1 Ok so obviously the left wing advocate has not seen it.

1 A bit off subject. If sectarian violence between the Sunnies and Shiites escalates in Iraq and the Sunni minority is getting their asses whipped will the Jordanians and Saudis come to their aid? Wouldn't it be nice if the Sunnis and Shiites in the middle east went at it big time. Interesting scenario. Al Queda doesn't get along with the Shiites. Therefore we would have the Jordanians, Saudias, Al Queda and Iraqi Sunnis fighting with the Iraqi Shiites and Iranian Shiites. Syria? Don't know what they stand for. They probably don't either. Perhaps we are doing the wrong thing by attempting to stop sectarian violence in Iraq. Let the Shiites get their revenge and set back and watch the fun. Muslims killing muslims. What's wrong with that?

2 Well rooster for one thing they would probably be against the Kurds. Letting Saudi Arabia in might help some Sunnis against the terrorists and Shia terrorists.  Saudi would eliminate the sunni terrorists becuase they can't be controlled and  view Saudi Arabia as a puppet regime. But I don't think they have any love for the Kurds  and would try to domintate them and take some of the oil they have back. I'm not sure that's a very good idea.  We might lose a lot fo the progress that's been made in the north. 

3 from one proud papa to another - congrats r.s.

4 No it's not Rusty's kid.  Rusty Shacleford is a handle. But I thought it was cool.

5 The Kurds may be victims in this. I don't really trust any middle east types. They are muslims. I do know the Saudis and Jordanians will not stand by and let their Sunni brothers get slaughtered. The real danger is the Saudis and Al Queda coming together for a common cause. If the Sunnis start losing a religious war the Saudis are sure to supply money and volunteers to the Iraqi Sunnis. From there who knows? What will Iran do? Probably the same. I don't think we can stop what is going to happen. We can put a soldier on every corner in Bagdad and it won't make any difference. These people hate each other more than they hate us. Let them kill each other. While they are busy doing that they are not killing us.

6 The term "letting the Saudis in". Hummm! The Saudis will do as they please. All they have to do is talk about oil.

7 Agreed, but they won't at if we can eliminate the need for them to act as they see it.

8 Why is it all we. (Americans) And I still think Saudi, Jordanian interference with the Shiite menence from Iraq and Iran would be fun, helpful and may very well put an end to terrorist involvement. They lop off heads quickly and know of value of it. We must listen to complaints about the horrible treatment of baby murderers at Abu Ghraib.

1 Deal with reality for a change -

Saddam Hussein's apologists sound a lot like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield.  Hussein was not treated with proper respect in the moments before the Iraqis stretched his neck.
 
This s how the great faghib (Chief) showed the people of Iraq respect:
 
