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Something terrible happened here. Something murderous
The Observer ^ | April 6, 2003 | Paul Harris

Posted on 04/05/2003 4:16:38 PM PST by MadIvan

The coffins are laid out in neat rows in an abandoned warehouse. In each is a crumpled bag of bones, old and dusty but still recognisably human. In the open end of one sack a skull is buried among the fragments of a skeleton. Its eye sockets are empty. Its teeth are smashed. Beside it, two ribs point out like accusing fingers.

Something terrible happened here. Something murderous. Something evil.

The proof lies in a cargo container nearby. Its metal door hangs open and inside are pages and pages of files. Each sheaf of notes contains a picture of a man or woman. Each and every one has been shot in the head. Their wounds are mangled and gaping. Many of them barely looked human any more as the anonymous photographer chronicled their dead faces. It is a horror almost beyond words.

It is hard not to see the black and white photographs - two for each victim - and want to look away. Yet each was a brother, a father or a son. Or a mother or daughter or sister. Each had a past and hopes for a future. Yet each ended here, in this dry and dusty hall of the dead. There must be at least 200 of them in the plywood coffins roughly hammered together by a hurried carpenter. All of them are in bags, jumbled together in anonymous piles of remains.

'Whoever they are, they have been desecrated in their death. No one should ever treat the dead like this,' said Sergeant Simon Brain, a veteran of tours in Bosnia who has seen places in the Balkans that look similar to this. 'That is two countries now that I have seen mass graves,' he added with a shake of his head.

There are signs of torture too. Outside the warehouse stands a wall. It is dotted in the centre with a spray of bullet holes. Nearly all of them are at head height. There is a ditch behind it. If anyone was shot against the wall, their blood would have drained cleanly away. In another warehouse a dozen tiny concrete cells have been built of breeze blocks inside the hangar. In some of them portraits of Saddam Hussein stare from the grey walls. In several an iron pole has been hung from the roof. Dangling from it are rusting metal hooks. They are ideal torture chambers.

'We can't speculate on what this is until an investigation has been carried out,' a British military spokesman said. But one officer, speaking privately and clearly shocked by what he had seen, was more blunt. 'Just look at those photos,' he said. 'Look at this place. People were being tortured and executed here.'

The building has now been declared off limits after being discovered by British soldiers of the Third Regiment of the Royal Horse Artillery yesterday morning. An investigation will now be launched into exactly who lies in the coffins. War crimes investigators have been alerted to the discovery and the building sealed off and guarded.

No one will envy the officials who will have to venture inside. The warehouse lies on a sprawling and abandoned military base on the outskirts of Az Zubayr, a small town near Basra. No one lives nearby. It can only be reached by rough and pitted mud causeways that traverse a lunar landscape contaminated by oil leaks from nearby refineries. Multi-coloured slicks soak into the dust of the drained saltmarshes as they bake in the sun. There is no sign of life apart from the stray dogs that swarm over this part of Iraq.

The base itself is a mess. Most of the buildings have been trashed or looted and destroyed over the previous decade or so of war and sanctions. There are holes in many of the buildings and roofs missing from some of the barrack huts.

Yet the warehouse of bones was locked and intact. There is little doubt that the bones are several years old. No flesh remains on the long brown leg and arm bones or bits of rib. Only a few tufts of tough black hair lie scattered on the floor, where dogs have tugged at a few of the bags and spilled their grim contents on the unforgiving concrete.

But there is no doubt the base was inhabited until only a few weeks ago. Among the buildings are Iraqi army shirts still in their bags, new gas mask respirators, signal huts for an artillery unit and maps with military drawings on them. Yet the Iraqi soldiers who were here were literally living beside hundreds of corpses.

