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.”
Too bad AlJazeera's isn't showing these photos or interviewing the ordinary Iraqis who were tortured here.
Agreed. And the same should apply to the professors and teachers who preside over their classes.
Regards, Ivan
Wasn't the Pol Pot's institution?
never forget
This would seem to indicate that you have read a little and understand that why, in the beginning, the west did embrace a secular leader who seemed interested science and progress. When he went bad, or if he was always bad, or if the US made the wrong choice in the face of two evils has little to do with the present. When the world was called to account for their poor judgement, their humanity, their sense of liberty, their desire to disarm a sadistic tyrant, etc., France, Germany and Russia didn't answer.
I'm afraid that as long as their are fools like those at the UN in positions of authority and influence it will keep on happening in various hellholes all around the world. If not for the strength of character and fortitude of men like Bush and Blair, the see-no-evil paper shufflers at the UN would still be allowing this outrage to continue in Iraq.
Thank God for the freedom loving Anglo-Saxon nations of the world. We (Americans, Brits, Anzacs, etc) seem to always end up being the ones who pay the price to stop this kind of inhuman evil, while the rest of the world looks the other way and pretends it can't hear the screams.
Jailed Iraqi children run free as Marines roll into Baghdad suburbs
I know this will give me nightmares tonite.
Just to see how they were reacting, I went over to DU to see if this article was posted. It was and the discussion turned my stomach. There are no more uncaring, hateful people than those leftists. They all turned their noses up and proclaimed it a fabrication. After all, they reasoned, Saddam freed everyone from the prisons last year, so there couldn't be kid behind bars over there.
I don't know who is more execrable, the people who did this, or the ones who continue to ignore it.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, by the blood of patriots, and tyrants."
Now IS the time for Iraqu\is to takt things into their own hands, and deal with the leftovers how they will. They know best.
I, for one, applaud them. Coming to socialists near you. Yes, Saddam's party is officially called the SOCIALIST ba'ath party. You just never get to see that in the socialsit media.
Oh, there'll be plenty of time for that later on.
In the meantime, graphic reportage of the earthly wages of the sins of Saddam's hyenas will serve as an example and unforgettable warning to all who would seek to oppress and slaughter innocents in the future.
There likely is no better way to show the world that the defenseless and oppressed are not necessarily such forever.
Indeed, it would appear that the sanitary executions and "Christian burials" of the oh-so-neatly tried and convicted Nazi war criminals did little to capture the hearts and minds of subsequent evil-doers and tyrants in every corner of the globe....
Then, you'll just love what Ramsey Clark (former Atty General under LBJ) says (March 30, 2003): Ramsey Clark: Saddam Not Brutal
Appeasement movement leader and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark defended Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein on Friday, saying that reports of his brutality were part of a U.S.-backed disinformation campaign.Asked about an eyewitness account of the torture death of an Iraqi dissident who was put in a glass cage and eaten alive by dogs while Saddam and other top leaders watched, Clark told WLIE-NY radio's Mike Siegel, "That's the most absurd story I've heard in a long time."
* * *
The anti-war leader said that other accounts from Iraqi defectors who have described Saddam's brutality, as well as reports of terrorist training operations inside Iraq, were probably false.
"I've worked with problems of defection and informers for years and years and they're not generally reliable," Clark told WLIE. "You have to be careful about who you're talking to. I also recognize propaganda. And I hear more garbage and propaganda coming out about how evil the Iraqi people are."
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