THE CRUELEST COVER-UP

Tales of Saddam's Brutality
The Iraqi people talk about mass graves and Saddam’s crimes against humanity

"Most afternoons, among the market stalls leading to the old city of Najaf young men set up TV sets in the street showing grotesque scenes of cruelty. Handcuffed prisoners are executed with sticks of dynamite shoved into their pockets. Screaming men plead for their lives as they are beaten by Saddam Hussein's secret police. Crimson fragments of bodies lie in the street, moments after a huge explosion, to the soundtrack of an Arab lament. The crowds gather round. People mutter and shake their heads. Then they queue to pay 1,000 Iraqi dinars (about 33p) [50 cents] for laser discs containing footage of the appalling scenes. These are the atrocity discs of Iraq, a booming mini-industry in a country still stricken by the consequences of the war. They are produced in home factories, with the simplest computer equipment."
-- The London Times, September 20, 2003

"The day after the liberation, my aunt put out a black banner--an Arab mourning ritual--with the names of all her relatives who had been murdered by the regime on it. And she looked down her street, and there were black banners on almost every house. On some houses it looks like a long shopping list. She said to her neighbour, 'You too?' Under Saddam it was a crime to mourn people killed by the regime--it made you seem suspicious too. Everyone was suffering terribly, but they were suffering alone. They just didn't know that everyone else was hating it too."
-- Yasser Alaskary, co-founder of Iraqi Prospect Organisation, an Iraqi freedom group, The Independent (London), September 18, 2003

"Freed in April after 13 years in prison, [Dr. Ibrahim] Basri [Saddam's former physician] is now reaching out to register and help as many victims of the regime as he can find. They stream to a clinic attached to his house, a sad collection of former political prisoners, relatives of the executed, and maimed men who cannot work because they lost an arm, an ear, or a foot to the torturer's knife. 'All the time in prison, I think, "What can I do to help these people?"' he said. ... 'For the first five years, he put me in a cell by myself, 2 meters by 2 1/2 meters, where I didn't know if it was day or night. I was so dirty with lice. There were cockroaches in my mouth at night. And they came to beat you in the morning and at night for nothing, nothing.' Once, he continued, the guards beat him in front of 300 inmates until they broke his legs. 'I never said, "Mercy." I just said, "Iraq."'"
-- The Boston Globe, August 7, 2003

"The bodyguard says he was disgusted by Uday's activities-he points to a floor-to-ceiling cage in the corner of the club's kitchen where he says monkeys were kept for Uday because he liked to have the animals watch him when he was deflowering virgins. ... It was his to make the singers who entertained Uday at the Boat Club gulp down a liter and a half of a 'cocktail,' a combination of 90-proof alcohol often with some drugs thrown in. ...

"'I would line up all the entertainment against that wall,' the bodyguard said, pointing to the side of the garage. 'And I would take a stick. ... And I would say, "Drink, drink, you have 10 minutes." If any of them didn't drink, I hit them with a stick.' ... Then, if the singers still refused, they were given a 'street beating,' meaning that their faces were untouched but they were pummeled until they could hardly stand up. ...

"'I always felt like I was the one who took the beatings because each shout of pain from the beaten person, I used to pray to God and ask God to punish me for what I was doing. But the person who took the beating did not know that if I didn't carry out the orders, I would take the same beating that he was getting.'"
-- Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2003

"Jailers often treated allegedly lagging players in ways certain to hurt, not improve, the athletes' performances on the field. After shaving their heads to humiliate them, athletes were hung upside down and the soles of their feet whipped. They were buried in hot sand up to their necks. Their fingers or ears were amputated. Electric shocks were applied to their skin. And, in the case of soccer players, they were forced to kick concrete balls."
-- USA TODAY, July 30, 2003

At only 22, Tareq, a defender, has been to prison five times. After a while, he recognized a pattern to the punishment. "The first stage of the torture is the reception, when you are given a choice of which plastic cable you will be beaten with. Then you are beaten 15 to 20 times. The reception is over. In the next stage, you are thrown into knee-deep sewer water and told to swim," he says. Tareq was dragged bare-chested across hot asphalt. Made to run barefoot over broken glass and gravel. When it was time to leave, he says, "The farewell party is a beating."
-- USA TODAY, July 30, 2003

"Ahmad was Uday's chief executioner. Last week, as Iraqis celebrated the death of his former boss and his equally savage younger brother Qusay, he nervously revealed a hideous story. His instructions that day in 1999 were to arrest the two 19-year-olds on the campus of Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts and deliver them at Radwaniyah. On arrival at the sprawling compound, he was directed to a farm where he found a large cage. Inside, two lions waited. They belonged to Uday. Guards took the two young men from the car and opened the cage door. One of the victims collapsed in terror as they were dragged, screaming and shouting, to meet their fate. Ahmad watched as the students frantically looked for a way of escape. There was none. The lions pounced. 'I saw the head of the first student literally come off his body with the first bite and then had to stand and watch the animals devour the two young men. By the time they were finished there was little left but for the bones and bits and pieces of unwanted flesh,' he recalled last week."
-- Sunday Times, London, July 27, 2003

