another junior senator, had served less than one term in Congress and had already begun building a reputation as one of the Senate’s leading centrist Republicans.

Looking back on the 2002 vote, Chafee now says he has had what he considers “torturous votes,” but “this wasn’t one of them.”

Skeptical of Saddam’s ability to produce weapons of mass destruction, Chafee took a private trip to Langley, Va., to meet with CIA officials for a briefing in the summer of 2002 as Bush was making his case for war.

Chafee said he never believed the Iraq war was about weapons of mass destruction. Instead, he said, “It was this grand vision of changing the Middle East.”

With a large, bipartisan coalition supporting the resolution, the Republican leadership let Chafee vote his conscience and exerted no pressure on him to change his mind. Even his pro-war constituents stayed silent and have remained so since the vote.

He visited Iraq in October of last year with a group of fellow lawmakers and was heartened by what he saw. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought,” he said. “I thought, if done right, maybe we can pull this off.”

And so, Chafee said, he has tried to look forward to the future of Iraq and America’s role in the country’s reconstruction.

Conrad, who spends his free time reading presidential autobiographies and historical nonfiction, is fond of analyzing history.

He did quite a bit of it before the war vote by reading 1919, a history of Iraq’s independence. The book helped fan his concern that the long-standing conflicts between the different ethnic factions in Iraq would be too much for America to handle.

“We have a very poor understanding of the conflicts in the region,” he said.

He was skeptical that Iraqis would be celebrating in the streets after an American victory and waving U.S. flags in thanks.

“I knew none of that was true,” he said. “I knew that was utterly far-fetched.”

Conrad was the last senator to speak on the floor before the vote. His speech was a laundry list of worries and dire predictions for failure. He cautioned that a war with Iraq could destabilize an already volatile region, take a large economic toll on America and create an urban-warfare situation for American troops.

He said that he has reread his statement several times since then and that he is shocked by how much of what he predicted has come to pass.

“Boy, I think I got that about right,” he said last week. “I think history will conclude that this is a mistake.”

Like Chafee, Durbin did not believe that Saddam was building up a weapons stockpile in Iraq or that the dictator could launch a nuclear weapon. He also did not think the CIA had adequately analyzed the intelligence information on Iraq weapons capabilities.

Durbin said that six weeks before the vote he had yet to see a national intelligence estimate — a document that analyzes a country’s capacity to develop and use weapons. Durbin wrote to George Tenet, the CIA’s director, in September and asked for the report.

“They hurried up and produced one in three weeks,” Durbin said. The report, he added, typically takes at least six months to prepare.

“I said, I don’t believe half of this” and that much of the document was conjecture, he said.

“I read it, and I said this does not make a convincing case for me,” he added.

Durbin tried to convince other senators who supported the resolution to change their minds, telling the ones who ventured to the White House for briefings that they were only getting half the story. Since the vote, he said, several of his colleagues have told him privately that they wished they had listened to him then and voted no.

But during that 2002 vote, he said, most people were only doing what they thought was right. Some of them, he said, were anguished over how to vote.

It was a vote that could have political implications for several senators up for reelection either this year, such as Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) who voted no, or in 2006.

Dayton, who is up for reelection in two years, said his vote will most likely be an issue in his race, but, he said, “It’s hard to predict.”

“ A year is a millennium in politics, and we’re still two years away,” he said.

The inhumane reign of Saddam Hussein: Newsweek, Time Magazines
Newsweek, Time via The White House

Newsweek - Time

Time

"A chef at Baghdad's exclusive Hunting Club recalls a wedding party that Uday crashed in the late 1990s. After Uday left the hall, the bride, a beautiful woman from a prominent family, went missing. 'The bodyguards closed all the doors, didn't let anybody out,' the chef remembers. 'Women were yelling and crying, "What happened to her?"' The groom knew. 'He took a pistol and shot himself,' says the chef, placing his forefinger under his chin.

