Posted on 08/06/2002 4:45:35 PM PDT by Recovering_Democrat
Iraqi Physician: Saddam's Orders to Cut Off the Ears of Defecting Soldiers and Officers Were Implemented in Iraqi Hospitals
"The problem started in 1994 when Saddam Hussein issued a presidential order to cut off the ear of any military person who failed to report for military service, or defected from the army. Unfortunately, I had just started my residency after graduating from medical school. I never imagined that an Iraqi physician would be forced to perform mutilating surgeries... But this is exactly what happened... the day came when Iraqi military physicians... were forced to cut off the ears of officers and soldiers..."
Dr. 'Awadh relates his first experience when he witnessed military personnel being driven to the hospital at night, their hands handcuffed and their eyes covered, and led to the operating room "like sheep to the slaughter." He goes on to say that about an hour later he saw the same soldiers being carried on gurneys to the same cars that brought them in; they were unconscious, and their heads were bandaged. "On the following day... the hospital director summoned all the surgeons to the OR... because a conflict brewed among them, as some of them were trying, as much as possible, to distance themselves from performing this crime... and one of them even said that most of the non-surgical physicians had the ability to perform such an operation... I was told later that he [the hospital director] forced all the specialists, with no exception, to perform the mutilating surgery. It seemed to me at the time that this was one way to spread the responsibility among all the surgeons... and [to try] to alleviate the burdens of the crime from the shoulders of those who performed it..."
Dr. 'Awadh wrote that he constantly asked himself what would his reaction be if he was asked to perform the operation, "but fortunately I was never asked to do so..." He maintains that: "Some of those physicians were even afraid to walk on the streets where they lived and practiced their profession ..."(1)
Endnotes:
(1)Al-Hayat (London) August 2, 2002.
hmmm...that is tough. but if you spell his name sodom perhaps something will come to mind.
Huh?? Where has this guy been?
If Saddo is dealt with in this way, the other tinhorn dictators in the region will have to double their next order for Depends.
After his execution; Mussolini's corpse was taken to a Milan square, the Piazzale Loreto, where the Germans had displayed the bodies of executed partisans in 1944. The bodies of Mussolini, his mistress, and some close associates, were hung upside down from the girders of a garage. Soldiers guarding the bodies were unable to prevent an immense crowd from taking out their anger on the exposed corpses. People spat at them, kicked them, and even pumped more bullets into them. These scenes were filmed by US troops, and postcards of the event became macabre mementoes treasured by thousands of anti-Fascists. Others, and not only Fascists, were disgusted by the gory spectacle, and the bodies were hastily taken down and buried. Yet the deaths and their aftermath continue to hold a grisly fascination for Italians: previously unseen film footage of the spectacle in the Piazzale Loreto, and Mussolini's subsequent autopsy, gained record audiences when shown on television in 1994, and only last year a `new' investigative book by a neo-Fascist journalist titled Mussolini's Last Five Seconds became a bestseller.
That does not mean it's not true. It does not mean I am opposed to "getting" Saddam. It does mean that it has an odor of propaganda.
If you see that, the whole cutting off ears thing doesn't sound all that hard to believe. Don't you agree?
Very informative post.
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