Unspeakable Acts: Mass Murder
"Now, 12 years later, Mr. Shaati cannot remember if the
women and children beside him screamed as the bullets
hit, or whether the men in the hole moaned as they died.
He only recalls a moment of hollow silence when the
soldiers stopped shooting. Then came the throaty rumble
of a backhoe and the thud of wet earth dropping on
bodies. He survived but saw hundreds of other innocents
buried in another of Saddam Hussein's anonymous mass
graves."
-- The New York Times, June 2, 2003
"The soldiers took them out in groups of 100 to 150
people. When his time came, Mr. Shaati was ordered to
remove his T-shirt and rip it into strips that were tied
over his eyes and around his hands. The prisoners were
herded onto a bus, everyone holding on with their teeth
to the shirt of the person in front of them. When they
arrived at a field - Mr. Shaati is still not sure where
- their grave had already been prepared. 'They led us
down an incline into a wide long hole,' he said. 'It was
quiet. No one fell or even cried. I was positioned very
close to the corner, maybe second or third from the
wall. Then they started shooting. Somehow I wasn't hit.
By then, I guess, they didn't go to the trouble of
shooting all of us.' After the grave was covered, Mr.
Shaati, alive but choking on dirt, wormed his way out of
the ditch. He punched through the earthen blanket with
his head, and worked himself free of the cloth straps.
Gulping the cold night air, he knew that all his
soldierly ideas about honor and country counted for
nothing."
-- The New York Times, June 2, 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
------
"[J]ust to see the landscape of bones mixed with
clothing, skulls strewn in the splay of human detritus
and other remains is chilling. At first, it just seems
like hundreds of bundles of clothes have been laid out
on the dikes and roads that cut through the marshes
here.
"Then the traces of human anatomy appear. A femur from a
leg, a humerus from an arm, a shard of pelvis, and skull
peeking out from a gray blanket that someone assembling
remains laid down. The bundles reveal themselves as the
former repositories of living human flesh, before the
gunfire sent them on their journey into the marsh.
"'It's a kind of hell out there,' said Mr. Nasir, who no
longer plants onions where so many bodies have been
desecrated. 'We have always known that there were people
here, but we couldn't take them,' he said. 'We knew our
Muslim brothers were not buried properly, but we
couldn't say a word.'"
-- The New York Times, May 14, 2003
"'This is my brother,' declared Munther Taffuk after
examining the freshly exhumed corpse, relieved to a
point that he had found his missing sibling after a
two-year search. Munther then moved in for a closer
look. 'My God,' he screamed. 'They took out his eyes.'
He then pulled two matted pieces of cotton wool from the
eye sockets of his little brother's skull and wept.
"His sister, Manal, cried openly as she said her younger
brother, Muthfer, simply vanished without trace two
years ago. 'My God, look what they did. This is my
brother, he did nothing wrong.'"
-- Times of Oman, April 22, 2003
"The skeletal remains on display Monday showed signs of
physical trauma. Some still had faded bandages tied
around the eye sockets and black cloth binding the feet.
Several skulls had large holes on one side or were
crushed in the back. In each open wooden coffin, the
bones were carefully wrapped in white cloth, surrounded
by scraps of hair, bits of teeth and bones. The visible
evidence of their demise drove scores of black-clad
women to wailing and men to weep."
-- Associated Press, May 12, 2003
"The grave was no more than a long trench, with dirt
shoveled over the men executed for their role in the
uprising here in 1999 after the killing of a prominent
Shiite cleric, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, said relatives
who viewed the remains today.
"On March 25, 1999, a shepherd in the desert about 45
miles north of Basra saw men being brought by Baath
Party trucks to an open clearing, said Ali Hassan, 20.
The shepherd said he saw a backhoe dig a long trench and
the men, blindfolded, were lined up in front of the
ditch. Then they were shot."
-- The New York Times, May 12, 2003
"In May 1991, having served in the Persian Gulf War with
the Marines, I volunteered for further duty in Provide
Comfort -- a joint military operation designed to assist
in the relocation of Kurdish refugees into northern
Iraq. Assigned to the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, I
was flown to the city of Zakho, where the unit was
establishing its headquarters in and around an abandoned
Iraqi divisional headquarters building....
"As the Marines began digging defensive positions and
putting up tents, a grisly discovery was made. Heavy
equipment had unearthed myriad body parts; hands, arms,
legs, etc., were uncovered in what was determined to
have been a mass grave. Most telling among this evidence
of inhumanity was an infant's sandal.
"The body parts were reburied immediately after their
discovery, but for many days the stench of rotting flesh
lingered in the air until all the remains were located
and reburied. It was later learned from the Kurds that
about 70 of their tribesmen had been taken into this
Iraqi divisional HQ and that none had come out alive.
The victims were brutally tortured and executed, their
remains then thrown into a common grave."
-- James Zumwalt, op-ed in The Washington Post, April
30, 2003
"Near Kirkuk, U.S. military forces discovered about
1,500 unmarked graves last week near a military base and
industrial park. Officials believe they are the remains
of victims of Saddam's repression of ethnic minorities,
including Iraqi Kurds. Tens of thousands of Kurdish men
disappeared under Saddam and were killed, according to
human rights groups."
"Beth Ann Toupin, an Iraq specialist with Amnesty
International, said it is still early to know the
magnitude of rights abuses under Saddam. 'There's
probably much more to be found,' she said, noting that
hidden prisons may be discovered. 'And what's new to us
is that now people care.'"
-- The Washington Times, April 23, 2003
"The Baath regime has gone and now we can talk freely
with you. They [the corpses] are all political. Ten to
15 bodies would arrive at a time from the Abu Ghraib
prison and we would bury them here. The last corpse
interred was number 993."
-- Mohymeed Aswad, manager of Baghdad cemetery, Agence
France-Presse, April 21, 2003
"The civilians were hanged. Sometimes a soldier would
come through and they were all shot. I could distinguish
them by their uniforms. This grave belongs to a woman.
She was hanged. There are another five cemeteries in
Baghdad with secret gravesites so in this city alone
there are about 6,000 (political) corpses."
-- Gravedigger at a Baghdad cemetery, Agence
France-Presse, April 21, 2003
"I have spoken to a prison officer who worked there. He
had no idea how many people were killed in that prison
but he said it must have been thousands. In one corner
of that prison outside the walls of an inner secure area
we found relatives grieving over an open grave where
they had found a number of bodies. Bodies who have had
their hands tied behind their backs - they had been shot
in the head.
"It is our understanding that these people had been
rounded up for the simple crime of having a satellite
mobile telephone. As such they were suspected of being
American spies. They were shot in the dying days of the
regime even though those who shot them must have known
that the end was up."
-- Tim Rogers, ITV News (UK), reporting from Baghdad on
bodies found in a prison run by the Iraqi Ministry of
Social Affairs, April 22, 2003
"In 2000, Mr Abu Sakkar [a clandestine government agent]
