THE CRUELEST COVER-UP
White House | Various
Tales of Saddam's Brutality
The Iraqi people talk about mass graves and Saddam’s crimes against humanity
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"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
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"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
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"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
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"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
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"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
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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
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"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
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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
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"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
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"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
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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.
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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.
Except for rare and brief mentions, they choose to bury the evidence.
We waited six months for the UN to decide not to help.
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?
Shame on you!
Where is your concern for the Iraqi children?
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?
They did not die in vain.
Thousands of children have been saved in the past six months.
Iraq is free.
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"We will not forget it was the U.S. soldiers who liberated us from Saddam," said Abid Ali, an auto repair shop owner in Sadr City last month -- and our research shows that he's not unrepresentative.
...Evidence of the comparative gentleness of this war can be seen in our poll. Less than 30% of our sample of Iraqis knew or heard of anyone killed in the spring fighting. Meanwhile, fully half knew some family member, neighbor or friend who had been killed by Iraqi security forces during the years Saddam held power.
Perhaps the ultimate indication of how comfortable Iraqis are with America's aims in their region came when we asked how long they would like to see American and British forces remain in their country: Six months? One year? Two years or more? Two thirds of those with an opinion urged that the coalition troops should stick around for at least another year.
We're making headway in a benighted part of the world. Hang in there, America.
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IRAQ: Plan unveiled to restore ministry buildings(200,000 jobs created) ~ 9/17
"We have cleaned major thoroughfares and extended services to most areas. We are collecting garbage, repainting streets, repairing sewage and water pipelines and trying to keep Baghdad clean and tidy," he said. (Hadi Faeisa al-Salmani, Baghdad Municipal). He said the municipality has made 200,000 job opportunities available in Baghdad alone.
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Letter from Iraq ~ 9/9
Pan_Yans Wife wrote Ahmad a letter in response to this: 8 Thanks from Iraq ~ Ahmad Al-Attar, grateful Iraqi med student request for medical supplies ~ Al-Zahrawi Hospital ~ Mosul, Iraq | Science Magazine.
This was his response to her:
Dear XXXXXXX,
I’m the one who should thank you very much for your lovely email! It is great to know that there are people in the world who do not know you and do not need to care about you, yet their kindness and humanity spread across continents wide to bring back hope in our frail souls giving us the energy we need to carry on and never give up no matter how hopeless the situation seem. God bless all the brave men and women who sacrificed their lives to help us, and God bless all those who are continuing to do their best to make Iraq a democratic and free nation. Amen.
You know, liberty may be such a simple word and can be taken for granted in many places around the world, but the truth is: there is nothing more precious than the sense of being free…it is simply indescribable! The day Saddam’s infamous statue fell which marked the end of the tyrant’s reign, was arguably the happiest day of my life. It was a dream come true…and at times, even dreaming of getting rid of that thug was difficult. He ruled with an iron fist, a phony religious pretense and a diabolic plan to devalue everything that had a value, especially knowledge & science. I could go on forever describing some of his atrocities and crimes, many of which are too bad to be believed! But I am not going to bore you with that. I just wanted to thank you for your kind words and prayers. Please spare some for the American soldiers who are unfortunately still being under attack from Saddam loyalists. I pray for their safety and happy return home.
I also appreciate very much your efforts to “find the truth” as we too suffer from all the negative media cover which makes Iraqis more frustrated and reflect a bad image of the country. I assure you, most Iraqis are hard-working people who just want to rebuild their country and forget the dark era of wars, hate and tyranny and work on a new democratic Iraq where we can live in peace and harmony with all the civilized nations of the world. We now have our golden opportunity and we won’t let anybody take it away from us.
God bless you all, and thanks again.
Yours Ahmad Al-Attar
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...They lined the route of his convoy, mixing the traditional Kurdish dress of puffed trousers and wide belt with the fatigues of peshmerga fighters. Women in black headscarves carried flowers or pictures of their loved ones.
Children issued smart military salutes while the crowd held aloft portraits of US President George W. Bush and banners emblazoned with: "Our liberators are welcome," "We love America" or "Thank you President Bush".
