Posted on 04/08/2003 2:55:08 PM PDT by MadIvan
ABID HUSSAN took one step inside the foul-smelling prison cell and began to shake. Beads of sweat ran down his forehead and behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. The 45-year-old shopkeeper pointed to the electric cables hanging from the ceiling where President Saddam Hussein’s security police would torture him three times a day.
People tried to elbow their way inside this impossibly small 6ft by 4ft torture chamber. They were anxious to sift through the documents carpeting the floor to see if it gave a clue as to what became of a loved one, or friend, who had been dragged inside here and was never heard of again.
Until yesterday, when British troops finished their search for booby traps inside the State Security headquarters, no one in Basra would have dared to set foot in this building. It was forbidden even to walk on the pavement outside what residents nicknamed “the white lion”, a big white building, a fearsome creature that devoured people. But everyone knew what went on behind the thick concrete walls.
The torture cells lay in squat, rectangular rows in landscaped grounds tucked behind a six-storey tower block, where floor after floor of filing cabinets were stuffed with the records of untold numbers of citizens.
One old man studying the jumble of paperwork pointed out that the files with red edges were of those who had been executed.
Saddam’s jailers were meticulous record-keepers. They pinned photographs inside the documents showing how the prisoner was bearing up to various stages of torture. They finished with pictures of the battered and bloodied body after execution.
Standing inside his former cell at the end of a dark corridor, Mr Hussan described, in a low whisper, how he had been seized in the street in March 1999 because he was standing close to a prominent Shia cleric in Basra.
“I didn’t know the man, I never spoke to the man and I’m not even a Shia, but they held me in this stinking hole for ten months,” he said.
The only dim light came from a small, barred window. There was a hook in the ceiling and Mr Hussan demonstrated how his hands had been tied behind his back and how he had been suspended from it for up to three hours a day.
He lifted his shirt to show the scars and weals on his painfully thin legs where he had been whipped with electric cable. “All day and night you would hear terrible screams, and some were from children.”
After a couple of minutes he could not bear to stay in the room any longer and dashed off around the corner to what he called “the cages”: long, red-painted wire-mesh cells, where inmates would be forced to watch others being tortured as they awaited their turn to be dipped into a rusty metal bath and electrocuted.
Around the edge of this torture yard were cells for some of those sentenced to death, including a couple where an adult would have had to bend double to fit inside. There were prisoners here until five days ago, when their captors, realising that British tanks were coming, abandoned the centre.
Walking around the centre yesterday, nervous locals pointed discreetly to a couple of heavily built men who they suspected of working there and who had, perhaps, returned to cover up their work.
To try to disguise the true purpose of this building, Saddam placed a secondary school across the road in what was the fashionable suburb of Ashar. On the corner were the courts of justice, although most punishment was meted inside the white lion out without the need for a trial.
Raad Azoor, 32, waved a document that he said, showed how the torturers had executed his brother, an army officer, in 1991, claiming that he was a traitor for questioning an order over the invasion of Kuwait.
“There is not a house in Basra that has not had someone taken to this place. Some were freed. Thousands were not,” he said, spitting at an official crest lying amid the debris.
These were not just the wild claims of those delighted to see the back of a cruel regime. Proof of systematic, state-orchestrated violence against citizens was strewn across the courtyard, with documents, files, signed confessions and interrogations being blown around by the hot wind.
One file being trodden underfoot involved an 11-year-old boy accused of “treason”. His crimes, apparently, included writing seditious messages on a school exercise book.
There was a separate section for women, with girls as young as 13 included in records in a red-bound book recovered by one man who clutched it to his chest for safekeeping.
The trouble for the allies who might want to use such evidence in future war crimes hearings is that most who stampeded through the skeleton of Basra’s most-hated building were only too happy to start bonfires in every office, using the prison records.
Every few minutes flame and smoke belched through another broken window as looters finished cannibalising the electric fittings and water pipes, then decided that what they could not steal they would burn.