was caught "under-reporting" activities in the mosques
and sent for two months to Tourist Island on the Tigris
river, south of Baghdad, to receive a crude brand of
re-education.
"'Three of my fellow Shias were shot in front of me,' he
said. When he returned to his work with the police
campaign to put down Shia opponents and rebels, he
witnessed more savagery. 'One day I walked into the
station and the room of the interrogation office was
wide open. I saw Captain Abbass, one of our men, beating
a man on the floor. I recognised him as a Shia religious
student. He beat the man in the head and I noticed and
pointed out to the captain that the student was already
dead. He just said that he wanted to punish him more and
that his hand was the "hand of god".'"
-- The Daily Telegraph (London), April 23, 2003
"I saw thousands killed and buried in mass graves. Some
were lined up and machine- gunned before being covered
with sand. Others were just buried alive. Saddam had a
programme of telling villagers (Kurds) they were being
relocated south. We would take trucks that would
normally hold 12 to 15 people and put in 200 with no
water or ventilation. Many would die on the way.
Survivors were driven to Al Anbar or Tharthar and buried
alive in vast holes dug in the ground. I saw thousands
of people - men, women and children - die this way."
-- Defecting colonel in Iraqi internal security service,
Evening Standard (London), April 17, 2003
"At least three massacres on Saddam City's streets have
occurred in the last 10 years, including 700 people
gunned down during a 1998 Shiite demonstration, said
Muhammad Qadim Saadoun, a former air force helicopter
pilot whose 40-day political imprisonment ended last
week with the U.S. entry into Baghdad.
"He said he was imprisoned repeatedly for refusing to
fire on his fellow Shiites, who form the majority of the
population but had long been subservient to Mr.
Hussein's Sunni-dominated secular government.
"'You cannot imagine the horrible things they did to
us,' Mr. Saadoun said. He was tortured while hanging
upside down by his feet and pistol-whipped so hard he
has lost some of his memory."
-- The Dallas Morning News, April 17, 2003
"Kubba's money insulated his family from mayhem, but it
did not shield him from witnessing the almost casual
slaughter of his people. Last week he recalled a 'scene
that haunts me still.' Kubba was driving his Mercedes
through Basra's Saad Square when he came upon some 600
men who had been detained while police checked their
IDs. According to Kubba, 'Chemical Ali' Hassan al-Majid,
Saddam's half brother and the tyrant of southern Iraq,
stopped and inquired, 'No IDs? Just shoot them all.'
Kubba watched as 'they shot over 600 people in front of
me.'"
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003
"When they came closer, I could see in the bus men,
women and children with blindfolds over their eyes. I
was very afraid and hid in a hole. It was mostly men.
There were about eight children and ten women. They
(Ba'ath Party forces) took them off the bus and led them
over to the hole in groups. They sat or knelt and then
they began to shoot them from very close, many shots.
Some were just pushed in and then covered up with earth.
There was no escape, it was done very quickly.
"I could not tell this secret because I knew it was
dangerous knowledge that I should not hold, dangerous
knowledge. But if the British Army want me to show them
I will dig up the bodies myself, because I know they are
there. I can never forget."
-- Satar Al Khalid, a Bedouin, recalls an incident he
saw near Ramallah, Iraq, in 1998, Daily Mail (London),
April 14, 2003
"'Prisoners were taken to watch executions; anyone who
cried was executed, too. Our hands were tied like this.
First the left hand and then the foot. Then a black hood
on my head, then they applied electricity."
"They had a game: They made people drink gasoline, then
put them out in open ground and fire guns at them."
-- Abdallah Ahmed, survivor of Abu GhraibPrison, on CBS
Evening News, April 14, 2003
"Two men yesterday gave eyewitness accounts of the
execution last Saturday of a commander of the Iraqi 29th
brigade after he recommended retreating from Sheykhan, a
frontline town that fell to US and Kurdish forces at the
weekend.
"'He was made to stand in a ditch for half an hour or so
and then he was shot,' said Salah Mehdi Taleb. 'The man
who shot him was Mahmoud Taher, who also gave us
political education.'"
-- The Financial Times (London), April 10, 2003
Pervasive Fear
"'I am one of millions who have been tortured,' said
33-year-old Ali Khadem Al Essery, whose knuckles were
smashed with a club while he was being interrogated in
1994. Everyone here knows someone who was tortured, and
many victims see a bleak future without a measure of
justice exacted on the torturers."
-- Newsday, April 21, 2003
"A chef at Baghdad's exclusive Hunting Club recalls a
wedding party that Uday crashed in the late 1990s. After
Uday left the hall, the bride, a beautiful woman from a
prominent family, went missing. 'The bodyguards closed
all the doors, didn't let anybody out,' the chef
remembers. 'Women were yelling and crying, "What
happened to her?"' The groom knew. 'He took a pistol and
shot himself,' says the chef, placing his forefinger
under his chin.
"Last October another bride, 18, was dragged, resisting,
into a guardhouse on one of Uday's properties, according
to a maid who worked there. The maid says she saw a
guard rip off the woman's white wedding dress and lock
her, crying, in a bathroom. After Uday arrived, the maid
heard screaming. Later she was called to clean up. The
body of the woman was carried out in a military blanket,
she said. There were acid burns on her left shoulder and
the left side of her face. The maid found bloodstains on
Uday's mattress and clumps of black hair and peeled
flesh in the bedroom. A guard told her, "Don't say
anything about what you see, or you and your family will
be finished."
-- Time, May 25, 2003
"At Baghdad's teeming Al-Mutanabi book market, Ali
al-Saadi held up a gilded Islamist book and recalled the
one he said led to his torture in one of Saddam
Hussein's military prisons. 'When I was a literature
student in 1982, intelligence officers found a book by
Mohammed Sadeq Sadr in my house,' said Saadi of the
Shiite ayatollah whose 1999 murder was widely attributed
to Saddam's Sunni-majority regime. 'They accused me of
organizing a political group. I spent three years in
jail and suffered a lot,' he said, showing scars on his
wrists from prison chains and gaps where he said three
teeth had been pulled out with pliers. Saadi was just
one of many writers and thinkers at the weekly market
who celebrated being able to buy and sell books that
were illegal under the old regime."
-- Agence France-Presse, May 9, 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
"'The writers who praised Saddam would get treated well.
The members of the Baath party were always watching the
others. There were always security members at my plays
and sometimes they (the plays) were not allowed,' said
[Aziz Abdul] Sahib. Sahib said he had been selling his
writings at a public market once a week 'just so I could
eat.'"
-- Agence France-Presse, April 28, 2003
"Uday's favourite punishment was the medieval falaqa, a
rod with clamps that go around the ankles so that the
offender, feet in the air, can be hit on the bare soles
with a stick. A top official in radio and TV says he
received so many beatings for trivial mistakes like
being late for meetings or making grammatical errors on
his broadcasts that Uday ordered him to carry a falaqa
in his car. Uday also had an iron maiden that he used to
torture Iraqi athletes whose performance disappointed
him.
-- Time, May 25, 2003
