Posted on 03/28/2003 12:23:46 PM PST by Lancey Howard
Posted on Fri, Mar. 28, 2003
THE BRUTES OF BAGHDAD IF SADDAM RAISED HIS TWO SONS TO BE AS VICIOUS HE IS, THEY'RE DOING HIM PROUD By BARBARA LAKER lakerb@phillynews.com
ONE IS a sadistic playboy who rapes 12-year-old girls and tortures friends for amusement.
The other is a methodical, ruthless enforcer who kills for political power, then has his victims buried in mass graves.
They are Saddam Hussein's infamous sons - two evil brothers with blood on their hands.
The Brutes of Baghdad.
As bombs and missiles chisel away at their father's regime, it's unknown if Odai and Qusai Hussein are dead or alive. But one thing seems certain: They would kill anyone, whether it's thousands of strangers or their closest relatives, to survive.
Qusai, Saddam's youngest son at 36, who controls Iraq's security and intelligence agencies, is probably his father's successor. Odai, 38, was shot at least eight times in 1996 when gunmen sprayed bullets at his car. The once athletic and tall Odai now uses a wheelchair or limps with a cane.
The sons "differ only in that Odai kills people for fun, and Qusai kills people in a very businesslike fashion," former CIA chief R. James Woolsey reportedly said.
Odai, considered the family's most heartless, has at times been called the "Butcher's Boy and" has a private torture chamber known as the "Red Room."
As a young child, he played with disarmed grenades and saw his father deal with political enemies in his torture chamber at the Palace of the End.
In 1988, he murdered his father's trusted food taster, bodyguard and pimp at a party on the Tigris River, according to the May issue of Vanity Fair.
Saddam threw Odai in jail, and eventually forgave him, but the relationship was tarnished. And Odai grew more ruthless.
Over the years, he shot Saddam's beloved half-brother in the leg and crippled him for life. One unfortunate friend died after being held down and forced to drink massive amounts of pure distilled alcohol. Those who crossed him in business were shot in the arm and leg and left to die, defectors told Vanity Fair.
Starting at 20, Odai used his sadistic ways on athletes when Saddam made him head of Iraq's National Olympic Committee and its soccer federation. With young people demoralized by the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam thought Odai could restore national pride through sports.
The March 24 issue of Sports Illustrated describes the brutality that sports stars endured. Latif Yahia, a body double for Odai, told the magazine that a boxer who had been knocked out in the first round was ushered into Odai's office.
"This is how you box?" Odai screamed at the manacled boxer as he threw punch after punch. Odai then jolted him in the chest with an electric prod, shaved his eyebrow, an insult to Muslim men, and told his aide to take him downstairs and finish the job. Yahia never heard of the boxer again.
In 2001, Amnesty International reported that Odai had ordered the hand of a security officer be chopped off after the man was accused of stealing sports equipment that later turned up.
A former soccer player, Sharar Haddar, said Odai dragged him and his teammates over concrete, pulling skin off their backs. They were then yanked through a pit so that sand stuck to their raw skin, and made to jump in a vat of sewage.
The soles of their feet were then beaten, a form of torture and punishment for losing a match.
Iraqi defectors have told British and U.S. officials gruesome tales of rape. Odai, they said, forced teachers in Baghdad's poorest schools to send 12-year-old girls to the palace to be raped.
Odai, defectors say, likes virgins, knowing young girls cannot get married in Iraq after being raped.
"He likes joking with his friends, 'Look at her, after this, she'll be a prostitute,' " one defector told Vanity Fair.
If the girls resist, his bodyguards dangle them over a wooden beam and bash them with a wooden club.
He warns victims not to flinch from the beating, defectors report, or they will have their legs broken. He hits them up to 50 times. When they're writhing in pain and can barely walk, he orders them to dance.
Some business associates who showed up late for a meeting were branded on the buttocks with hot irons.
"This mark is never going to go from your body, so you'll remember me until the day you die," Odai reportedly tells them.
Odai, who also controls the country's media, is the flamboyant one known to drive a red Porsche and wear a $3 million ring. Qusai is the quiet, behind-the-scenes man with three sons who has never given a public speech.
Qusai, now in charge of the Republican Guard, earned his father's respect by helping to suppress a Shiite rebellion soon after the first Gulf War.
He rounded up hundreds and put them in warehouses, defectors say. Men, women and children prisoners were stripped naked. He questioned many himself and they were shot immediately if they didn't cooperate. Most victims were buried in mass graves dug by bulldozers.
He had others tortured. Five years ago, 20 senior army officers were arrested for plotting against Saddam, according to defectors. Qusai had them strung up by their thumbs and lowered into vats of boiling water while he forced other officers to watch. Other reports claim he forced suspected dissidents to watch as their wives and children were gang-raped.
While Qusai may be the second most powerful man in Iraq, it was his flashy brother who delivered the family message when President Bush gave them 48 hours to leave.
Iraqi forces will prevail, Odai bellowed.
The mothers of U.S. soldiers will "weep blood instead of tears."
Well, they were just following their peaceful religion, which is written in the Koran:
Koran (III - The House of Imran: 75) "And when Allah took Compact with the Prophets: That I have given you of Book and Wisdom: then there shall come to you a Messenger confirming what is with you - you shall believe in him and you shall help him; do you agree? They said, 'We do agree'. Allah said, 'bear witness so, and I shall be with you among the witnesses'. Then whosoever turns his back after that - they are ungodly."
"They are ungodly." Since Islam is the only true religion, it has the duty to dominate all other faiths and thus abolish them, and their followers better instruct the rest to embrace their religion or else!
That's right, they concentrate on more peaceful things such as the Koran dictates, like getting people who aren't Islamic to renounce their faith, or become victims of destruction by force of arms, better known as Jihad. By the way there are close to 900 of these verses in the Koran.
I can't ping the WCMH list.
On second thought. If you want on or off the Western Civilization Military History ping list, let me know.
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