One of the condemned women was pregnant. This presented a problem, said Ahmad, because under religious law a pregnant woman should at least be allowed to finish her term and deliver the baby before being executed. 'She was several months' pregnant,' he said. 'The doctor had verified it, she had said so and we could see her swollen stomach. She was taken in and out three times - everyone was unsure what to do with her.' Telephone calls were made to Uday by his representative. As they waited, the woman sobbed and begged for mercy for her unborn child. On the third telephone call the order was given to go ahead with her execution. 'At that the woman was beheaded - and knowing she was pregnant, I felt sick in the stomach and wished for Allah to open up the ground and swallow everyone there including myself,' said Ahmad.
-- Sunday Times, London, July 27, 2003

"They put me in a cell just 1m by 1.5m, painted completely red with no windows and lots of tiny stones on the floor and told me to count them. It did not matter what number you said it would be wrong. If I said 2000, they would say no, it's 2001 and beat me 10 times. Then they put me inside a circle and told me to run round and round for nine hours. After that they threw me on the hot pavement and a fat guard sat on my chest. Then they pulled me along by my ankles so that my back was streaming with blood.

"Another time they drew a bicycle on the wall and told me to ride it. They threw me in foul dirty water and said you must swim, then they kept pushing me under with a stick forcing me to drink.

"Once they told us we had to catch 10 flies during the night and 10 mosquitoes during the day or you would be tortured more. This was impossible so you had to catch the mosquitoes at night and hold them till daytime and vice versa with the flies. Then they would ask which is male and which is female. Whatever you said it would be vice versa."
-- Sunday Times, London, July 27, 2003

"When I was in Iraq a doctor from Basra told me that, after being jailed by the police some years ago, he refused to tell his inquisitors whatever it was they wanted to hear. Instead of beating him, he told me, they brought in his 3-month-old daughter. The interrogator tore the screaming infant's eye out. When the desired answers were still not forthcoming, the questioner hurled the little girl against the concrete wall and smashed her skull."
-- The New York Times, July 26, 2003

This is a very small number out of thousands and thousands of similar horror stories from Iraq. The Iraqi people have been telling these stories for years. The above is from the very public White House website, a small sample of a lengthy Iraq archive of Saddam's brutality - taken from international publications, available to anyone with access to the internet.

Those involved in this war -- from a press charged with informing the public, to those on Capitol Hill accusing our heroes of fraud, holding back funds while they vote themselves a raise -- are long familiar with the horrors suffered by the Iraqi people under Saddam Hussein.

During those six months, thousands of innocent children and political prisoners died.

Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Party, AP and BBC, the Bush and Blair lynch mobs, Amnesty International, UN, France - how can you continue to ignore the mass-murder and spit on the heroes who planned and fought and won this war?

Where is your thanks to the US military and the Bush administration for providing both the necessary leadership and the tremendous skill and courage it took to remove this human WMD and his Ba'athist co-thugs?

Where is your gratitude for the sacrifices of the American mothers and fathers whose "children" were wounded or killed in the line of duty, honorable men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of strangers in a foreign land?

You are very welcome.

This "mass (mini) e-mail" did provoke...both gratitude and fury.

Second only to the reaction I received from a simple, wonderful editorial written by Barry Farber (who kindly thanked me for thanking him *g*):

Proud to Have Liberated Iraq ~ Barry Farber

This one angered a member of the British Parliament so much, he wrote not just one, but two lengthy 'responses.'

Could be because I copied and pasted the names of his peers in the "To:" box where everyone who received it knew their opponents did, too.

I now share these two most often with war critics. (^:

Ping for those who are pretending that WMDs was the reason for removing Saddam. Frankly, I don't want to share this free nation with you, and our Soldiers certainly deserve better from their fellow Americans in positions of leadership, or in possession of those mighty destructive pens.

doug they had a pacificst, spineless, leader, with no cajones, who would rather have someone, young, on their kneees before him than do anything about the butcher of Bagdad. Consequently we lost a couple of embassies, plus personnel, the first bombing of the World Trade center, 21 Marines lost in Ryhad, and the loss of personnel and the bombing of the USS Cole. His response was to try and catch the perpetrators through our justice system, which, by the way had been castrated by his dyke, attorney general.

Those accusing our military are those who mostly covered up THIS.

The world now knows more about the abuses of a handful of criminally negligent MPs than they know about the systematic human atrocities committed by one of the most oppressive regimes in history, carried out with the full permission of Saddam, by his thugs for decades.

The press had access to most of this info, and far more, long before we went to war.

We know the world would have reacted far differently to this war if they had been properly informed by our free press - and would have reacted far differently to the war protestors, to the longsuffering victims of Saddam trying to find the courage to stand today, and to our courageous American troops - who DID what thousands of Iraqis tried and died and failed to do - removed Saddam - and who are now facing, fighting - and removing - Saddam's cruel accomplices, and liberating a nation.

I just read this for the first time, RCGirl. I thank you for compiling this.

I wish I knew of some way to hunt for the comments I made on FR during the runup to the BASH. After President Bush's foray to the UN, and the debate about whether the WMD issue was critical, I kept trying to tell people that it was NOT the most important reason to get rid of Hussein NOW. It was always - ALWAYS - more important to get rid of him because of the misery he was creating for my friends there. Those I knew did not want to return to Iraq, but their family was held hostage to their return. Several were high performing students, who were of course subsequently pressed into service for the regime, forced to do who knows what type of work for him.

Thank God he is gone!

Thank You, President Bush, and our wonderful military and their staff.

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