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 ...
To all those who have doubts as to why we are in Iraq...please re-read this article.
I doubt this story will have a chance of any coverage, the manistream media is too busy covering the candle light vigils being held by the Liberals for Uday and Qusay Hussein.
Great first post LakeLady,
Welcome to Free Republic,
MJY
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