Posted on 03/17/2003 2:37:50 PM PST by MadIvan
“There was a machine designed for shredding plastic. Men were dropped into it and we were again made to watch. Sometimes they went in head first and died quickly. Sometimes they went in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 people die like this. Their remains would be placed in plastic bags and we were told they would be used as fish food . . . on one occasion, I saw Qusay [President Saddam Hussein’s youngest son] personally supervise these murders.”
This is one of the many witness statements that were taken by researchers from Indict — the organisation I chair — to provide evidence for legal cases against specific Iraqi individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. This account was taken in the past two weeks.
Another witness told us about practices of the security services towards women: “Women were suspended by their hair as their families watched; men were forced to watch as their wives were raped . . . women were suspended by their legs while they were menstruating until their periods were over, a procedure designed to cause humiliation.”
The accounts Indict has heard over the past six years are disgusting and horrifying. Our task is not merely passively to record what we are told but to challenge it as well, so that the evidence we produce is of the highest quality. All witnesses swear that their statements are true and sign them.
For these humanitarian reasons alone, it is essential to liberate the people of Iraq from the regime of Saddam. The 17 UN resolutions passed since 1991 on Iraq include Resolution 688, which calls for an end to repression of Iraqi civilians. It has been ignored. Torture, execution and ethnic-cleansing are everyday life in Saddam’s Iraq.
Were it not for the no-fly zones in the south and north of Iraq — which some people still claim are illegal — the Kurds and the Shia would no doubt still be attacked by Iraqi helicopter gunships.
For more than 20 years, senior Iraqi officials have committed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This list includes far more than the gassing of 5,000 in Halabja and other villages in 1988. It includes serial war crimes during the Iran-Iraq war; the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds in 1987-88; the invasion of Kuwait and the killing of more than 1,000 Kuwaiti civilians; the violent suppression, which I witnessed, of the 1991 Kurdish uprising that led to 30,000 or more civilian deaths; the draining of the Southern Marshes during the 1990s, which ethnically cleansed thousands of Shias; and the summary executions of thousands of political opponents.
Many Iraqis wonder why the world applauded the military intervention that eventually rescued the Cambodians from Pol Pot and the Ugandans from Idi Amin when these took place without UN help. They ask why the world has ignored the crimes against them?
All these crimes have been recorded in detail by the UN, the US, Kuwaiti, British, Iranian and other Governments and groups such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and Indict. Yet the Security Council has failed to set up a war crimes tribunal on Iraq because of opposition from France, China and Russia. As a result, no Iraqi official has ever been indicted for some of the worst crimes of the 20th century. I have said incessantly that I would have preferred such a tribunal to war. But the time for offering Saddam incentives and more time is over.
I do not have a monopoly on wisdom or morality. But I know one thing. This evil, fascist regime must come to an end. With or without the help of the Security Council, and with or without the backing of the Labour Party in the House of Commons tonight.
The author is Labour MP for Cynon Valley.
Well, it is not our duty, but it should be our goal. I give you Japan and Germany as examples of countries who are better neighbors because we DID step in in the past.
We almost agree...I'm not advocating invading countries for human rights abuses alone, but I am saying that in such cases as we are able make a justifiable case for national security, our overall objective in such instances should be "regime change." The overall strategy would have to be adhered to over decades, as they have between the liberation of Germany from the fascists and the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban.
I'd say Iran amd North Korea are the only two countries that present such an opportunity at this time.
So, one charge in Kuwait is false, but that means every other charge against Saddam is untrue? Sorry, not buying it.
Ivan
That there must be a form of global law enforcement is a natural result of changes in the world, over which we have no control. Each of us is destined to choose what form that governance may take.
Here, now, we have an emerging force in the world that can act to cut back the growth of socialism and brutality. That may seem a little "imperialistic", but in the absence of such action, the UN's paradigm will predominate, and the planet will continue the flush itself down a rathole.
People yearning for liberty everywhere will follow a strong lead, and support the overthrow of evil in their own countries; but someone has to lead : that leadership has devolved upon the US, UK, Austrailia, Poland, and others.
