The inhumane reign of Saddam Hussein: Pt. 3 - USA Today, LA Times

USA Today, Los Angeles Times via White House Iraq news archives ^ | various

[Ragtime Cowgirl]

USA Today - Los Angeles Times

 

USA Today

 

"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

~*~

Tareq recalls how his team was invited to pose for pictures with Uday. At 6-5, Tareq towered over Uday. "The next day, I was taken and flogged 20 times" for being taller, says Tareq, who plans to leave Iraq soon to play professionally in Germany or Scandinavia.
-- USA TODAY, July 30, 2003

~*~

The few Iraqi men of Pumping Station No. 1 tried to protect it as if it were their own. In the end, they lost tools, spare parts and important records to gangs ransacking the oil complex. But they saved the new red fire engine; a quick-thinking operations manager drove it home.

"Over the weekend, the men sat silently, their faces clouded with doubt and fear, as an American oil engineer tried to convince them the station - and the oil flowing through it - really do belong to them and the Iraqi people.

"Under Saddam's regime, the workers said, the station was a place where they had to be careful in their work and careful what they said. On the payroll as a mechanic was a Baath Party official whose real job was to ensure loyalty to the Iraqi dictator.

"Any workers who complained 'would disappear in the night,' said Muslim Yehia, a technician. 'We don't know if they were killed or tortured or ran away.'"
-- USA Today, April 14, 2003

~*~

'I was beaten, refrigerated naked and put underground for one year because I was a Shiite and Saddam is a Sunni,' said Ali Kaddam Kardom, 37. He said he was arrested in the central city of Karbala on March 10, 2000. He returned to the facility in Baghdad this weekend, he said, to help rescue any Iraqis who still might be imprisoned there."
-- USA Today, April 14, 2003

~*~

"An Iraqi soldier, who according to the facility's records witnessed the beatings, said interrogators regularly used pliers to remove men's teeth, electric prods to shock men's genitals and drills to cut holes in their ankles.

"In one instance, the soldier recalled, he witnessed a Kuwaiti soldier, who had been captured during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, being forced to sit on a broken Pepsi bottle. The man was removed from the bottle only after it filled up with his blood, the soldier said. He said the man later died.

"'I have seen interrogators break the heads of men with baseball bats, pour salt into wounds and rape wives in front of their husbands,' said former Iraqi soldier Ali Iyad Kareen, 41. He then revealed dozens of Polaroid pictures of beaten and dead Iraqis from the directorate's files."
-- USA Today, April 14, 2003

~*~

"Saturday, former prisoners and Iraqi soldiers said they heard screams of 'help' from men who were still there. Several soldiers who tried to enter the underground prison through a manhole said they found the area flooded and doors locked. Kanan Alwan, 41, who worked in the facility's administrative office, said the intelligence officers of the facility programmed the prison's computers, which control the water flow, so that the water level would exceed the height of the prison doors.

"'They are drowning in there, and there's nothing we can do for them,' Alwan said. 'The real criminals fled. But the innocents who probably did nothing wrong have been condemned to death.'"
-- USA Today, April 14, 2003

~*~

Los Angeles Times

"After games, they called me from Odai's office," Mahmod said. "They would say: 'This player, this player, this player.' I would organize the players. They would sit in a room. Someone would come and take them, jail them."

"If he would find any small mistake, he would directly punish me," said Laith Hussein, captain since 1996 of the Iraqi national soccer team, recalling "10 or 12" times that he was jailed over the years.
-- Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2003

~*~

"'We were forbidden even to have a funeral. Sheik Jaafar's men told us our house would be destroyed if even one relative came to console us,' said Qadir, whose spare living room is adorned with a photo of President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. 'The security men came anyway and smashed our furniture and dishes.'"
-- Los Angeles Times, June 8, 2003

~*~

"The executions took place two or three times on most days, Arjawi said. Each time, between 100 and 150 blindfolded people, their hands and sometimes feet bound, were led into pits about 10 feet deep. Gunmen then fired into the pit, often for several minutes, Arjawi said. A bulldozer then pushed dirt onto the bodies, sometimes burying or crushing people who had survived the volley and were trying to climb out."
-- Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2003

