Iraqis recount torture at Saddam's hands

Oxford · 06-23-2003, 08:49 PM

The following article was copied from the Kansas City Star newspaper. It's difficult to believe that humans can be this cruel. Catching and killing Saddam will not occur quickly enough. In fact, I believe he should receive the same treatment that he gave his fellow countrymen. Saddam's crimes against his people are reason enough to have intervened, regardless of whether or not we find WMD.
Ox
-------------------

Posted on Mon, Jun. 23, 2003

Iraqis recount torture at Saddam's hands By DANA HULL, TOM LASSETER and NATALIE POMPILIO, Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - You can find just about anything at the Baab al Sharjee market in the center of Baghdad. Air conditioners, electric fans, radios, satellite dishes. And short videos that chronicle the torture chambers of Saddam Hussein. One video - "Saddam's Crimes and His Followers: Mukhabarat Torturing" - shows men lying on the ground as their legs are tied to a stick in the air. They writhe in pain as military officers whip the soles of their bare feet. Another shows a grenade being strapped to the chest of a blindfolded man. A few minutes later, he's blown up.

"Thousands of people have bought them," said Taha Adnan, 16, a vendor in the market. The world long has known that Saddam used chemical weapons against the Kurds and brutally repressed Shiite Muslims, has known of his secret police and torture chambers. But until his regime disintegrated in the face of a U.S. onslaught, it seldom heard the cries of his victims or their survivors.

Now they are starting to tell their stories. Basima Hamid last saw her husband, Naser al Saadi, one morning in 1999. He left to visit his family, and when he arrived, the Iraqi Intelligence Service was waiting at the house and arrested him.
His crime: studying to be a sheik. For years, Hamid wondered if he was alive. One of Naser's older brothers has been missing since 1982.

When Baghdad fell April 9, the family contacted the Committee of Free Iraqi Prisoners, a group founded by former prisoners. The organization has scoured documents retrieved from intelligence offices and has posted lists of thousands of names of those executed by the regime. Hamid learned that her husband was lynched at 2 p.m. on Aug. 9, 2000, at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. U.S. forces discovered 993 unmarked graves at the prison; her husband's body was in Number 860. The family found his bones and reburied them in
Najaf, a city that's holy for Shiite Muslims.

"Please, find out all of Saddam's crimes and let the whole world know about the reality of Saddam," said Hamid, who's still wearing black mourning clothes and raising two young sons. "He is the
evilest man that I ever saw."

Hamid would like to see Saddam captured and brought to a trial. "They should cut out his tongue, cut off his ears, so that he feels pain," said Hamid, dark eyes flashing with anger. "Everything that he did to us should be done to him."

Naser Kasem was 29 when he got fed up with the Iraqi military and the beatings that came with service. So he deserted. The police picked him up at a checkpoint in Karbala. He was dragged from a small, pitch-black concrete cell every two hours and taken to a torture room. There, he said, a man would crank up a small generator as another man got the wires ready. They shocked the bottoms of his feet and made him clutch the live wire with his hands. They poured molten plastic on his feet and pushed lit cigarettes into his flesh. They beat him with a stick and with an electrified rod.

Two hours later, he was taken back to his cell for two hours of
sobbing, and then the police returned to give him some more. Then
came two years in jail.

The other men in the room looked away, or down at the ground.
Asked what he did when he finally got out of jail, Kasem shrugged.
He went back into the military, he said. What else was there to
do?

Abbas Fadel, a large, muscular man, has a picture of his brother Ali
hanging from a nail in front of his small grocery store in southeast
Baghdad. The inscription under Ali Fadel's face reads, "He was
arrested by the criminal Saddam Hussein."

"I couldn't show it to people in the past because of the regime,"
Fadel said. "Now I hang it up to show respect."

Ali Fadel was arrested and then killed in 1983 - hanged in prison -
for no apparent crime other than reading in a library.

Police found anti-Saddam graffiti on a wall near where Ali had been
studying and rounded up more than 25 people who had been seen
there that day. Someone had written, "Saddam is a coward.
Saddam has no honor."

There was no proof that Ali was involved, but the police wrote in
their report that he was a Shiite Muslim, and that, Abbas Fadel
said, was enough. The family never got his body back, and is still
making trips to mass graves in hopes of finding his bones.

Capt. John Morgan, a spokesman for the U.S. Army's V Corps, said
it would be impossible to calculate the damage Saddam wrought to
his people. The psychological effects, he said, will be felt for
generations. Each new report of mass graves, or the revelation
that athletes were tortured in a chamber under the Olympic
stadium, turns his stomach.