"Uday's physical ailments seemed to heighten his
sadistic tendencies. According to his chief bodyguard,
when Uday learned that one of his close comrades, who
knew of his many misdeeds, was planning to leave Iraq,
he invited him to his 37th-birthday party and had him
arrested. An eyewitness at the prison where the man was
held says members of the Fedayeen grabbed his tongue
with pliers and sliced it off with a scalpel so he could
not talk. A maid who cleaned one of Uday's houses says
she once saw him lop off the ear of one of his guards
and then use a welder's torch on his face."
-- Time, May 25, 2003
"Saboowalla said he was imprisoned because he spoke his
mind to fellow travelers fleeing Baghdad after Saddam's
1990 invasion of Kuwait. He said he'd remarked that if
talks with the United Nations did not work, force would
be used against Saddam. '...someone overheard me. The
police came the same day and asked why I spoke against
Saddam,' said Saboowalla. 'I told them it was just
normal conversation and I didn't mean it.'
"An Iraqi court sentenced him to 20 years for
'insulting' Saddam, who was then Iraq's president. He
said the police testified that he had advocated
'shooting and killing Saddam.' The years in jail have
made him watch his words. He refused to talk about how
he was treated in jail. But his younger brother... said
Saboowalla had spoken of being placed in solitary
confinement for weeks and 'not seeing the sun' for 27
months."
-- Report on the return to India of Annis Mohammed
Saboowalla, who had been imprisoned in Iraq since 1991,
Associated Press, April 25, 2003
"Poet Imad Kadhum...said he had been terrified that
Baath members would inform on him and that several
friends were arrested for offending Saddam, who was
himself credited with penning several self-aggrandizing
novels.
"'All the writers here refused Saddam Hussein and many
were in trouble if we did not praise Saddam in our
poetry or stories,' he said. 'We never accepted that we
were criminals. If our work was disliked by Saddam or
(eldest son) Uday, then we would be placed in jail.'
"'A lot of (writers) may have been killed, and to this
day we don't know what has happened to them,' Kadhum
said."
-- Agence France-Presse, April 28, 2003
"A slightly broader picture of what happened has emerged
from the chief gravedigger, just 21 years old. He is
Muhammad Muslim Muhammad and he said he began digging
graves here when he was 14 to fulfill his military
service.
"He said he received the bodies every Wednesday at about
11 a.m., after the weekly hangings at around 5 a.m.
There were never fewer than nine bodies to bury. During
one especially bad time in 2001, he said, the numbers
rose. One day he buried 18 people. He said he had never
told anyone the details of his job. 'I didn't open my
mouth, or I would have ended up with these poor people
here,' he said."
-- Report on Al Qarah Cemetery, The New York Times,
April 25, 2003
"'I am still afraid,' he murmured. 'Saddam is alive and
so are all those closest to him. We don't know if one
day the regime will come back. Those who did this to me
are still around, We just don't know their faces. They
just took off their uniforms and went home. They are
still out there and we are still afraid.'"
-- Mutilation victim quoted in The Sunday Times
(London), April 20, 2003
"Former prisoners of ousted president Saddam Hussein's
government are everywhere in Basra, standing on street
corners waiting for water, rummaging through papers in
the headquarters of the once feared secret police,
sitting quietly at home on a hot afternoon. These are
the tortures they describe, and more: a prisoner forced
to sit on a heated metal stove, electric shocks applied
to genitals, a small blade used to slash a prisoner's
back. Even doctors became torturers; they cut off army
deserters' ears. Servants of the system fell victim to
it, too: police officers and prison guards arrested,
tortured, then sent back to work. Torture was considered
so routine that many former prisoners shrugged at first
when asked about it. 'Of course, they tortured me.
Beating people here is something regular,' said Maithem
Naji."
-- The Washington Post, April 19, 2003
"The picture that emerged of the intelligence service
here was of a kind of sadistic shakedown operation,
where agents took prisoners to satisfy their masters but
extracted money to satisfy themselves.
"Other men returning here said the interrogators had
gone even further, demanding sex with female relatives
when no money could be paid. In most cases, the
prisoners said, bribes were paid, women were offered,
but the prisoner remained in jail.
"'My family paid them everything we had, $25,000, and
still they did not release me,' Mr. Masawi said."
-- The New York Times, April 21, 2003
"Tens of thousands of security files on Iraqis have been
found in a huge underground vault beneath the
headquarters of Saddam Hussein's most feared secret
police agency, the legacy of a Soviet-style domestic
spying system that controlled everything from job
assignments to whether a person would live or die.
"The files include the mundane -- a man denied the right
to leave the country because he refused a job transfer
-- and the chilling -- a 19-year-old high school student
hanged because he admitted he was the leader of a cell
of a banned political party.
"'By God, this is everyone in Iraq,' translator George
Yousef muttered as he entered the records vault, about
twice the size of a basketball court, discovered two
days ago by U.S. marines and visited by a journalist
Sunday."
-- Knight-Ridder Newspapers, April 21, 2003
"Maithan Al Naji had a visit from a United Nations
relief team. Anwar Abdul Al Razaq got sick. Zuhair H.
Jawa Kubba had American dollars in his pocket. Jawad
Abdul Al Naby smuggled some sheep. Because these things
happened, these men were beaten with steel rods, had
electrodes placed on their genitals, were hung from
their arms until their shoulders were dislocated, were
suspended by their ankles over the stone floor of a cell
while their torturers whipped them with electric cables
and pulverized their knuckles with wooden clubs."
-- Newsday, April 21, 2003
"'I went to kill one person, but suddenly I saw he had
guards with him, so I killed four or five of his
guards,' Ali recalled. 'After that, we cut off his head
and we put it in a bag and we brought it to Baghdad from
Karbala at 4 a.m. We put it in front of Uday's office.
He asked us to bring his head.'"
-- The Washington Post, April 22, 2003
"'As I began to cut Uday's hair, this man [Uday's press
secretary] was praying as they [Uday's bodyguards]
extracted his teeth with pliers. But my hands didn't
shake. I was always very careful. I knew a small mistake
would be the end of me.'"
-- Marwan Ali, Uday Hussein's barber, Daily Mail
(London), April 22, 2003
"Ali belonged to Saddam's Fedayeen, a security force led
by Hussein's elder son, Uday. For the better part of a
decade, he recalled, he assassinated opposition figures,
broke the backs of those accused of lying to the
government and chopped off tongues, fingers, hands and
once even a head.
"'It didn't matter if we felt he was guilty or not
guilty. We had to do it,' he explained. 'These people
were against Saddam Hussein. If we got orders to punish
him, we would go and do it. If Uday said to cut off his
tongue, we would do it. Or his hands or fingers or his
head. Anything. We would do it.'"
"'I just followed orders,'" he said.
-- The Washington Post, April 22, 2003
"Iraq became one of the few nations that legally
sanctioned the use of torture in pre-trial
investigations, and as a punitive measure. The death
sentence was prescribed for a large variety of offenses
including usurpation of public money, corruption,
insulting the presidency, and treason -- loosely
defined. Law became whimsical and contingent on the will
