Perspective the media won't give on Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse:
May 17, 2004 -- THE tape was shocking. In the medical clinic at Abu Ghraib prison, nine Baghdad merchants were shown undergoing surgery to remove their healthy right hands on the orders of Saddam Hussein.
It wasn't hard to track the men shown in the video. The incident was well known in Baghdad and the tape had been widely circulated to terrorize other merchants who might dare to deal in foreign currency.
Nothing could more dramatically illustrate the depth of cruelty and inhumanity of Saddam's regime. Iraqis often say, "Cruelty is the tryant's art." And Saddam should take his place among history's cruelest tryrants.
I went looking for the men in the video. Of the nine who lost their hands in 1995, six were still in Baghdad, one had died, one escaped to Germany and one to Holland. I tracked them down and proposed I make a documentary incorporating the brutal amputation scenes, while telling their story to the world. They agreed.
They were not unique in Saddam's Iraq. During his 35-year reign of terror, Saddam and his Baathist cohorts punished citizens by cutting off hands, feet, ears, tongues or simply executing them. Thousands more were mutilated and lost limbs in Saddam's senseless wars with Iran and Kuwait. As many as 3 million Iraqis may have been eliminated during the Saddam years, with many now turning up in mass graves throughout the country.
Saddam and his sons, Uday and Qussay, often documented the punishment of those they accused of not supporting the regime, using videotape. One Iraqi general who fled to Jordan, received a videotape showing the rape and torture of his wife and daughters. Uday is reported to have taped his pet lions killing and eating two young men who he considered his rivals for the affection of a beautiful woman. Such tapes are scarce now and were probably destroyed as Baghdad fell a year ago.
As I began production of the documentary "Remembering Saddam" I also started a search for doctors, hospitals or anyone willing to help undo Saddam's brutal surgery. Luck struck in a Baghdad restaurant when discussing my concerns with journalist friends, I was overheard by an American at a nearby table.
Roger Brown, an oil engineer from Houston, Texas came over with a suggestion. "I'll bet Marvin Zindler at Houston's KTRK Channel 13 could help you find help for these men." Within days he had put me in touch with the Zindler and his producer Lori Reingold.
Marvin Zindler is famous as the crusading reporter whose expose in 1973 led to the closing of the Chicken Ranch Bordello. The story later became the play and movie "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas."
Zindler didn't have to look far to find a doctor willing to provide his surgical skills. At 82, he projects a youthful, wrinkle-fee image and admits to more cosmetic surgery than Michael Jackson. His doctor, Joe Agris, is one of Houston's premier plastic reconstructive surgeons.
Dr. Agris agreed to operate on the Baghdad merchants. He enlisted the Methodist Hospital to provide surgical facilities, Dr. Fred Kestler, who is a specialist hand surgeon and Dynamic Orthotics to provide the training the patients would need to operate their new bionic hands. The German-American company Otto Bock offered to provide all seven prosthetic hands, while Continental Airlines agreed to fly the men from Europe to Houston and the Pentagon and Coalition Provisional Authority arranged to fly the men out of Baghdad.
By early April the documentary was ready for broadcast in both Arabic and English, and all the arrangements had been made to help the men start recovering a facsimile of their missing right hands.
True to their word, the Baghdad merchants shared their story with me, in spite of threats against them for cooperating with an American journalist. I also interviewed their wives, children and neighbors to document the depth to which their cruel punishment had blighted their lives.
The gruesome footage of their amputations is carefully presented in increasingly shocking increments as the documentary unfolds. In the final scene, a severed hand is placed on a table with forceps. "Is this the hand that threatened Saddam?" asks Basm Al Fadhly as he watched the tape of his hand being cut for the first time. "The Coalition doesn't need to find weapons of mass destruction to justify the war. Saddam killed our children without weapons of mass destruction. They are embedded in his brain."
Today, the seven Baghdad merchants will walk out of Dynamic Orthotics with their new hands. A final week of training with their new prosthetics is scheduled in Houston, then a week of touring and hand shaking in Washington before flying back to Baghdad in early June.
Last week, Nazaar Joudi was writing a letter to his wife as he experimented with his new hand. While in Abu Ghraib prison Joudi wrote a letter to his wife, with his healthy right hand, hours before Saddam's henchmen cut it off. That letter turned out to be prophetic. "I may lose my right hand," he wrote, "but hopefully Allah will replace it someday with an even better one."
My documentary "Remembering Saddam" continues to languish on the desks of yawning broadcast editors, but the subjects of that documentary will be writing letters to their wives with their new hands.
In spite of the current chaos and continued terrorism in Iraq, these seven Baghdad merchants are optimistic that life will stabilize soon. "I ask the whole world not to let this tragedy that happened to us be repeated," says Joudi. "The age of tyrants is over, the age of good remains. God willing. Good is coming in Iraq."
Don North owns and operates Northstar Productions Inc. based in Fairfax, Va.
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/24175.htm