The purpose of my web log is to be a connection to my children, extended family and friends. However, all are welcome! Verse of the year: Philippians 4:12 I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.
| Monday, January 01, 2007 |
| Saddam's Hanging |
Some deaths are losses... and some are gains.
TALES OF A DICTATIORSIP OF HORROR
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
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A nondescript five-story building notable only by the extra barbed wire on the roof, the Haakimiya Prison is actually 10 stories. Belowground 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
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
THE CHILDREN:
Former United Nations worker Vanessa Lough said children as young as four have been taken from their parents during the night over the past fortnight and murdered after extremists targeted families thought to have been helping the Coalition forces.
“Some children were hanged as their helpless parents were forced to watch,” said Ms Lough, 37. She heard of the atrocities during a water drop on the outskirts of Basra, Iraq's second largest city and a Ba'ath party stronghold. “In one street alone, they said three children could at one point be seen hanging from the lampposts and around the corner another child lay burned on the road. Parents and children who resisted were badly beaten.” Ms Lough said that, at first, the three women, all middle-aged, were reluctant to talk about what they had seen for fear of persecution.
“They were genuinely afraid for their lives,” she added. “Through what I can gather, they knew of at least 11 deaths but said there were many more elsewhere in the city.”
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“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
Daily Mail, April 15, 2003
The Baath Party completely dominated life in Iraq. Until this week, every neighbourhood 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
“One of the ladies said Ba'ath party leaders and several henchmen had ordered and carried out the killings after their headquarters were bombed last week. It was their way of getting back. One of the men told a father his son was being killed because the father had been seen laughing with several men from the British Army that day. They told him he had ‘betrayed’ Saddam in an act of treason. He received a broken leg and a severe beating. The men made the father watch as they set his son alight with petrol.”
The Mail on Sunday (London), April 6, 2003Labels: Military |
posted by Kim Coreson @ 6:04 PM   |
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