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Inside the hell of Saddam's torture chambers
The Times ^ | April 9, 2003 | Daniel McGrory

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.”


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Foreign Affairs; Front Page News; Government; News/Current Events; US: District of Columbia; United Kingdom; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: atrocities; basra; blair; bush; children; childrensprisons; documents; embeddedreport; executions; humanrights; iraq; photographs; prisonerabuse; saddam; saddamhussein; torture; torturechamber; uk; us; war; warlist; whitelion
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To: MadIvan
I'm sitting here reading the article and comments and seething with anger toward Americans who have insulted the president and protested the war. These Americans should be physically dragged to Iraq and forced to read the files and listen to the torture stories first-hand. I wish I could spit in the faces of all these mindless peaceniks who would support continuing enslavement of innocent people by a butchering, mass-murderer.
61 posted on 04/08/2003 3:30:46 PM PDT by NoControllingLegalAuthority
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To: browardchad
"...enjoyed looking at the torture records."

Probably. That's the reason for the pictures, I bet.

Another form of more torture used by Saddam & Co. - chopping a family member's head off and putting it on a stake in the front yard of family overnight so they would see it lst thing in the a.m.
62 posted on 04/08/2003 3:31:04 PM PDT by whadizit
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To: Russell Scott
Can you give me the day and the hour? I know neither, myself.
63 posted on 04/08/2003 3:31:37 PM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
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To: FairOpinion
How could anyone aware of these horrors be AGAINST us liberating the Iraqi people from this? Those condoning this, by having opposed us to stop this, are monsters, same as Saddam.

Maybe Scotty boy would like his daughters in there, just for a day...no torture, just captive.

64 posted on 04/08/2003 3:32:50 PM PDT by nicmarlo
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To: SevenofNine
SCOTTY SHUT UP .... You should say something BEFORE

Speaking out against the atrocities committed against children didn't fit with Scotty's agenda. Apparently, it didn't fit the UN's agenda, either.

65 posted on 04/08/2003 3:35:08 PM PDT by nicmarlo
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To: MadIvan
Damn. Depravity at it's worst...so far.
66 posted on 04/08/2003 3:36:36 PM PDT by TheSpottedOwl (America...love it or leave it. Canada is due north-Mexico is directly south...start walking.)
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To: Nagual

67 posted on 04/08/2003 3:39:46 PM PDT by Caipirabob (Democrats.. Socialists..Commies..Traitors...Who can tell the difference?)
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To: MadIvan
Heads on pikes!

Start with whomever we catch first!

Bob, Ixnay, whoever...
68 posted on 04/08/2003 3:41:51 PM PDT by headsonpikes
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To: MadIvan
Yes, we've seen it before and the same countries that perpetrated those crimes are guilty again, as accomplices.
69 posted on 04/08/2003 3:41:58 PM PDT by Eva
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To: MadIvan
"But yet each time, each revelation of evil is a shock."

Exactly what I was thinking. I though I understood it but I wasn't close.

70 posted on 04/08/2003 3:43:27 PM PDT by Proud_texan
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To: MadIvan
Bump for war crimes.
71 posted on 04/08/2003 3:45:11 PM PDT by <1/1,000,000th%
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To: MadIvan
Maybe. But it's just as likely that he's doing the only the thing that will keep him and his family from being jailed, tortured, and executed.
72 posted on 04/08/2003 3:46:16 PM PDT by GovernmentShrinker
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To: crobnson
"Maybe we should swamp the world with the truth."

It's got to be coming. The world just has to grow a spine and face the horrors that are going on in places like this. Boo-hoo. The globalist socialists in the UN and elsewhere spend so much time whining and pointing fingers about the environment, etc. It is about time they started correcting the basic wrongs - but first they have to have it shoved in their face.
73 posted on 04/08/2003 3:46:28 PM PDT by whadizit
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To: Eva
I hope we can bring justice out of this - justice to the murderers that did this, justice to the nations that coddled the murderers and criminals. That means Chirac, among others.

Regards, Ivan

74 posted on 04/08/2003 3:47:07 PM PDT by MadIvan
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To: Anamensis
For tens of thousands of Iraqis, that was no bad dream, but their final reality.
75 posted on 04/08/2003 3:48:00 PM PDT by Travis McGee (----- www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com -----)
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To: whadizit
Right, serves no purpose to keep showing this.

Of course the Left is taking notes about how to deal with people that pray too much.

76 posted on 04/08/2003 3:50:09 PM PDT by oyez (I'm an old fool, but..)
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To: MadIvan
I think I'm going to be sick.

This should have to be read by every high school and college student.


77 posted on 04/08/2003 3:50:28 PM PDT by unixfox (Close the borders, problem solved !)
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To: Belial
Does that include Reagan, who subsidized Saddam?

Actually, I read a story here yesterday that mentioned the breakdown, percentage wise, of arms suppliers to Iraq over the last thirty years. It read:

Russia(USSR) 58%
France 14%
China 12%

United States <1%
UK almost none at all

Brazil had more than the US and UK combined. Again, this lie is repeated by the left almost as much as the Supreme Court gave the election to Bush. If anyone else read that post too cold you post the link.

78 posted on 04/08/2003 3:50:33 PM PDT by ThreeYearLurker
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To: Savage Beast
Killing and torture honed to a sciece.
79 posted on 04/08/2003 3:51:00 PM PDT by oyez (I'm an old fool, but..)
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To: MadIvan
Bump for later read.
80 posted on 04/08/2003 3:51:41 PM PDT by Right_in_Virginia
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