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Sorry to be redundant, but I fully expect the perps to be lauded at the Democratic National Convention next year. |
Posted on 08/03/2003 12:19:58 PM PDT by LakeLady
I never imagined when I wrote in March about the plastic shredder used to kill in one of Saddam’s prisons that I would, some months later, read in a chillingly meticulous record book that one of the methods of execution was “mincing”.
I had just finished a press conference in the still-shabby British Embassy in Baghdad, when a reporter from FoxTV told me that he had been handed for safekeeping by an Iraqi a 56-page record book from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. Later, at the Sheridan hotel, we scanned the horrific record of Saddam’s sadism and brutality. The prison itself, really a vast concentration camp, is on the edge of a small town. Market traders sell fresh fruit and vegetables, children play ball in the dusty streets. The normality of life outside this ghastly place, where so many lives came to an end, is itself horrible, since many of the people probably would have worked in the prison. I walked around talking to groups of young boys messing around on their bikes. Two of them, not more than 16 years old, told me they had been guards.
Just a few days before the Americans arrived, they said, the remaining prisoners had been killed; stood in trenches up to their waists and shot through the head.
In the corridors there are murals of Saddam Hussein: Saddam with a hawk on his shoulder; Saddam with a rocket-launcher and a dove in the barrel; Saddam in a silk shirt with a cigar. His victims were taken from dark and overcrowded cells to the execution block with its ceiling hooks and levers that catapulted them to a grisly death in the pits below. Some were still alive. The guards then broke their necks by standing on them.
The UN could have gone on passing resolutions and sending in inspectors and reporters for the next 50 years, but in the end there was no realistic alternative to war. Those who bleat about weapons of mass destruction or question the legality of war should talk to the Iraqi people. They are irritated. They ask, “Don’t they care about us? About mass graves? About torture?” Stand at the mass grave at al-Hillah where up to 15,000 people are buried, hands tied behind their backs, bullets through their brains.
Examine the pitiful possessions found so far: a watch, a faded ID card, a comb, a ring, a clump of black hair. Watch the old woman in her black chador, tattoos on her gnarled hands, looking through the plastic bags on top of unidentified, reburied bodies, for something that will help her to find her son, who disappeared in 1991.
Stand at the mass grave near Kirkuk, where huge mechanized trucks churn the earth in clouds of dust. Look at the skeletons now tenderly reburied in simple wooden coffins. Talk to Mirrim, who was only 12 at the time of the 1991 mass arrests. He, his mother, uncle and cousins were piled on buses. They turned off on to a farm road and the executions started. People were thrown into a pit, machine-gunned and then buried with a bulldozer. Mirrim crawled out of the mass grave, leaving his dead relatives behind.
A house in Baghdad, formerly the private home of one of Saddam’s secret police, has been taken over by those who seek to put the record straight. Outside, on the banks of the Tigris, hundreds of Shiite men search through the records found so far.
Dusty papers and old files fill every room. In one are three computers into which 150,000 names of the dead and where they died have been logged in just two weeks. In another room is some of the torture equipment: a chiropractor’s couch wired to administer electric shocks, the weights and pulleys used to apply pain. All around are grieving relatives, women in black chadors clutching tearfully at my arm. They have waited 12 long years for news. They still wait. Saddam, like Hitler and Pol Pot, kept meticulous records of his crimes. At the same time, Baath party men are said to be buying up the files that implicate them in the crimes.
The director of this self-help centre was in prison eight times. Once they took off all his toenails. He shows me photographs of executions and the bloodied, battered body of a university lecturer from Basra, still alive, his sawn-off arm lying by his side.
On the streets of Baghdad, WMD is not an issue. “Thanks to Bush and Blair,” they cry. I ask what would have happened if they had spoken to me like this in the past on the streets of Baghdad. One man slowly drew his hand, palm down, across his throat.
Ann Clwyd is a member of the British Parliament and has been a human rights activist for three decades. She is Prime Minister Tony Blair’s special envoy for human rights.
(Excerpt) Read more at baghdadbulletin.com ...
It's a long story
Welcome aboard.
I've been searching for direct news sources that are on the ground in Iraq, reporting on what is really going on in Iraq. I especially want to find English language sources.
I'm not sure what to make of the Baghdad Bulletin. At first, it appeard to be a good source of information from inside Iraq. I posted a few stories from that site (possibly even this article) a couple weeks ago.
Now, I'm not 100% certain that it is entirely legitimate, though.
The domain name is registered to a London, England address, not to an address in Iraq. Also, the web site is hosted in the USA (Colorado I think when I traced it). That's not an indication that the site is bogus. Actually, hosting the site on a U.S. server that's well secured by an experienced U.S. hosting service is probably a good idea for any Iraqi newspaper on the web. It will help to avoid denial of service attacks and hacking from Baathist hackers.
Finally, some of the "reporters" appear to be British nationals who originally went to Iraq as "human shields." Others are environmental activists (Greenpeace members, etc.). At this point, I think they are a better information source than our own American media, or the British and European media outlets. But I'm still not sure what they are publishing is as close to what is really happening on the ground in Iraq as we might like.
Having said all that, I check their site every few days to see what they say. I just take some of their reports with an appropriate grain of salt. Usually it calls for a smaller grain of salt than say CNN or ABC News, but I'm still not sure they deliver the unfiltered truth.
In WWII, we didn't invade Europe and defeat Nazi Germany to stop the Holocaust. However, similar to the Iraq situation, after we won and figured out the extent of the regime's crimes, our soldiers on the scene felt better about stopping that then they did about the original reasons for the war.
What a newbie!!!
Send me ten bucks...I'll send you the secret decoder ring...an extra three dinars will get it engraved.....4,000 get's your name on it.
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Sorry to be redundant, but I fully expect the perps to be lauded at the Democratic National Convention next year. |
There is no level of suffering that will be horrid enough for these monsters.
That's "religion of pieces"
You should post more often. Welcome aboard...
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