"Last October another bride, 18, was dragged, resisting, into a guardhouse on one of Uday's properties, according to a maid who worked there. The maid says she saw a guard rip off the woman's white wedding dress and lock her, crying, in a bathroom. After Uday arrived, the maid heard screaming. Later she was called to clean up. The body of the woman was carried out in a military blanket, she said. There were acid burns on her left shoulder and the left side of her face. The maid found bloodstains on Uday's mattress and clumps of black hair and peeled flesh in the bedroom. A guard told her, "Don't say anything about what you see, or you and your family will be finished."
-- Time, May 25, 2003

~*~

"Uday's physical ailments seemed to heighten his sadistic tendencies. According to his chief bodyguard, when Uday learned that one of his close comrades, who knew of his many misdeeds, was planning to leave Iraq, he invited him to his 37th-birthday party and had him arrested. An eyewitness at the prison where the man was held says members of the Fedayeen grabbed his tongue with pliers and sliced it off with a scalpel so he could not talk. A maid who cleaned one of Uday's houses says she once saw him lop off the ear of one of his guards and then use a welder's torch on his face."
-- Time, May 25, 2003

~*~

"Uday's favourite punishment was the medieval falaqa, a rod with clamps that go around the ankles so that the offender, feet in the air, can be hit on the bare soles with a stick. A top official in radio and TV says he received so many beatings for trivial mistakes like being late for meetings or making grammatical errors on his broadcasts that Uday ordered him to carry a falaqa in his car. Uday also had an iron maiden that he used to torture Iraqi athletes whose performance disappointed him.
-- Time, May 25, 2003

~*~

Newsweek

As part of the prison routine, Issa was tortured daily, sometimes twice a day. Battery acid was spilled on his feet, which are now deformed. With his hands bound behind his back, he was hanged by his wrists from the ceiling until his shoulders dislocated; he still cannot lift his hands above his head. The interrogators' goal: 'They just wanted me to say I was plotting against the Baath Party, so they could take me and execute me. If they got a confession, they would get 100,000 dinars [roughly $40].'"
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003

~*~

"A nondescript five-story building notable only by the extra barbed wire on the roof, the Haakimiya Prison is actually 10 stories. Below ground are interrogation cells where unspeakable horrors were committed. ...A former inmate, Mohsen Mutar Ulga, 34, ...was searching for documents about his cousin, executed under Saddam. Ulga said he was sentenced to 12 years in jail for belonging to an armed religious group called 'the revenge movement for Sadr,' referring to a martyred Shiite cleric. He had been arrested with 19 others; the lucky ones were executed right away. The rest were tortured with electric cattle prods and forced to watch the prison guards gang-rape their wives and sisters. Some were fed into a machine that looked like a giant meat cutter. 'People's bodies were cut into tiny pieces and thrown into the Tigris River,' said Ulga.

"Ulga and the reporter silently walked through the darkened cells at Haakimiya, which was surprisingly clean, except for the graffiti on the walls. GOD I ASK YOUR MERCY, scratched one prisoner who'd marked 42 days on the walls. SAVE ME, MARY, implored another, presumably a Christian. IN MEMORY OF LUAY AND ABBAS WHO WERE TORTURED, read another."
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003

~*~

"Kubba's money insulated his family from mayhem, but it did not shield him from witnessing the almost casual slaughter of his people. Last week he recalled a 'scene that haunts me still.' Kubba was driving his Mercedes through Basra's Saad Square when he came upon some 600 men who had been detained while police checked their IDs. According to Kubba, 'Chemical Ali' Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's half brother and the tyrant of southern Iraq, stopped and inquired, 'No IDs? Just shoot them all.' Kubba watched as 'they shot over 600 people in front of me.'"
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003

~*~

"Almost as large as Saddam's palaces are his many prisons, where countless Iraqis were tortured and killed. We take you now inside one of Saddam's most notorious prisons, 18 miles west of Baghdad, and it's hard to imagine a grimmer place. US soldiers are searching what remains of one of the biggest and most elaborate prisons in the world. Saddam Hussein never cut corners when it came to punishment. Abu Ghraib once held tens of thousands of human souls -- criminals, political enemies, and those who just happened to get in the way. A 12-year-old Iranian boy visiting his grandmother near Basra in 1985 was swept up in an Iraqi invasion. He was still here 15 years later.

"[H]e lived with 28 other detainees in a nine-meter-square cell, dividing up 1.5 kilos of rice and porridge a day. 'It was so cramped we couldn't sleep on our backs, we had to sleep on our sides, like spoons. And they brought us polluted water to drink, so we all had diarrhea.' Ulga was released last fall during Saddam's surprise general amnesty. 'Most people don't know that before the amnesty, they executed 450 prisoners so they would never go free,' said Ulga."
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003