of the party and president. Even foreign investments
were dependent on the good will of the ruling elite,
often tapping into a network of businessmen sanctioned
and protected by a Saddam family clique."
-- Khaled Abou El Fadl, op-ed in the Wall Street
Journal, April 21, 2003
"I was sitting outside my father's house in a village
near Tikrit on Friday when two carloads of fedayeen
stopped. They got out and began to beat me and accuse me
of being a saboteur. Then they shot me in the leg. They
took me to the police station and kept me for three
nights, saying they would kill me. Then yesterday they
just disappeared. And at 7am this morning (Monday) an
American Marine came and let me out of my cell. I feel
very lucky."
-- Khalid Jauhr, an Iraqi Kurd, in the Daily Mail
(London), April 15, 2003
"'I am from the city of Kirkuk and for the last ten
years I have been unable to return to my home there
because of Saddam. Seven of my relatives were executed
there by his security police when this war started. But
God willing and with the help of Britain and the United
States I can go back home now and live in peace.'"
-- Prshing Mohamed, Iraqi Kurd in Northern Iraq, in the
Daily Mail (London), April 10, 2003
"Ahmed [writer Ahmed Shawkut] went to prison again in
1997. This time, it was his second collection of short
stories that did him in. The government had approved the
book, but Ahmed sneaked into one of the stories a poorly
veiled allegory criticizing Hussein.
"The Mukhabarat was not amused. Agents collected the
entire 1,000-copy print run from the Mosul bazaar, piled
the books on the ground and ordered Ahmed to torch them.
After that, all he needed to do to make things right for
the regime was to serve nine months of solitary
confinement in a rat-infested cell."
-- San Francisco Chronicle, April 2, 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
"U.S. soldiers with tanks and armoured vehicles took
over the sprawling compound of Baghdad's military
intelligence headquarters on Friday after local people
thronged the compound searching for missing relatives.
"Reuters correspondent Khaled Yacoub Oweis said he heard
one explosion. It was not clear what caused it. Earlier,
Iraqi civilians had been digging feverishly, saying they
believed relatives were trapped in underground dungeons
used by Saddam Hussein's feared security apparatus."
-- Reuters, April 11, 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
"...ecret police thugs brutalized even senior
officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them
in line (one such official has long been missing all his
fingernails). One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a
colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed
by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to
write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam
Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no
front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers
and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always
remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss."
-- Eason Jordan, CNN chief news executive, in The New
York Times, April 11, 2003
"U.S. soldiers with tanks and armoured vehicles took
over the sprawling compound of Baghdad's military
intelligence headquarters on Friday after local people
thronged the compound searching for missing relatives.
"Reuters correspondent Khaled Yacoub Oweis said he heard
one explosion. It was not clear what caused it. Earlier,
Iraqi civilians had been digging feverishly, saying they
believed relatives were trapped in underground dungeons
used by Saddam Hussein's feared security apparatus."
-- Reuters, April 11, 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
"A burly 39-year-old man named Qifa, assigned by Mr.
Hussein's Information Ministry to keep watch on an
American reporter, paused at midmorning, outside the
inferno that had been the headquarters of Iraq's
National Olympic Committee, to ask the reporter to grip
his hand. The building, used to torture and kill
opponents of Mr. Hussein, had been one of the most
widely feared places in Iraq.
"'Touch me, touch me, tell me that this is real, tell me
that the nightmare is really over,' the man said, tears
running down his face."
-- New York Times, April 4, 2003
"One middle-aged man held up a huge portrait of Saddam
and used his shoe to beat the face of the Iraqi leader,
a particular insult. 'This man has killed 2 million of
us,' he yelled as bystanders milled around approvingly.
"The looters roamed unhindered through police stations,
government ministries and other buildings. A favorite
spot was the Al-Sinaa sports complex that held thousands
of new athletic shoes and was alleged to be the site of
an Iraqi torture chamber."
-- Orlando Sentinel, April 10, 2003
Unspeakable Acts: Torture
"She spent one year being moved from prison to torture
center to prison and back. Her tormenters would hang her
from a hook in the ceiling by her arms, which were bound
behind her back. Sometimes they added electric shocks.
Sometimes they beat her on the soles of her feet until
they were engorged with blood and her toenails fell off.
She was 25.
"'I was lucky that I became like a dead body,' she said.
'I didn't know what was going on around me. There was no
water, no bathroom. The only food was two big pots they
brought in, one with dirty rice and one of soup. You had
to fight for it. If you were strong and healthy, you'd
get food. If you were weak, you'd wait.'
"After the torture came the sham trial, then a sentence
to spend her life at Rashad women's prison, a maze of
unheated cells where the sewage would float from the one
toilet down the corridors and seep onto the women's
rough mattresses."
-- The New York Times, June 2, 2003
"First they broke his right arm with a pipe. Then they
punctured his right eardrum with a skewer. And then they
tried to break his right leg with a bat. But when the
X-rays that Uday Hussein demanded as proof of their
efficiency showed in fact they had not broken Tariq
Abdul Whab's leg, his captors took him back to prison
where someone smashed his right leg with such ferocity
that his toe hit his kneecap. Mr. Whab received all this
treatment simply because Uday thought the sports
television reporter was being disloyal to him by talking
to soccer players he didn't like."
-- The Vancouver Sun, May 3, 2003
"...Turkish officials were told how Turkomans and Kurds
were tortured together by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi police
at the notorious security headquarters of Kirkuk. 'I was
taken into custody and forced to sit on my knees for six
days in a cell one meter by one meter along with a
Kurdish prisoner,' a Turkoman man told the group. The
man, who asked not to be named, said, 'Even this shows
how we and the Kurds suffered the same fate in this
city.'"
-- Turkish Daily News, April 29, 2003
"As part of the prison routine, Issa was tortured daily,
sometimes twice a day. Battery acid was spilled on his
feet, which are now deformed. With his hands bound
behind his back, he was hanged by his wrists from the
ceiling until his shoulders dislocated; he still cannot
lift his hands above his head. The interrogators' goal:
'They just wanted me to say I was plotting against the
Baath Party, so they could take me and execute me. If
they got a confession, they would get 100,000 dinars
[roughly $40].'"
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003
"Another former prisoner from Saddam City, Hussein Ali,
said he was arrested for participating in the 1998
protest and imprisoned until late last year. During
torture sessions, his fingernails were yanked off his
fingers. He described his cell as 'a big hole with lots
of insects and worms.'"
-- The Dallas Morning News, April 17, 2003