On the street, the crews of a couple of British armoured personnel carriers paused briefly to watch the frenzied crowd hurling filing cabinets from top-floor windows, then accelerated away. All day a growing number of people, finally believing that the grip of Saddam’s regime is finished in Basra, stumbled over the rubble for a tour of the white lion.
There were those like Abu al-Mansoori, who was jailed here with his wife for five months for attending prayers in a Shia mosque and who argued with those who wanted this loathed symbol razed to the ground. “Leave it,” he said, “and let people truly see what bad things were done to us. It is truly incredible what was done in here.”
What data specifically does it represent?
Uh, it represents arms sales to Iraq from 1973-2002, broken down by country. You know, like it says in the very first line of text up there....
The units of measurement are not labelled.
The graph represents the percentage of total arms sales by country. What sort of units do percentages usually carry?
How are weapons defined?
Well, that's the sort of thing that's easily discovered by going to the source website referred to in the graph, isn't it? Specifically, it covers "major conventional weapons", such as tanks, planes, artillery, missiles, helicopters, et cetera. Anyway, go look for yourself - it's poor form to insist that someone else spoon-feed you when this sort of thing can be found on your own with extremely minimal effort.
Here's a link with some specifics. It describes how many Reagan officials, including Rumsfeld, continued to advance Iraq's weapons program after they used chemical weapons on their own people.
Specifics?! The Washington Post?!?
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!!
If I'm not mistaken, they still have us in a "quagmire" in Iraq, although that might have been yesterday.
On your side you have the Post and their "unnamed sources" and "administration officials".
On my side the is the Arms transfers to Iraq, 1973-2002 from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. I believe they are familiar with the English language.
Below are two files containing data on major conventional weapons transfered to Iraq for the period 1973-2002.
The first file provides SIPRI Trend Indicator Values for major conventional weapons transfered to Iraq expressed in US $m. at constant (1990) prices for the period 1973-2002. The data are presented according to major suppliers and are also expressed as percentages.
The following file contains a register that describes the weapons on order or under delivery, or for which the licence was bought and production was under way or completed during the period 1982 to 2001. This register also provides comments and some additional information on each deal.
Register of the transfers and licensed production of major conventional weapons to Iraq 1973-2002, (Acrobat file 17k)
When using SIPRI data for arms transfers made to Iraq after 1990, the following two points should be noted:
a] Although the SIPRI Arms Transfers Project has monitored reports of transfers of major conventional weapons to Iraq since 1990, none of these reports have been sufficiently well documented to confirm a transfer has taken place.
b] The SIPRI Arms Transfers Project only reports transfers of complete major conventional weapon systems. Thus, reports that indicate Iraq has obtained parts of a given weapon system, even if confirmed, would not be registered as a transfer.
c] See the Arms Transfers Project's chapter in the forthcoming SIPRI Yearbook 2003 for further details on suspected transfers to Iraq since 1990.
d] Information on suspected transfers of major conventional weapons and related equipment can be obtained from the Arms Transfers Project.
e] Details of arms embargoes in force against Iraq can be found at the Export Control Project.
I love the smell of napalm in the evening.
Anyone who chooses one of the alternate names for Satan as his forum moniker isn't likely to have any respect for a great and decent man like RR. If I remember correctly, somewhere in holy scripture Belial is called the "father of lies".
May they be in heaven. What they endured is hard to comprehend. Even if I'm not fond of someone, NEVER, EVER, even in a moment of passion would I do something like this to another human being for sport as was done here. These folks were defenseless. I have no doubt that death was a welcomed relief.
There is NO godly reason in the world to ignore this and do nothing. It's a shame we didn't complete the job back in 1991. Imagine how many lives we would have saved and how many people would have been able to live a normal life without the psychological scars that this regieme leaves behind. It's nothing more than Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin etc. ALL OVER AGAIN.
And not necessarily in that order.
IIRC they stand to lose billions owed to them by Saddam.
They also made a calculated gamble to align themselves with France and against the UK, in a European power struggle. Bad move on their part.
There are undoubtedly other reasons too.
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