~*~

"Hundreds of Iraqis whose loved ones vanished during the 1991 Shiite Muslim uprising watched Tuesday as workers dug into a mass grave, a backhoe pulling up eight or nine bodies at a time, and perhaps as many as 3,000 over the past four days. Villagers clutched the remains to their chests, trying to keep them intact as they fell from the machine's big shovel. They laid the bodies in the dirt nearby, next to hundreds of others waiting to be claimed. Then they searched for personal papers, the remnants of a wristwatch or other items that might reveal the identities of the dead."
-- Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2003

~*~

"As clumps of hair blew across the hard, dry land, Jabar Sattar sat rocking and sobbing on a hill of dirt created by the backhoe. He cradled a clear plastic bag containing the remains of his younger brother Faris. Faris was a soldier, he said, and had just returned from Kuwait when private security men arrested him in his front yard, just two miles from the grave site. 'I looked for 12 years,' Sattar cried into the bag of remains. 'Every day I told myself, you're alive and will come back. Now what am I going to say to our father?'"
-- Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2003

~*~

The Baath Party completely dominated life in Iraq. Until this week, every neighborhood had a Baath official who kept tabs on the area, ran a network of informants and recruited members into the party, say Iraqis. It wasn't difficult to figure out who they were: They had the best cars and the nicest houses and they had money to throw around."

"It didn't take much to run afoul of the party. A wrong word or chance comment within earshot of an informant often was enough to earn an interrogation or worse, according to residents of southern Iraq. There was little accountability, charges were difficult to counter and informants were eager to turn in 'troublemakers' to prove their own value."

"Ordinary people living in this kind of pressure cooker, where any misstep could be fatal, generally avoided sharing their true feelings with anyone but their closest friends and relatives. Making sure children didn't say an errant word before they understood the implications was also an essential survival tactic. 'You only talked when you were sitting with your very, very closest friends,' said Raheem Khagany, 24, an assistant engineering professor. 'If a Baath member heard you, you could be executed.'"
-- Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2003

~*~

The Iraqi Intelligence Service established a unit to assassinate Saddam Hussein's enemies at home and abroad that claimed 66 successful 'operations' between 1998 and 2000, according to documents obtained by The Times.

"Found on the floor of a looted Intelligence Service villa on the east bank of the Tigris River here, the six-page file described the program and contained suggestions for improving its effectiveness - including obtaining poisonous gas disguised as perfume or explosives that would detonate when the car of the target passed by."
-- Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2003

~*~

Naji Abbas headed out for a couple of hours one day in 1985 to buy some medicine and never returned. Thirteen months later, family members say, the police told them they could pick up his body at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Abbas, who, according to relatives, was guilty of nothing more than being a Shiite Muslim in Sunni-ruled Iraq, had been tortured, an eye poked out, an arm broken and his chest burned with electrical wires. The regime of Saddam Hussein then delivered the clincher: Family members were asked to pay 30 dinars, a month's wages, for the bullets that killed him."
-- Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2003

~*~

 

See also:

The inhumane reign of Saddam Hussein: Pt. 1 - The New York Times

The inhumane reign of Saddam Hussein: Pt. 2 - The Washington Post

Coming soon:

The inhumane reign of Saddam Hussein:

The London Times,

Newsweek, Time,

Agence France Presse, Toronto Star,

more....

~*~

[fhlh]

you've got to be kidding me?

This is in USSRToday and The LASlimes?

[Ragtime Cowgirl]

Fahrenheit 9/11 is Having "Devastating" Impact on Military Morale, Says Soldier Deployed Overseas

Soldier Says "Young and Impressionable" Soldiers Just Returned from Iraq Deployments Are "Being Made to Feel Ashamed" of Their Service

The National Center for Public Policy Research has posted online an e-mail received from a soldier, Spc. Joe Roche of the 1st Armored Division, who says Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 is "making the rounds" among soldiers at U.S. military bases overseas and is "shocking and crushing soldiers, making them feel ashamed" of their service in Iraq.

The letter has been published online by The National Center without abridgment. The full text can be found here.

Some excerpts:

"Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11, is making the rounds here at U.S. bases in Kuwait. Some soldiers have received it already and are passing is around. The impact is devastating. Here we are, soldiers of the 1st Armored Division, just days from finally returning home after over a year serving in Iraq, and Moore's film is shocking and crushing soldiers, making them feel ashamed. Moore has abused the First Amendment and is hurting us worse than the enemy has. There are the young and impressionable soldiers, like those who joined the Army right out of high school. They aren't familiar w/ the college-type political debate environment, and they haven't been schooled in the full range of issues involved. They are vulnerable to being hurt by a vicious film like Moore's."