"In the night, they took me again to the room, and they
made my body wet with water. I was naked," he recalls,
and now is when he searches with his eyes for that spot.
To cushion his words: They used clamps to connect
electrical wire to his genitals and then they sent a
current running through him.
"'My whole body shook,' he says. 'I was shouting to
them, "I will sign anything! Just stop this!" I was
shaking, shaking. I shook until I passed out.'
'The guards shocked him in the same way every night for
two weeks. When they feared he would die, they gave him
a week off. Then back to the shocking. Always they beat
him, sometimes on his back, sometimes on his legs and
arms, often on the soles of his feet until they bled.
The pattern continued for six months."
-- The Baltimore Sun, April 20, 2003
"<B>'Me.' 'Me.' 'Me,</B>' they murmured in response to the
question: Whose father, brother, son had been executed
by Saddam Hussein's government. Eleven hands in all,
raised in the stagnant air inside the low mud-brick
house of Sheik Kathem Al Wafi, signalling the death toll
here.
"These men and their sheik, the elders of the Al Wafi
tribe, are people of the Madan, the marsh Arabs who for
five millennia lived in a vast area of wetlands that
began about 50 miles north of Basra - lived, that is,
until 1988, when Hussein's government began a systematic
campaign of oppression, execution and internal exile
against them."
-- Newsday, 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
"'They took my brother in 1998,' said Sabah Al Wafi, 24,
a relative of the sheik, 'and they executed him. I was
arrested later. I had a letter from a Kuwaiti prisoner
of war'-one of 605 Kuwaitis still recorded as missing
from the 1991 Gulf War - 'and they found it when they
searched my house. They tortured me with electricity.
They made me sit on hot metal plates. They used to drink
and laugh as they tortured me.'"
-- Newsday, April 14, 2003
"The ordeal of one...victim of the secret police, a
woman identified only as Laila, is recounted in A Book
of Cruelty - An Attempt to Spoil What Has Remained of
Your Lives, by Amer Badr Hassoun. According to Hassoun's
account, the woman, a young law professor, was taken
into custody for refusing to join the Baath Party. She
was transferred from a Baghdad prison to a series of
prisons in the north before ending up at the Baghdad
security directorate. One of her torturers there was a
former student who kicked her and administered electric
shocks before killing a 13-year-old boy who was also a
prisoner. During one torture session, she passed out and
was taken to the adjoining Security Hospital and
subsequently to the nearby al-Kindi Hospital. She was
threatened with execution if she spoke of her torture to
doctors or nurses. When a doctor asked her if she had
been tortured, she responded with silence.
"She was later tried by a judge named Awwad al-Bandar on
the charge of not joining the Baath Party. After being
refused permission to represent herself, she was
convicted and given a life sentence. She was ultimately
released during one of Hussein's amnesty declarations
and later told her story to Hassoun. Her current
whereabouts are unclear."
-- Knight-Ridder Newspapers, April 14, 2003
"The male warders made her wear pants, an offense to
Shiites' strict female dress codes; without a belt they
often fell down. The low point of every day was the
daily torture session; the high point, gruel in a bowl,
the prisoners' only meal. Even that was denied her if "I
made some mistake." Hashmia's jailers scored her back
with a hot poker, beat the soles of her feet with
sticks, made her pull up her baggy pants and whipped her
legs. The sexual humiliation may have been even worse
than the pain, but that was serious. 'They slapped me so
hard that my neck hurts from it even now.' The torturers
wanted her to confess to plotting against the Baathist
regime, but she knew that would mean a death sentence."
-- Newsweek on line, April 12, 2003
"For five years Hashim, a teacher of English at a local
secondary school, was held in an Iraqi prison and
tortured. His scarred arms bore witness to how, he said,
he was strung from the ceiling and beaten by members of
the Iraqi secret services.
"'I had refused to join the party. They hit me a great
deal and I was made to eat my meals like a dog with my
hands tied behind my back. But I knew I could never join
the Baath Party. How could I and keep my conscience
clean?' he said.
"'If you want to stay out of trouble you have to join,
and then you could be promoted in the party from the
street level to representing the city. But then take
part in beatings and the burning of property of the
people they don't like. I was one of the people they
didn't like.'"
-- The Irish Times, April 8, 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
"...in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was
abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to
electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police
headquarters because he refused to confirm the
government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central
Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been
in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world
about the torture of one of its employees would almost
certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and
co-workers at grave risk."
-- Eason Jordan, CNN chief news executive, in The New
York Times, April 11, 2003
Unspeakable Acts: Mutilation
"Uday's physical ailments seemed to heighten his
sadistic tendencies. According to his chief bodyguard,
when Uday learned that one of his close comrades, who
knew of his many misdeeds, was planning to leave Iraq,
he invited him to his 37th-birthday party and had him
arrested. An eyewitness at the prison where the man was
held says members of the Fedayeen grabbed his tongue
with pliers and sliced it off with a scalpel so he could
not talk. A maid who cleaned one of Uday's houses says
she once saw him lop off the ear of one of his guards
and then use a welder's torch on his face."
-- Time, May 25, 2003
"Thousands of people are missing in Iraq, victims of
Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, but a more visible legacy
are the parts that are missing from people who survived.
Missing eyes, ears, toenails and tongues mark those who
fell into the hands of Mr. Hussein's powerful security
services."
-- The New York Times, April 24, 2003
"Farris Salman is one of the last victims of Mr.
Hussein's rule. His speech is slurred because he is
missing part of his tongue. Black-hooded paramilitary
troops, the Fedayeen Saddam, run by Mr. Hussein's eldest
son, Uday, pulled it out of his mouth with pliers last
month, he said, and sliced it off with a box cutter.
They made his family and dozens of his neighbors watch.
"...Salman was blindfolded and bundled into a van.
Residents of his neighborhood say the van arrived in the
afternoon with an escort of seven trucks carrying more
than a hundred black-uniformed fedayeen wearing black
masks that only showed their eyes. They rounded up
neighbors for what was billed as a rally; Mr. Salman's
mother was ordered to bring a picture of Mr. Hussein.
Two men held Mr. Salman's arms and head steady, and
pointed a gun to his temple. Another man with a video
camera recorded the scene. 'I was standing and they told
me to stick my tongue out or they would shoot me, and so
I did. It was too quick to be painful but there was a
lot of blood.' The fedayeen stuffed his mouth with
cotton and took him to a local hospital, where he got
five stitches, no painkiller and was returned to      prison."
-- The New York Times, April 24, 2003
"... Anwar Abdul Razak, remembers when a surgeon kissed
him on each cheek, said he was sorry and cut his ears