There is a race between communism allied with brutality and the Jeffersonian idiology of limited government subordinate to the natural liberties of persons. The UN espouses the former; the Anglosphere, the latter. By choosing to allow dictators to have what they will in their own countries, you also tacitly endorse tyranny: tyranny can not survive without parisitically feeding on prosperous, free nations. They are, by nature, propelled to swollow up societies like the one in which you live.
And as if that knowledge would not be enough to have one choose a position on the side of aggressive support of liberty, I would think that the simple knowledge that somewhere--anywhere--there was a human subject to brutality by the likes of Saddam, would be enough to move the heart and mind toward resolute counter-offense. We owe that support by virtue of our humanity, in addition to our interest in self-preservation.
I recall a network TV news story about one 19 year-old boy in Afghanistan who taught himself English and studied history by means of an illegal satellite dish and forbidden books. He hid the Oxford English Dictionary under the floorboards in his bedroom. For him, alone, was the liberation of that place worth the effort: he was at risk of death for his pursuits. I said to myself, " Here is a future leader of Afghanistan!"
As to attacking tyranny and brutality everywhere at once: that's impossible; but Iraq is a good place to start.
You have a choice: support action against all those evil bastards, or isolate yourself from "foreign entanglements" until the armies they nurture beat down your door.
Here, here. We must discern the moral course as a guide to our activities. While we cannot effectively free every people on Earth from tyranny at this time, we can recognize the objective and let it illuminate our course as we go forward.
As for your two nation list, it's a start, but only a start. If we were to base our intervention on inner atrocity then our ally Turkey would be somewhere in the top ten. Again, I agree with your sentiments. I just can't see them ever being used as a decisive factor in foreign policy decisions
Regards, Ivan
I have no idea where you are getting "my belief" in the "goodnes of Saddam Hussein." I am merely stating that Kuwaiti incubator baby story was also "eyewitnessed." There is precedence for similar fabrications, from the German "atrocoties" in Belgium in WWI, to the Gulf of Tonkin, to Bosnia to Kosovo and beyond.
I take them with a grain of salt and hope, yes hope to God, that they are not true.
This is not a Kuwaiti incubator story. I don't see why people keep insisting on bringing that up - this is not reported by the same people, nor is it the same charge. The man's brutality is well known, and any doubt must be set against that certainty.
It would be prudent for anyone to do the same.
Ivan
"Torture, killings and mass arrests had started on the day of the invasion. Men and women were pulled off the streets for interrogations. The wrong responses brought pain, mutilation, and in many cases death. Iraqi soldiers also raped women. After the war, Iraqi 'torture centers' in Kuwait were found to contain bloodstained saws, axes, pick handles, meat hooks, a power drill, hand vise, and electric cattle prods, pliers to extract fingernails; carpenter planes to shave off skin; and a pair of industrial driers, also stained inside with blood. Liberators also discovered a bed frame and a hot plate that had been wired to give electric shocks. The number of Kuwaitis tortured and murdered during the six months of Iraqi occupation is estimated to be in the thousands."
Whenever some nutcase dictator tortures people to death for fun, you'll always find some bunch who think it's just propaganda. Often that group extends beyond the useful idiots and includes folks like you who should know better. People poo-pooed the reports of the rape of Nanking, the Nazi death camps, the killing fields in Southeast Asia...They told Richard Wurmbrand that his tales of torture in Romanian prisons were lies, until they were proven true after the collapse of Romanian Communism. The National Council of Churches said there was no persecution of Christians in Soviet Russia, North Korea and is now actively campaigning to convince us that China has no Christian persecution and that the Christians in Iraq are just hap-hap-happy! People were shocked when they opened their Staatspolizei files after the German reunification and found out that their kids, spouses or pastors had been informing on them.
This is evil we're talking about here. And you think it's outside the realm just because some dipstick emir told a few fibs?
2. I ain't a Canadian.
3. Alberta ain't Canada, anyway -- it's Alberta.
4. I'm very disappointed in the whole bunch of us Freepers here who have spent so much time agonizing over a story that was so clearly designed to influence the opinion of a Jerry Springer fan with an IQ of 78.
The same kind that thought up the Holocaust, probably. After all, we all know the Nazis didn't gas millions of Jews or practice vivisection on Jewish children and infants. The stories of warehouses full of human hair and of lampshades made of human lskin? All fiction made up to demonize a culture and make people hate the "evil" Nazis.
< / sarcasm off>
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