"Specialist Janecek, who is feeling depressed because a close family member is nearing the end of her life, just saw the film today. I saw him in the DFAC. He is devastated. 'I feel shitty, ashamed, like this was all a lie.' Not only is he looking at going straight to a funeral when he returns home, but now whatever pride he felt for serving here has been crushed by Moore's film. Specialist Everett earlier after seeing the film: 'You'll be mad at shit for ever having come here.' And there are others. Mostly the comments are absolute shock at the close connections Moore makes between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia. 'Bush looks really really REALLY corrupt in this film. I just don't know what to think anymore,' is a common comment to hear. Some of these soldiers are darn right ashamed tonight to be American soldiers, to have been apart of this whole mission in Iraq, and are angry over all that Moore has presented in his film."

"Right now, just days away from what should be a proud and happy return from 15 months of duty in Operation Iraqi Freedom, your U.S. soldiers are coming back ashamed and hurt because of Moore's work."

"I sometimes want to be mad at my fellow soldiers for being susceptible to Moore's distortions, but I can't really blame them. These are good Americans, who have volunteered to serve our country. Nothing says they all have to be experts in Middle Eastern issues and history and politics to serve. That would be silly. ...But this is, of course, the vulnerability that Moore has exploited."

"I wonder how damaging and shocking a Moore project would have been in the 1940s making such a video of Franklin Roosevelt."

Spc. Joe Roche serves with the 16th Engineering Battalion of the 1st Armored Division. He and his unit were deployed in Iraq for 15 months. An archive of his e-mails can be accessed at www.nationalcenter.org/RochePage.html online.

The National Center for Public Policy Research is a non-partisan, conservative/free-market think-tank established in 1982 and located on Capitol Hill. It can be visited at www.nationalcenter.org online.

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[EQAndyBuzz]

What you are going to see over the next few days is all the atrocities coming out in the press. The idea behind it is to make Bush look like he did nothing to stop them while the media sets up Kerry's coming out speech and how he will be a hawk towards these regimes.

[newsgatherer]

Thanks for an excellent piece, I have posted it to Christian-news-in-maine.com it is in the Monday section, with credit to you and a link back to the post.
"> christian-news-in-maine.com/

[ml/nj]

You know, I was traveling last week so I got those free copies of USA Today delivered to my room. On Friday they had an article about Nantucket. Now I know something about Nantucket as my family summered (really Julied) there for a number of years. I like to read about what goes on there now that I visit less often. And the USA Today article had a number of factual errors, stupid factual errors. For example they said that 'Sconset (town at the eastern end of the island) was the easternmost point in the USA. (It's not even the esternmost point in Massachusetts!)

So if they get the stuff I know about wrong, why should I ever bother reading the other stuff as if they might have gootten that right?

ML/NJ

[PatriotGirl827]

That is one of the saddest things I have read lately. I hope Michael Moore burns in hell.

[Pete98]

Hmmmm...and is there any evidence that Saddam put panties on anyone's head? No? I thought not. Set him free!

[Ragtime Cowgirl]

These accounts were printed in 2003.

The world knows about the atrocities committed by a few unrepresentative MPs at Abu Gharib.

The world still doesn't know the true cruel history of the jihadist terrorists our troops face, fight - and remove - daily in defense of our freedom, post-911.

The Iraqi people have been telling their stories - through blogs and cell phone calls, articles in military news websites.

So have our troops.

Few in the free press are listening to the two most important voices on the ground in Iraq. They continue to bow down to the enemy - seemingly unaware that the enemy they aid cares nothing about their freedom, rights, or lives.

 Fahrenheit 9/11 and Its Impact on Military Morale, by a Soldier ~ FR thread is up. Thanks, Cannoneer No. 4.

[Coop]

Great work!

[Happy2BMe]

"I wonder how damaging and shocking a Moore project would have been in the 1940s making such a video of Franklin Roosevelt."

_____________________________________________

PING.

I'll post later in this thread. I have a little bit of insight into troop morale, but want to see what others have to say about Moron's impacting our troops and mission in Iraq.

Current Traitor List

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MOORE LIES.COM

[WOSG]

Thanks for posting this.

[Smartass]

Good post...

[Alamo-Girl]

Bump!

[PsyOp]

Bio-Chemical Weapons & Saddam: A History.