Museum of horrors

Jerusalem Post ^ | Dec. 9, 2003 | Matthew Gutman

[yonif]

Here, men and some women and children were beaten nearly to death, then lifted by their bound wrists towards the ceiling until their arms dislocated. They were then allowed to recover enough for more torture. All of this, conducted under the banner of justice.
These were the lucky ones, according to Adnan Farrage al-Sa'edi, a former inmate of Hakemiyeh, which is being converted into Iraq's first memorial to the disappeared and tortured. Hundreds of thousands – Shi'ites, Kurds, clerics, and peasants – were executed and dumped in unmarked graves that pock the countryside.
As Iraq struggles to grasp the magnitude of the ousted regime's terror, the US-appointed Governing Council plans to establish a war crimes tribunal to mete a different kind of justice for the several hundred Ba'ath Party leaders who engineered the crimes against humanity.
The tribunals are to be an entirely Iraqi affair: Iraqi judges will hear the cases, which will be presented by Iraqi lawyers and observed by international experts.
For the past 20 years, exiles' estimations of Saddam's executions have increased incrementally from the horrifying to the catastrophic.
"Before the war, the estimations peaked at 400,000," said Iraqi National Congress vice secretary-general and security chief Nabil al-Masawi.
At the time, that number was considered inflated. Then Saddam's statue came tumbling down in mid-April, and the veil obscuring the horror was lifted. The official number of missing at the hands of Saddam's terror squads now stands at 780,000, but it is growing, said Masawi, who fears it could climb to 1 million.
Sa'edi padded down the unlit halls of Hakemiyeh, his hands clasped behind his back as if in testimony to his torture. He snapped open the bolts of his former cell block and fell to his knees, beside a heap of ragged blindfolds. The future curator then began describing the horror, detail by detail.
He brought his hands together behind his back and jutted them upwards simulating the hook that guards had placed in his wrist bindings. A winch slowly cranked, lifting him almost two meters off the floor. Searing pain followed cartilage pulling away from bone. The guards tugged on his feet with each denial.
When asked how he could so nonchalantly describe his torture, he said: "What we had was very comfortable compared to what others suffered."
Other secret prisons like those in Saddam's Radwaniyeh Palace swallowed up thousands of detainees. Few returned to the land of the living.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam's regime broke thousands of opponents by dipping them feet first into vats of acid, or putting limbs into meat-grinders. Some were forced to witness their children's heads bashed into concrete walls, others were forced to watch as wives were raped. Inevitable execution was their only relief.
By the 1990s, an increasingly paranoid Saddam began to fear inspections from human rights groups. He scaled back the torture program and moved the remnants out of the Baghdad suburbs to his palaces and more distant prisons.
On March 2, 1996, Sa'edi was signed in to Hakemiyeh, stripped, blindfolded, and then tossed into a six-square-meter cell with 13 other men. In the crimson painted room – a touch devised by Saddam to simulate blood – he slept in the filth-ridden latrine; there was no other space. A number, 320, his new name, was printed in marker on his right wrist.
When the Mukhabarat realized he was a political prisoner, he was put in solitary confinement, and then the interrogations began. Daily beatings were supplemented by the meat-hook treatment. When inmates neared death, they were injected with antibiotics. Then they were fed chicken. More torture followed.
Bottles of anti-spasmodics and antibiotics littered the floor of the facility's clinic.
Every three weeks the torture was interrupted by 15 minutes of sunshine in a rooftop cell. Clumps of sodden hair remained in the corners of the cell where the inmates' heads were shaved. "It was part of the humiliation," Sa'edi said.
Among the Mukhabarat's favored tactics to break the opposition was kidnapping and blackmail, said Masawi, who lost five members of his family to the regime. The Mukhabarat, under Saddam's orders, filmed the torture, rape, and execution. The videos were then sent to family members to grieve them into submission and surrender.
All the videos were meticulously duplicated. Copies of the torture were filed both in the Mukhabarat's Baghdad headquarters and in the provincial capitals where they were taken.
Sa'edi mentioned his own "crime" only as an afterthought: From his book shop he had sold "forbidden books" on the religious teachings of the Shi'ite spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
After three months in Hakemiyeh, he was sentenced to 20 years, moved to the Mukhabarat's Baghdad headquarters, and from there to the notorious Abu Ghraib Prison.
The evidence used against him at his military trial was a scrap of paper upon which he had written, "Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr [a revered and later executed Shi'ite cleric] is our national leader."
After his conviction, all of his assets were transferred to the regime. In October 2002, he was released in a general amnesty.
Sa'edi, with his aquiline nose, almost white beard, and slightly stooped posture, seemed sprightly and alert for his age. He looked 60, but said he is 41.

What rankles many of those in Iraq's new political parties is that they and journalists managed to get the hundreds of tons of Mukhabarat files before the coalition forces. While the coalition forces snatched truckloads of material, journalists scoured the ruins of Saddam's palaces and secret police stations. They found links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden, and Iraqi efforts to sell enriched uranium to Arab states.

As for Sa'edi, he said his party, once one of the longest suffering in Iraq, had converted the building into a museum to ensure "that this never happens again in Iraq."
"For part of this, thanks are due to the US," he said from his dank former cell, Number 44. "America was the only country that could have done this."
Sa'edi said he theoretically supports the idea of war crimes tribunals, "but if you ask my mother and my wife, they will say it is better for these criminals to be burned immediately... But I never carried a pistol in my belt. Our struggle is through ideas, and it is still part of our duty to make people aware of these acts."
When asked what sentence would be appropriate for those found guilty he uttered one word: death.

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[Darksheare]

"What rankles many of those in Iraq's new political parties is that they and journalists managed to get the hundreds of tons of Mukhabarat files before the coalition forces."

And the press has been willingly complicit in propagating what happened by keeping silent about what they found.
And possibly destroying the evidence they found to keep their pet agendas safe.

[JoJo Gunn]

Attention Ed Asner and crew:

It is In Your Name!