First shipment of Iraqi oil since war arrives in Jordan

AMMAN, Jordan, Nov. 16 — A shipment of 1 million barrels of Iraqi crude oil has arrived at Jordan's Red Sea port, the first such supply since the U.S.-led war in neighboring Iraq began, the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources said Sunday.

No it had nothing to do with this happening in Iraq under Saddma, or the terrorist connects, just about the oil ...

One of the condemned women was pregnant. This presented a problem, said Ahmad, because under religious law a pregnant woman should at least be allowed to finish her term and deliver the baby before being executed. 'She was several months' pregnant,' he said. 'The doctor had verified it, she had said so and we could see her swollen stomach. She was taken in and out three times - everyone was unsure what to do with her.' Telephone calls were made to Uday by his representative. As they waited, the woman sobbed and begged for mercy for her unborn child. On the third telephone call the order was given to go ahead with her execution. 'At that the woman was beheaded - and knowing she was pregnant, I felt sick in the stomach and wished for Allah to open
up the ground and swallow everyone there including myself,' said Ahmad.
-- Sunday Times, London, July 27, 2003

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"They put me in a cell just 1m by 1.5m, painted completely red with no windows and lots of tiny stones on the floor and told me to count them. It did not matter what number you said it would be wrong. If I said 2000, they would say no, it's 2001 and beat me 10 times. Then they put me inside a circle and told me to run round and round for nine hours. After that they threw me on the hot pavement and a fat guard sat on my chest. Then they pulled me along by my ankles so that my back was streaming with blood.

"Another time they drew a bicycle on the wall and told me to ride it. They threw me in foul dirty water and
said you must swim, then they kept pushing me under with a stick forcing me to drink.

"Once they told us we had to catch 10 flies during the night and 10 mosquitoes during the day or you would be tortured more. This was impossible so you had to catch the mosquitoes at night and hold them till daytime
and vice versa with the flies. Then they would ask which is male and which is female. Whatever you said it would be vice versa."
-- Sunday Times, London, July 27, 2003

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"When I was in Iraq a doctor from Basra told me that, after being jailed by the police some years ago, he refused to tell his inquisitors whatever it was they wanted to hear. Instead of beating him, he told me, they
brought in his 3-month-old daughter. The interrogator tore the screaming infant's eye out. When the desired
answers were still not forthcoming, the questioner hurled the little girl against the concrete wall and smashed her skull."
-- The New York Times, July 26, 2003
"Freed in April after 13 years in prison, [Dr. Ibrahim] Basri [Saddam's former physician] is now reaching out to register and help as many victims of the regime as he can find. They stream to a clinic attached to his house, a sad collection of former political prisoners, relatives of the executed, and maimed men who cannot work because they lost an arm, an ear, or a foot to the torturer's knife. 'All the time in prison, I think, "What can I do to help these people?"' he said. ... 'For the first five years, he put me in a cell by myself, 2 meters by 2 1/2 meters, where I didn't know if it was day or night. I was so dirty with lice. There were cockroaches in my mouth at night. And they came to beat you in the morning and at night for nothing, nothing.' Once, he continued, the guards beat him in front of 300 inmates until they broke his legs. 'I never said, "Mercy." I just said, "Iraq."'"
-- The Boston Globe, August 7, 2003

"Jailers often treated allegedly lagging players in ways certain to hurt, not improve, the athletes' performances on the field. After shaving their heads to humiliate them, athletes were hung upside down and the soles of their feet whipped. They were buried in hot sand up to their necks. Their fingers or ears were amputated. Electric shocks were applied to their skin. And, in the case of soccer players, they were forced to kick
concrete balls."
-- USA TODAY, July 30, 2003
"The day after the liberation, my aunt put out a black banner--an Arab mourning ritual--with the names of all her relatives who had been murdered by the regime on it. And she looked down her street, and there were black banners on almost every house. On some houses it looks like a long shopping list. She said to her neighbour, 'You too?' Under Saddam it was a crime to mourn people killed by the regime--it made you seem suspicious too. Everyone was suffering terribly, but they were suffering alone. They just didn't know that everyone else was hating it too."
-- Yasser Alaskary, co-founder of Iraqi Prospect Organisation, an Iraqi freedom group, The Independent (London), September 18, 2003

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