The chief US diplomat spent several emotionally wrenching hours here, visiting a small monument built to mark the tragedy surrounded by 1,000 gravestones on the edge of the town.
At a ceremony with hundreds of relatives of those who perished from the town of 40,000 people, Powell stood flanked by US civil administrator Paul Bremer and Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Massud Barzani.
Powell toured a memorial museum housing a vast collection of photographs, many of them showing children struck down dead in the street as the toxins engulfed the town. The walls were etched with the names of the 5,000 dead.
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Iraqis and coalition forces provide legal due process to oil smugglers at sea ~ 9/15
Last week, Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, in conjunction with the Coalition Provisional Authority and Commander, Joint Task Force Seven, escorted an Iraqi judge to the vessels being held in Iraqi territorial waters under suspicion of smuggling Iraqi oil.
The Al Basrah Investigating Judge visited the detained vessels to adjudicate the smuggling cases.
“I am very thankful to coalition forces for trying to help the Iraqi people re-establish the Iraqi judicial system,” he said. “They are trying to support and help the Iraqi people, and to protect Iraqi ports from all the vessels that are trying to smuggle illegal fuel out of the country. I am hoping this will be fixed and will help us a lot in trying to avoid this in the future.”
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...Evidence on the ground in Iraq suggests that the population does not actually regard the absence of Arab involvement as a bad thing at all. The truth is that most Iraqis would prefer to have a US-dominated force in their country, over an Arab one. The grim reality, one particularly hard to hear for those Arabs who felt they were supporting their Iraqi brethren when demonstrating against war, is that most Iraqis don’t want to have anything to do with them.
On the walls of Mosul University, one of Iraq’s oldest, warning signs are clearly displayed: “No Jordanians, No Palestinians.” Iraqis are clearly still upset that other Arabs were able to study in Iraq, effectively on former President Saddam Hussein’s payroll. Iraqis have had enough of seeing their own lives compromised for the benefit of Arabs from neighbouring countries. Saddam played the Palestinian card for all it was worth. Iraqis widely believe that the support, both vocal and financial, he gave to families of Palestinian suicide bombers was the reason behind the wrath of the “Zionists” in Israel and America.
Whether that is true or not is beside the point Iraqis saw other Arabs benefit from the Baath regime, while they were left to suffer. In contrast, the US spilled the blood of its soldiers to liberate them from Saddam’s tyranny. No matter how bad things are in Iraq, friends, colleagues and relatives assure me that with the pressure of living under the old regime gone, life is 100 percent better.
The illicit oil deals between Saddam’s regime and countries like Syria and Jordan, which were affectionately known as “memorandums of understanding,” irked the population. Even now, in a country that has the world’s second-largest reserves of crude oil, Iraqis must go begging to Syria, Turkey and Jordan for fuel imports to meet domestic consumption. It’s not an easy pill for the average Iraqi to swallow.
Stories are doing the rounds telling of how even Kuwaitis profited from Saddam after 1991. Iraqis are incensed that people from a country supposed to be their enemy were treated better by their leader than they were. “Foreigners had more rights in Iraq than Iraqis did under Saddam,” is not an uncommon complaint heard in Baghdad. There is a lot of animosity toward those countries that managed to gain from the former regime’s thirst for international recognition and popularity. In this light, the bombing of the Jordanian Embassy in August is not difficult to comprehend. It was even more tragic and disgusting an act when considering that it was mainly Iraqis who died in the blast.
Pan-Arab nationalists will find that their dreams have died in the dusty streets of Baghdad and in the narrow lanes of Fallujah. Iraqis just aren’t interested. They have enough problems of their own and want to get back on an even keel, to enjoy their country as they were always supposed to. In Jordan, King Abdullah champions his “Jordan First” campaign, struggling to get the message out to his people. Iraqis have learned their lessons Iraq comes first; there is no second place.