~*~

The male warders made her wear pants, an offense to Shiites' strict female dress codes; without a belt they often fell down. The low point of every day was the daily torture session; the high point, gruel in a bowl, the prisoners' only meal. Even that was denied her if "I made some mistake." Hashmia's jailers scored her back with a hot poker, beat the soles of her feet with sticks, made her pull up her baggy pants and whipped her legs. The sexual humiliation may have been even worse than the pain, but that was serious. 'They slapped me so hard that my neck hurts from it even now.' The torturers wanted her to confess to plotting against the Baathist regime, but she knew that would mean a death sentence."
-- Newsweek on line, April 12, 2003

~*~

"The massive prison cast a shadow over the entire neighborhood. Yehiye Ahmed, 17, grew up nearby. The prison guards were his neighbors; the inmates' screams were the soundtrack of his young life. 'I could hear the prisoners crying all the time, especially when someone was killed. I could hear everything from my house or when we played soccer behind the prison,' says Yehiye, a quiet boy, with large, haunted brown eyes and a body that suggests malnourishment.

"Yehiye and his friends would often go inside the Abu Ghraib compound to sell sandwiches and cigarettes to visitors, guards, and sometimes even prisoners. 'I saw three guards beat a man to death with sticks and cables. When they got tired, the guards would switch with other guards,' he recalls. 'I could only watch for a minute without getting caught, but I heard the screams, and it went on for an hour.'"
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003

~*~

Perhaps saddest were two rooms, each hardly bigger than a normal bedroom, reserved for children; they had been crammed with scores of kids from 12 to 16 years old, say the former inmates. Ali Nasr, 13 at the time, was caught up in a sweep when Shiites throughout Iraq rioted after the murder of their Grand Ayatollah, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sader (also called Sader II) in Najaf. ... Ali spent six months in the juvenile wing of Unit Four, sleeping on his feet when the cell was too crowded to lie down, or taking turns on the floor with other prisoners. The boy was still too scared to talk about it, even now."
-- Newsweek on line, April 8, 2003

~*~

"Radi Ismael Mekhedi spent 10 years behind bars. Last week, he wandered through the looted prison and stood behind the red bars of his former cell for the first time in over 10 years. 'I was severely tortured during my imprisonment because I was considered a traitor to my country. I never believed a person could be subjected to such treatment by another human being,' Mekhedi says. 'Life was already painful under Saddam, and if you came to the prison, you were always in fear for your life.'"
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003

~*~

"... Anwar Abdul Razak, remembers when a surgeon kissed him on each cheek, said he was sorry and cut his ears off. Razak, then 21 years old, had been swept up during one of Saddam Hussein's periodic crackdowns on deserters from the Army. Razak says he was innocently on leave at the time, but no matter; he had been seized by some Baath Party members who earned bounties for catching Army deserters. At Basra Hospital, Razak's ears were sliced off without painkillers. He said he was thrown into jail with 750 men, all with bloody stumps where their ears had been. 'They called us Abu [Arabic for father] Earless,' recalls Razak, whose fiancee left him because of his disfigurement.

"No one is sure how many men were mutilated during that particular spasm of terror, but from May 17 to 19, 1994, all the available surgeons worked shifts at all of Basra's major hospitals, lopping off ears. (One doctor who refused was shot.) Today, Dr. Jinan al-Sabagh, an administrator at Basra Teaching Hospital, insists that the victims numbered only '70 or 80,' but he'd prefer not to talk about it. He says the ear-chopping stopped before his own surgery rotation came up. 'I want to forget about all this. I vowed I would never do it. I said I am a surgeon, not a butcher....'"
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003

~*~

Well, in the beginning, this place looks just like an anonymous office building. And that made it all the more filled with terror, because slowly, prisoners would come up, tell you that they had been held here, that they had been tortured. You look at the walls, and see graffiti written by the prisoners here. And it's heartbreaking, really. Allah, help me. Or, you know, today I'm alive, but tomorrow I'll be underground. You see Iraqi families wandering around trying to find news of relatives, and finding nothing. I was about to leave when a group of agitated Iraqis came up and said, come with me. I have something to show you. It's an execution ground. There are still some bodies there. So I said, ok. Let's go take a look. And indeed, we drove to a very remote part of the prison. It was like a makeshift execution ground. You know, somebody had just hurriedly set some guys up there and shot them. They had been half-buried in the ground."
-- Newsweek reporter Melinda Liu interviewed on NBC Nightly News, April 22, 2003

~*~

The inhumane reign of Saddam Hussein: Pt. 2 - The Washington Post

The inhumane reign of Saddam Hussein: Pt. 3 - USA Today, LA Times

more....

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8 Graphic proof from Saddam's Killing Fields ~ photos ~ http://www.9neesan.com | the dead of Iraq

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