Posted on 10/31/2003 5:52:03 AM PST by knighthawk
When I talk about some of the things that bother me a lot about Iraq, like the gouging out of eyes, the branding of the Arabic word for "whore" on young women's foreheads, the beheading of other women in public, things like that, a few of my American friends who opposed the war often get quite angry - at me, not at the torturers and executioners. They tell me such things happened when Saddam Hussein was in power, until March. So shouldn't foreigners just shut up or stop putting out reports like the one about the 30-year-old man whose ears were cut off or the other young man whose genitals were cut off.
I do not know how many Iraqis have been tortured by their fellow Iraqis since Saddam ran or was killed. But we know he honed various machines to take over for his national gestapo, and we know of the close alliances with transportation and technological units of other countries, especially Syria and Iran.
Who do we think coalition forces are fighting now? Who do we think is killing our soldiers?
I think it is sickening to assume that any prisoners who fall into the hands of those enemies will not be treated like animals. Saddam's forces, Iraqi and foreign, were trained in torture. It would be idiotic to believe they abandoned the practice after he disappeared - idiotic and insulting to the memory of the tortured dead.
But their memory hasn't yet been wiped out, thanks to the work of experts in the State Department and Amnesty International. Their reports on torture end with last year. Either later data could not be gathered, or they decided releasing it now would give away too much about our intelligence gathering. But as long as journalists can read the information, they should remember at least some of the victims.
From the high piles of reports, I am seized with the memory of a woman beheaded without even a legal charge. She was married, with three children. The "secret" police (about as secret as traffic cops in New York) hunted her husband down because he belonged to a branch of Islam working against the government. The police grabbed all the family members and pulled their heads back. The executioners beheaded the wife. Presumably, the husband got the masculine courtesy of some kind of hearing before his head was cut off. I don't know.
There seems to be hardly a body part that did not interest the Iraq torture officialdom. Amputation of breasts and tongues are known to the families, but there are no pictures of the vanished victims, so naturally the amputations are hard to prove. There is no knowing how many were tortured to death. The fate of tens of thousands who disappeared also remains unknown.
An unending irony pursues me. As a foreign correspondent, I spent 13 of 17 years close to Muslims as a colleague and friend - first at the UN, then in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. I lived among the peoples of the different religions of the vast area that was my beat, and I cannot remember a religious or national quarrel among us. There were none - then.
Years later when we met, there were still no quarrels among us, although we knew by then of the hideous national riots among Hindus and Muslims that had ripped across India. One day, a Hindu and Muslim, both friends, visited me in New York. They had seen the blood and heard the screams of the riots. I went immediately to India to see if I could understand how adults who had been friends as children grew up to kill each other.
I never did find out, nor did they. It is a mystery that has repeated itself in Iraq, where, thanks to Saddam, Iraqi tortured and murdered Iraqi.
1) Judge this post in context of the videos and
2) Understand why the Iraqis were (and still are) scared $hitless of Hussein.
These ignorant Democrats (most of them) should be ashamed of themselves. They are not for "freedom" and "human rights"; they are just blindly, rabidly against Pres. Bush and believe thoroughly the rhetoric and propaganda of the enemies of this nation. They want to be respected and told they are "patriots"; I am not going to respect them nor am I going to lie and say they are "patriots"; they are NOT. They are stupid, treasonous, treacherous snakes.
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