Mustafa Alrawi is managing editor of the Baghdad-based and Iraqi-staffed independent weekly Iraq Today (www.iraq-today.com), Iraq’s first English-language newspaper. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR
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Iraqi entrepreneurs to launch 24 hour tv channel ~ 9/17
Baghdad, Iraq Press, September 17, 2003 – A group of Iraqi entrepreneurs have launched a new television channel whose 24-hour broadcasts are to be carried the world over via satellite.
The Iraq Broadcasting Corporation or IBC is the first post-Saddam independent and private broadcasting company.
"The company aims especially at Iraqi viewers via programs to be beamed on both local and international levels," IBC's spokeswoman Shahla Hassan told Iraq Press.
"IBC does not associate itself with any particular party, group, religion or sect. It is open to all cultures and beliefs," she added.
Since the ouster of dictator Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis have been swamped by satellite television and a flood of newspapers.
Under Saddam Hussein, satellite dishes were banned and the few Internet cafes in the country were under the control of the security organs and users were not allowed to build their own e-mails.
Many Iraqis feel that the international media particularly Arab satellite television channels do not provide a balanced reporting of their post-war conditions.
"We shall try to bring happiness to Iraqi households after years of gloom and isolation under Saddam Hussein," Hassan added.
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Peaceful city shows another side to postwar Iraq ~ 9/19
...Residents of the agricultural hub city known as the "White Flower" for its traditionally low crime and easy-going ways say Kut is worlds apart from the country they see each night ablaze with attacks on their cut-price television sets.
"Life is absolutely normal here," Mohammed Idian, 35, said on Friday in his central shoe shop.
Residents ascribe the relative tranquillity to Kut's new-found prosperity as a trade hub and the fact that it is a mainly Shi'ite city where support for toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was never strong.
...Iraqi police chat in the shade, donkeys pull carts along the streets as black-robed women with shopping bags step into the road around satellite dishes that clog the sidewalk.
Outside the mosque that serves the city of about 300,000 people, men with towels on their heads to tame the afternoon sun kneel on rugs in the dusty street.
The cleric's inclusive message is fitting for the peaceful city about 180 km (110 miles) southeast of Baghdad. "Iraqis must choose an Iraqi government for all the people that can represent all different Iraqis from all different areas," Abdul Al Iesawi said over loudspeakers.
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For some Londoners, the war against Saddam wasn't just about politics. It was about the future of their homeland - and the chance to return to it. Johann Hari meets three young exiles who have just had their first taste of life in 'free' Iraq.
... "We were so scared that we might have been wrong. We kept thinking, 'What if we get there and everybody hates us for supporting the war?' But it was amazing: almost everyone we met was more hawkish than us. All over the country, even people who really hated the Americans agreed it would have been a disaster if the war had been called off." Yasser said: "One of the first things my uncle said to me was that his greatest fear in the run-up to the war was that the Americans would do what they did in 1991 and leave us to Saddam."
.. "These are going to be the seeds of democracy," Yasser explains. "Once you learn to argue against people instead of killing them as Saddam did, you're on your way. We explained to the university students that they could have different newspapers - and even have different opinions in the same newspapers - and it seemed totally surreal to them. They just couldn't understand it. But when they realised that it really was possible and nobody was going to punish them, they were so excited that they were just obsessed.
"They were in the middle of their exams and supposed to be studying, but they insisted on writing and photocopying a newsletter that they distributed everywhere. They wrote articles on amazing things they could find out about on the internet - philosophy and art and the difference between proportional representation and first-past-the-post! It was the best thing in my life, seeing that," Yasser says.
...Sama explains: "We took a group of university students to a workshop arranged by a Washington-based organisation about how to set up NGOs [non-governmental organisations]. To you or me it would seem incredibly basic, but to them it was a revelation. They hadn't understood that you could set up your own organisation, without any orders or permission from anyone. They thought societies and charities were something the state did to you, something secretive and conspiratorial, not something people create for themselves. It was beautiful to see this happening."
The most biting disappointment facing the IPO members, however, has been the fact that when Saddam's vast prisons were opened, none of the hundreds of thousands of missing people emerged alive. Abtehale's grandmother suffered a second stroke when it became obvious to her a week after the liberation that her missing son, husband and nephew were not going to appear, traumatised but alive. Yasser's mother still refers to her missing brother and sister as "imprisoned". He says: "I try to tell her that there are no more prisons to be opened up, that they're gone and she has to grieve. But she can't bear to hear it."