Exactly who they were is so far a mystery. But there are a few clues. Some of the bags are made of plastic and inside them can be seen a few pieces of military equipment. The green belt of the Iraqi army is plainly visible in several of the sacks. Were they soldiers suspected of disloyalty in recent years? Were they Shia rebels from 1991, many of whom were in the army? More than 50,000 Shia were killed by the forces of Saddam Hussein in their doomed revolt. But in most of the bags there is no trace of clothing. Just bones.

In one sack a single photograph lies. It is a simple ID card. From it a middle-aged man stares out. He has black hair, a long face and a drooping moustache. In life he would perhaps have looked pensive. But lying half covered by his own dusty remains, the man pictured looks sad and forlorn, regretful for the life stolen from him. A splotch of bloodstain on the corner of the card is reminder enough of the brutality of how all his hopes must have died.

It is hard to stay in the warehouse long. In one corner empty coffins are stacked four or five high. Whoever was doing this grim work was stopped before they finished their task.

That is a small mercy, but no respite for those already dead.

Inside the hangar the dusty air hangs close around the clothes and almost makes one retch to think of what is being breathed into the lungs. It is a relief to leave the charnel house. Outside the sun shines. A breeze blows some of the bone dust away. But inside the horrors remain, testimony to the crimes of a regime that, while facing death itself, will leave images of terror that time may never erase.


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; Front Page News; Government; News/Current Events; US: District of Columbia; United Kingdom; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: atrocities; blair; bodies; bush; coffins; embeddedreport; iraq; iraqifreedom; saddam; uk; us; war; warlist
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To: knak
makes you wonder how we let the '92 election slip away...
81 posted on 04/05/2003 10:31:14 PM PST by des
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To: CyberAnt
There treasanous faces should be shoved in it.
82 posted on 04/05/2003 10:36:02 PM PST by sheik yerbouty
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To: MadIvan
Saddam's Iraq = Hitler's Germany

1) Torture, mass killings
2) Youth brigade
3) "leadership" by fear and threats
4) revocation of food and water in order to control the population

And this is all I can think of this late at night.

83 posted on 04/05/2003 10:43:23 PM PST by NotJustAnotherPrettyFace
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To: Excuse_My_Bellicosity
Right. Go to your local used book store & pick up "Lenin's Tomb" and/or "The Black Book of Communism" in the (recent) history section.
84 posted on 04/05/2003 11:09:16 PM PST by 1066AD
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To: MadIvan
We, on the Right, knew what Saddam was. Winston warned us about people like this.

Yes he did tho' way before my time. We just rented the HBO made movie on this topic "The Gathering Storm." Worth viewing, couldn't believe it was Albert Finney as WSC !

85 posted on 04/05/2003 11:20:05 PM PST by 1066AD
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To: NotJustAnotherPrettyFace
5)Saddam, if still alive, will not be captured alive. Like Hitler, he will commit suicide or do something along the lines of a martyr.

He just seems like the type, which scares me a bit.

86 posted on 04/05/2003 11:33:53 PM PST by af_vet_rr
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To: MadIvan
John Loftus
on WABC Batchelor and Alexander show
said he thinks that they may be the missing Kuwaiti prisoners
whom Saddam promised to return
after the Gulf War
but never did.
87 posted on 04/05/2003 11:37:21 PM PST by Allan
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To: MadIvan
I thought that this was a well-written article. Such bureaucratically monstrous treatment of human beings demonstrates the validity of analogies with Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Mussolini, Mao, Pol Pot, Pinochet, and Castro.

If "peace" meant sitting by with knowledge of such atrocities, and we good few were all proponents of such "peace," then we would ourselves eventually become victims of these same atrocities.

One ought to have wondered indeed whether the derelict U.N. was chartered merely to prevent the scourge of international bellum per se, "war," or to prevent also the equivalent horror of intra-national bureaucratic mass murder or slavery. But such a philosophical question now seems meaningless and moot, because we know that the U.N. has as its primary purpose deliberate interference with United States and British economic, political, and strategic interests.

And so we are not going to suck very many more of the eggs which the U.N. has been laying, to turn a phrase.