off. Razak, then 21 years old, had been swept up during
one of Saddam Hussein's periodic crackdowns on deserters
from the Army. Razak says he was innocently on leave at
the time, but no matter; he had been seized by some
Baath Party members who earned bounties for catching
Army deserters. At Basra Hospital, Razak's ears were
sliced off without painkillers. He said he was thrown
into jail with 750 men, all with bloody stumps where
their ears had been. 'They called us Abu [Arabic for
father] Earless,' recalls Razak, whose fiancee left him
because of his disfigurement.
"No one is sure how many men were mutilated during that
particular spasm of terror, but from May 17 to 19, 1994,
all the available surgeons worked shifts at all of
Basra's major hospitals, lopping off ears. (One doctor
who refused was shot.) Today, Dr. Jinan al-Sabagh, an
administrator at Basra Teaching Hospital, insists that
the victims numbered only '70 or 80,' but he'd prefer
not to talk about it. He says the ear-chopping stopped
before his own surgery rotation came up. 'I want to
forget about all this. I vowed I would never do it. I
said I am a surgeon, not a butcher....'"
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003
"He described how, clad in black garb that covered all
but his eyes, he had often meted out sentences in the
street, in front of a victim's family and horrified
onlookers. Guarded by armed colleagues, he used to tie
up and blindfold the accused. One of his men held the
detainee's head in a firm grip. Another forced open the
mouth.
"Ali would then draw out a pair of pliers and a sharp
knife. Gripping the tongue with pliers, he would slice
it up with the knife, tossing severed pieces into the
street. "'Those punished were too terrified to move,
even though they knew I was about to chop off their
tongue,' said Ali in his matter-of-fact voice. 'They
would just stand there, often praying and calling out
for Saddam and Allah to spare them. By then it was too
late.
"'I would read them out the verdict and cut off their
tongue without any form of anaesthetic. There was always
a lot of blood. Some offenders passed out. Others
screamed in pain. They would then be given basic medical
assistance in an ambulance which would always come with
us on such punishment runs. Then they would be thrown in
jail.'"
-- Fedayeen Saddam member interviewed in The Sunday
Times (London), April 20, 2003
"Dr. Jinan Al Sabagh, a surgeon at Basra's Teaching
Hospital, remembers the day in 1994 when the Baath Party
came to the hospital with groups of men who were said to
be deserters. The doctors were told to slice off the
men's ears.
"'It was definitely obligatory,' said Al Sabagh, a
gentle man in his 60s who seemed close to tears as he
struggled to describe what happened those three days.
'If you didn't, you would have the same thing done to
you.
"'They made four groups of doctors, one for each day,'
Al Sabagh explained. "I was in the fourth group. One
doctor here refused and they said if you didn't do it we
will do the same to you. He did it.'"
-- Newsday, April 21, 2003
"Ferass Adnan is a 23-year-old trader who speaks with
difficulty these days now that part of his tongue is
missing. Some months ago he got into a fight in a market
in northern Baghdad and was overheard insulting Saddam
as the 'son of a dog'. A policeman tried to arrest him,
but Adnan fled.
"Within hours, Iraqi secret police agents arrived at
Adnan's home and, failing to find him, took away his
uncle, brother, and two cousins. They were thrown in
jail and tortured with electric shocks.
"It was only a matter of days before the regime's
ubiquitous security spies caught up with Adnan in the
suburbs of Baghdad. He was jailed and then, on March 5,
turned over to the specialists of Ali's punishment
squad. Adnan was taken back to his father's home in
north Baghdad, where his entire family was ordered to
gather outside the local coffee house.
"'His hands were tied and his eyes blindfolded,' the
young man's father, Adnan Duleimi, recalled last week.
'I had not seen my son since they had arrested him. I
tried to pay for his release. I lost all my savings,
handing everything I had to corrupt security officers
who promised to help but only took my money. There was
nothing I could do. I had to watch in silence as they
took a knife to my son's tongue. Had I said a word we
would all have been killed.'"
-- The Sunday Times (London), April 20, 2003
"One of Ali's fellow fedayeen lost his tongue simply for
repeating how he had heard of a man who had accused Uday
of bringing shame on the Iraqi people for dressing in
multi-coloured shirts - which, according to the critic,
made him look like a woman.
"'There was no mild form of criticism when it came to
Saddam, Uday or the regime,' said Ali. 'Any critical
comment, even to say that the president looked tired in
a speech, was enough to risk having one's tongue cut off
by us.'"
-- Interview with a member of the Fedayeen Saddam in The
Sunday Times (London), April 20, 2003
"Kadhim Sabbit al-Datajji, 61, a resident of the poor
Shiite neighborhood known as Saddam City under Mr.
Hussein, said his trouble began when the eldest of his
seven sons became old enough to join the Baath Party,
but did not. 'Some Baathists in the neighborhood began
asking why no one in my family was a party member and
saying that with so many children, my family could cause
trouble,' he said. 'They asked, "Why don't you or your
sons join? We think you are in an opposition party."'
"He now has a walleyed stare to show for eight years in
prison. He is quick to pop out his glass eye for a
visitor - and to tell of how he lost the real one to
torture."
-- The New York Times, April 24, 2003
"Doctors gave him an injection and he lost
consciousness, he said. When he awoke, the right side of
his head was wrapped in bandages. It was Sept. 15, 1994.
'I started crying,' Mr. Ghanem said. 'I felt crippled. I
felt oppressed. I hated Saddam with all of my heart, but
I didn't know what to do.'
"He was sent to prison where he said he saw hundreds of
others missing one ear. Many, like Mr. Ghanem, had
inflamed wounds.
"His mother came every Friday, selling off household
appliances to buy painkillers and antibiotics for her
son. Others were less fortunate. Mr. Ghanem described a
medieval scene in which delirious and dying inmates lay
on the prison's dirt floor screaming from pain. 'The
right side of some of the men's heads were puffed up
like red balloons,' he said. Two of his friends died
from infections.
"'Saddam, God curse him, treated my son like an animal,'
said Mr. Ghanem's weeping mother. 'Only animals have
their ears cut off.'"
-- The New York Times, April 24, 2003
Unimaginable Places
"Her most disturbing memory is of the time she felt
nothing but her own pain. After the beatings and
electric shocks, Suriya Abdel Khader would find herself
once again in the fetid cell, a room so crowded that
most prisoners could only stand. The women died upright,
then slumped to the floor, but Ms. Abdel Khader
remembers registering only a dull flash of annoyance
whenever that happened. 'Get this body out of the way,'
she would think to herself. 'It's taking up room.' She
was imprisoned, she believes, because her four brothers
had been arrested in Mr. Hussein's blanket crackdown on
Shiites suspected of supporting Iran or the Islamic Dawa
Party."
-- The New York Times, June 2, 2003
"General Jawdat al-Obeidi, the proclaimed deputy head of
the Baghdad provisional government, said that about 150
political prisoners were found by US troops in a secret
prison in Salman Pak, 35 kilometres south of Baghdad,
and another 200 were rescued at a spot he refused to
name. In Kadhimiya, a primarily Shiite neighbourhood in
Baghdad, 25 people were discovered in an underground
prison, he said.