Tens of thousands of Iraqis are making a weekly pilgrimage to Kadhimiya, where a human rights centre has been set up to log on computer the names of all the hundreds of thousands of people executed by the regime. They have six million files to work through, seized when the regime fell. They have processed two hundred thousand so far. Abtehale went there searching for her grandfather and uncle. So far, they seem to have vanished without record into Saddam's vast torture machine.
...Yasser says quietly: "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." Even now, people are only just coming to terms with the massive crimes that have been committed against them. Sama talked to a group at a university about her family's experiences. Afterwards, a girl approached her and whispered: "You were deported? I have never told anyone this before, but my uncle was deported too." Sama explained that more than two million people had been deported by the Baathists, and there was no shame in it. The girl had had no idea.
...Yet hope was restored by their trip to Northern Iraq. "It was like going into a different world," Sama says, her eyes welling up. "It's beautiful. It looks like part of Europe. It's totally free and efficient and secure and democratic. It was so encouraging, because at the end of [the first] Gulf War it was just like the rest of Iraq. We could make progress like that in the next decade. We brought one of my cousins with us, and he cried and said: 'Is this my country? Is this really part of Iraq?'"
There is a terrible fear among many Iraqis that they will not be able to match the Kurds' achievement if they are abandoned by the Americans once again. "The memories of 1991 are so vivid," says Sama. "People still fear that somehow the Americans will abandon us and Saddam will claw his way back from the grave. They say, 'It happened in 1991, it could happen again.' That's one crucial reason why people are reluctant to cooperate with the coalition." She adds: "I find it absolutely incredible that the anti-war people are now calling for the coalition to leave straight away. Nobody in Iraq wants that. The opinion polls show it's just 13 per cent. Don't they care about the Iraqi people and what they want at all? This isn't a game. This isn't about poking a stick at George Bush. This is our lives."
As for those who blame every problem in Iraq on the legacy of sanctions, Sama has little time for them. "Iraqis aren't stupid," she says. "They know that Northern Iraq was under sanctions, too, and none of the terrible things that happened under Saddam, like dying babies, went on there. Most people call them 'Saddam's sanctions'. The real issue was Saddam's tyranny, and the way he used sanctions like he used everything else to strengthen his rule."
Swinging her legs, happy and relaxed like I have never seen her before, Sama says: "If we hadn't been to Iraq, we'd be really depressed right now. I came back, saw the news and thought, 'Are they talking about the same Iraq?'" Is this, I wonder, because the media can only deal with Arabs as victims or terrorists? The IPO members don't think so. Rather, Yasser says, there are several reasons why the reporting from Iraq is stressing the negative over the positive. "First, buildings being bombed is a much better story than the formation of the Baghdad city council to clear up the rubbish and sort out the sewers. Angry Iraqis make a better story than hopeful Iraqis."
"Second, a lot of the media was openly anti-war, so now that there are hundreds of thousands of mass graves being opened up and all the evidence shows that the Iraqis supported [the war], the media are latching on to the few things, like the looting and, of course, the weapons issue - that was always a red herring - that seem to vindicate their position. And third - I know this sounds like a petty point, but it's very important - a lot of journalists are using the same guides and translators that they used before the war, because they know them. They don't seem to realise that those people were carefully selected by the regime because of their loyalty to Saddam's line. So most journalists are getting a totally distorted picture."
..Yasser adds: "There's something I'd like to say to your readers. People who really care about Iraqis should join us in fighting for democracy in Iraq and for the debts accumulated by Saddam to be cancelled. Join Jubilee Iraq [a group campaigning against Saddam's debt, contactable at www.jubileeiraq.org]. Argue for the Governing Council to be strengthened. Support us. Don't spend your time hoping that Iraq fails just so you feel better about opposing the war."
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Anyone who still trusts the mainstream press for war news is not being vigilant, and is selling out our troops and the free world.