Looking ahead, the wretchedly astonishing iniquity of these 'Butchers of Babylon' likely will pale in comparison with those abominations which the free world is going to eventually uncover in the fearsome necropolises of North Korea.
88 posted on 04/05/2003 11:58:59 PM PST by Unknowing (Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.)
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To: Jeff Chandler
Saddam is dead.

I have been feeling this "in my bones" for about the last 24 hours.

I can feel his evil spirit linger in the air like dust.

We must all be strong and not let it infect us.
89 posted on 04/06/2003 12:15:27 AM PST by tictoc
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To: MadIvan
Peter Arnett, this is the "discipline" of Baghdad.
90 posted on 04/06/2003 1:52:27 AM PST by Ruth A.
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To: MadIvan
Every man and woman of Baghdad should be required to walk through this location.
91 posted on 04/06/2003 3:29:09 AM PDT by Robert Drobot
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To: brigette
Your# 80),.........

Maybe,....These are 200 'victims' (used instead of mice/rabbits, etc.) in countrywide training in WMD programs (failures)?

But they all have bullet holes to the head.

Don't be 'fooled' by the details!

;-)

92 posted on 04/06/2003 7:27:18 AM PDT by maestro
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To: headsonpikes
Yesterday, a French publication, http://www.les4verites.com, had a cartoon on its front page (that they've since yanked) showing an American soldier growling to a stack of "Iraki" skull and bones:

"Ça y'est! Vous êtes libres!" -- "That's it! You are free!"

Today the cartoon would be quite properly addended to have the skulls haunting and griping at the French cartoonist "if not for your ilk of yellow pukes, we'd still be alive."

No freaking wonder they pulled the cartoon.
93 posted on 04/06/2003 12:45:36 PM PDT by Avoiding_Sulla (You can't see where we're going when you don't look where we've been.)
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To: Avoiding_Sulla
Remember that the Ba'ath Party was consciously modeled on the NSDAP(Nazis) of Germany during the Vichy regime's control of Lebanon and Syria during WWII.

Iraq is not some backward desert grazingland; it is a 20th Century totalitarian state, and bears all the hallmarks of its fascist and marxist brothers.

The Iraqis are a deeply-scarred people.
94 posted on 04/06/2003 1:14:43 PM PDT by headsonpikes
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To: Avoiding_Sulla
Oh, and the French?

Execrable, as always.

But they are shameless; we'll be hearing lots from Froggie.
95 posted on 04/06/2003 1:16:33 PM PDT by headsonpikes
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To: tictoc
>>I can feel his evil spirit linger in the air... <<

By any chance did you have Mexican food for lunch?
96 posted on 04/06/2003 1:44:18 PM PDT by Jeff Chandler ( ;)
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To: headsonpikes
Any chance you've seen that cartoon and have a copy I could get hold of? If I only could find a copy of yesterday's front page -- but I couldn't raise it at the website.

Get this:
I had mailed a few copies in emails, and I'd saved the email. But all I have now in the email is that box with a red x in it. I cannot imagine why it didn't save as an embedded image. And everybody who received my email has the same problem today. I'm angry with myself for failing to save it also to my harddrive -- but who knew the situation would blow up in the faces of the publisher so deliciously today? It wasn't until this new broke that I was inspired to ink-in that afterword in case anyone missed why "The 4 Truths" would have wanted to pull the cartoon. <G>

Oh what a lost opportunity!

97 posted on 04/06/2003 2:39:40 PM PDT by Avoiding_Sulla (You can't see where we're going when you don't look where we've been.)
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To: MadIvan
'Whoever they are, they have been desecrated in their death. No one should ever treat the dead like this,' said Sergeant Simon Brain

I'm of the school that believes the desecrations most likely occurred before the deaths.

98 posted on 04/06/2003 2:56:40 PM PDT by GretchenEE (We export freedom)
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