"'Before Baghdad fell, the guards let water flow into
the cells to kill the prisoners before they themselves
fled. But the prisoners were smart and built ramps to
climb on top of. That's why they didn't drown.'"
-- Sydney Morning Herald, April 22, 2003
"After he arrived in Baghdad, he was placed in a
darkened room with only a small red light, no bed.
Guards would splash buckets of water through a small gap
in the bottom of the door to put an inch or two of water
on the floor so that he could not sleep. They gave him
tea and a piece of bread for breakfast. Rice and a piece
of bread for lunch. He went to the bathroom in his room,
on the floor."
-- The Baltimore Sun, April 20, 2003
"A nondescript five-story building notable only by the
extra barbed wire on the roof, the Haakimiya Prison is
actually 10 stories. Below ground are interrogation
cells where unspeakable horrors were committed. ...A
former inmate, Mohsen Mutar Ulga, 34, ...was searching
for documents about his cousin, executed under Saddam.
Ulga said he was sentenced to 12 years in jail for
belonging to an armed religious group called 'the
revenge movement for Sadr,' referring to a martyred
Shiite cleric. He had been arrested with 19 others; the
lucky ones were executed right away. The rest were
tortured with electric cattle prods and forced to watch
the prison guards gang-rape their wives and sisters.
Some were fed into a machine that looked like a giant
meat cutter. 'People's bodies were cut into tiny pieces
and thrown into the Tigris River,' said Ulga.
"Ulga and the reporter silently walked through the
darkened cells at Haakimiya, which was surprisingly
clean, except for the graffiti on the walls. GOD I ASK
YOUR MERCY, scratched one prisoner who'd marked 42 days
on the walls. SAVE ME, MARY, implored another,
presumably a Christian. IN MEMORY OF LUAY AND ABBAS WHO
WERE TORTURED, read another."
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003
"When Shias, both leaders and young religious students,
were taken into custody, they were often transferred to
special torture cells.... 'The method of the
investigations was usually to hang someone upside down
and beat them, hammering hard on their bones,' Mr Abu
Sakkar said, pointing to a hook on the ceiling. Some
people would be left here for days upside down and would
just die of fatigue and thirst.'"
-- The Daily Telegraph (London), April 23, 2003
"Upstairs, accessible by a back stairway only, are about
100 individual cells, dark and windowless, stinking of
urine. In one sits a plate of half-eaten food, biscuits
and rice, still resting on a green plastic tray. At the
end of a hallway lies a pile of bindings and blindfolds.
"An elevator, the only one in the place, leads to the
basement and more cells. There are shackles in one room,
long cables in another. On another floor there is a
small operating room, where some former prisoners said
doctors harvested the organs of those who did not
survive.
"Finally, out back, stand three portable morgues, metal
buildings the size of tool sheds, with freezer units
attached. Inside one are six aluminum trays, each the
length of a body."
-- The New York Times, April 21, 2003
"Radi Ismael Mekhedi spent 10 years behind bars. Last
week, he wandered through the looted prison and stood
behind the red bars of his former cell for the first
time in over 10 years. 'I was severely tortured during
my imprisonment because I was considered a traitor to my
country. I never believed a person could be subjected to
such treatment by another human being,' Mekhedi says.
'Life was already painful under Saddam, and if you came
to the prison, you were always in fear for your life.'"
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003
"Well, in the beginning, this place looks just like an
anonymous office building. And that made it all the more
filled with terror, because slowly, prisoners would come
up, tell you that they had been held here, that they had
been tortured. You look at the walls, and see graffiti
written by the prisoners here. And it's heartbreaking,
really. Allah, help me. Or, you know, today I'm alive,
but tomorrow I'll be underground. You see Iraqi families
wandering around trying to find news of relatives, and
finding nothing. I was about to leave when a group of
agitated Iraqis came up and said, come with me. I have
something to show you. It's an execution ground. There
are still some bodies there. So I said, ok. Let's go
take a look. And indeed, we drove to a very remote part
of the prison. It was like a makeshift execution ground.
You know, somebody had just hurriedly set some guys up
there and shot them. They had been half-buried in the
ground."
-- Newsweek reporter Melinda Liu interviewed on NBC
Nightly News, April 22, 2003
"Almost as large as Saddam's palaces are his many
prisons, where countless Iraqis were tortured and
killed. We take you now inside one of Saddam's most
notorious prisons, 18 miles west of Baghdad, and it's
hard to imagine a grimmer place. US soldiers are
searching what remains of one of the biggest and most
elaborate prisons in the world. Saddam Hussein never cut
corners when it came to punishment. Abu Ghraib once held
tens of thousands of human souls -- criminals, political
enemies, and those who just happened to get in the way.
A 12-year-old Iranian boy visiting his grandmother near
Basra in 1985 was swept up in an Iraqi invasion. He was
still here 15 years later.
"[H]e lived with 28 other detainees in a
nine-meter-square cell, dividing up 1.5 kilos of rice
and porridge a day. 'It was so cramped we couldn't sleep
on our backs, we had to sleep on our sides, like spoons.
And they brought us polluted water to drink, so we all
had diarrhea.' Ulga was released last fall during
Saddam's surprise general amnesty. 'Most people don't
know that before the amnesty, they executed 450
prisoners so they would never go free,' said Ulga."
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003
"'Adnan Agari, who never returned, was taken away with
his brother Ghassan and his cousin Khatar. They were
taken to Baghdad and tortured with electrified wire,
Ghassan said. 'The screaming terrified me,' he recalled
of the dark, poorly ventilated torture chamber. 'I was a
boy then, 15. I have never heard anything like that
before or since.'"
-- The New York Times, April 17, 2003
"There in the corridor were the punishment units where
men were stuffed into windowless cinder block cells, one
metre by 50cm. On the left was the yellow holding pen
where prisoners fought to sleep next to the open pits
that served as latrines, suffering the stench for a few
inches more space."
-- The Guardian (London), April 17, 2003
"The massive prison cast a shadow over the entire
neighborhood. Yehiye Ahmed, 17, grew up nearby. The
prison guards were his neighbors; the inmates' screams
were the soundtrack of his young life. 'I could hear the
prisoners crying all the time, especially when someone
was killed. I could hear everything from my house or
when we played soccer behind the prison,' says Yehiye, a
quiet boy, with large, haunted brown eyes and a body
that suggests malnourishment.
"Yehiye and his friends would often go inside the Abu
Ghraib compound to se

1 Those guys from the 447th are friends of mine.  Thanks for putting EOD on your site.  We don't recieve enough attention for the work that we do over there.

2 Thanks for taking the time to get thesse to the wider public like you do. I know they don't have the 'T plus A' factor of some other stuff you post, but it is actually very important.

USA, all the way!

1 Iraqi Security taking control. Yea man, they've got things under control. Do anyone realize the type of animals we are dealing with. Iraqia are happiest when things are out of control. They love it. That's why they believe in the religion of pieces.