The new 23-minute tape, obtained and aired by Fox News Channel, shows Saddam's thugs tossing Iraqis from a building and beating, beheading and dismembering them in front of a mob in a public square.
The network said the tape, recently declassified, was given to Army soldiers in Iraq by an Iraqi civilian who played a role in its creation and is now cooperating with U.S. interrogators.
The tape shows Saddam's black-clad Fedayeen militiamen punishing soldiers suspected of desertion and disloyalty in the late 1990s.
"When you have people . . . cutting off people's heads and chopping off their fingers and chopping off their hands, throwing them off three-story buildings, you learn something about a group of people and how they lived their lives and how they treated their people," Rumsfeld said yesterday.
"We are so fortunate they are gone and that those 23 million people are liberated," Rumsfeld said. Thread
The huge national economic growth spurt announced yesterday came as a thrilling surprise even to Bush stalwarts. One former key economic adviser told me on Tuesday that he was all excited because he believed the growth rate would be 6 percent. Instead, it was 7.2 percent - which means it was 15 percent greater than even this cockeyed optimist had hoped for.
The more you look at the numbers, the more remarkable they are. One key to the growth rate in the second quarter of this year was the huge increase in defense spending - which, thanks to the war in Iraq, rose a staggering 44 percent. But in the third quarter, government spending as a whole rose only 1.4 percent, which means almost all the economic growth came in the private sector.
And a lot of that growth came exactly where you would want it to come - from growth in business spending. That grew by 11 percent, which means businesses are finally shelling out big-time for new equipment. And in very short order, they will need new workers to run that equipment, which means the employment picture is on the verge of brightening considerably.
Consumer spending, which has kept the economy afloat the past two years as businesses have contracted, rose robustly as well, by almost 7 percent. And that would not have been possible without a brilliant economic plan devised by the Bush administration. More
Just the sort of activities that thrill Jacques Chirac and Gerhardt Schroeder to the marrow, apparently.