"That is the kind of guy Saddam Hussein was. He took his Olympic
athletes and if they didn't perform, he tortured them," Morgan
said. "This one place where there was an olive branch to reach out
to other nations, he tainted that."

Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the former head of coalition troops in
Baghdad, recently called Saddam Iraq's biggest weapon of mass
destruction.

Hussein Abed Ali's only crimes were being a Shiite and being in the
wrong place at the wrong time. He was 16 in 1991 when Iraqi
police arrested him and 60 neighbors and accused them of
participating in anti-Saddam uprisings. Held in captivity for 45 days,
he was the only one who came home.

"We were terrified. We nearly died of fear," Ali said. "We were just
waiting to be killed."

Ali can't forget the first time he saw a man murdered. Hours after
he'd been arrested, a local Baath Party leader came to check on
the prisoners and noticed that two of the men had been shot. He
pulled out his own handgun.

"He said, 'How are these dogs still alive? They should have been
dead a long time ago.' And he pulled out a pistol and he shot them
both in the forehead. He enjoyed killing people," Ali said.

Ali saw men beaten to death with pipes. One man who dared ask,
"Why are you doing this to me?" had his hands cut off before he
was shot in the head. His torturer said, "This is how people are
treated when they go against Saddam."

"I could see it in other people's eyes. They died of fear before the
bullet or the pipe got them," Ali said. "I was 16 years old and
afraid to die, but I was just waiting my turn."

Ali went days without eating, and learned not to trust prison food
when a rare meal left a handful of other prisoners with fatal
diarrhea. A so-called "investigation" into the prisoners' actions
ended with at least one man crucified.

Ali was lucky: They let him go home.

"For every 100 people, they let one person go, to tell the people of
the city what happened to the rest," he said.

Ali was arrested a second time a year later and held for more than
two years but, again, managed to survive. He described the
tortures during his second incarceration - the beatings with
electrical cables, the day his feet were pounded with bats and his
toenails were pulled out - in a low, matter-of-fact voice.

He's 29 now, an electrician and a volunteer at the cultural center in
Musayeb, where the bodies from mass graves are counted and the
families of missing persons come searching.

"I help them find the people who weren't so lucky like me," Ali said.
"If it weren't for God, maybe my family would be looking for me
now."

NRAJOE · 06-23-2003, 08:59 PM

Sadistic bastage!

Oxford · 06-23-2003, 09:21 PM

He should have each finger, toe, arm, leg pulled off one at a time like he tortured his prisoners.

Sniper[MI] · 06-24-2003, 12:49 AM

And worse yet are the Liberal Democrap bastages in our own Gubmint that are whinig that we should not have gone in to remove soddom Hussein!

In my mind, these anti war, anti Bush, we shouldnt have gone there traitors arte no better than Hussein himself!

I think them liberal traitor, commie pigs should have to go to Iraq and talk to these survivors and tell them we should never have been there. See what a free Iraqi can do to a Saddam sympathiser now!

dam n, now I am so pissed! Where is a Democrat to punch when ya need one?!?!?!?

dhermesc · 06-24-2003, 09:45 AM

I really hope that he is captured by the people of Iraq and killed by them in reminisce of the way the Italians killed El Duce. If he is captured by American forces and tried in court the Shiites and Kurds will say it wasn't enough and the Baath supporters will say he died a martyr, either way the US loses.

Bert24b · 06-24-2003, 09:48 AM

If/when we ever find the guy, I think the most fitting thing we can do is to simply turn him over to his own people. Just handcuff him and drop him in the middle of Baghdad. They've had 20+ years to come up with an appropriate fate for him, and it's probably far more horrible and far more appropriate than anything we'd think up.

-Bert

06-24-2003, 10:56 AM

http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanista...665939,00.html

Keep in mind that we are just as guilty. We do not do it in our borders, but that does not make us any less guilty of torturing people.

Oxford · 06-24-2003, 11:01 AM

On second thought, I believe you guys are right with your solution. We (the USA) can't win in any public relations war with anyone if we subject Saddam to what he really deserves.

Like you said, turn him over to his own people (pre-screened, of course to get those who hate him the most...and there should be plenty people in this category) and they'll make short work of dispatching him to another world.

Then we can point to them and say that's what Saddam's own people wanted to happen to him. The world will be a better place when his remains turn back to dirt.

Ox

06-23-2003, 08:49 PM	#1
Oxford Super Moderator Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Gladstone, Missouri Posts: 13,022 Blog Entries: 4	Iraqis recount torture at Saddam's hands The following article was copied from the Kansas City Star newspaper. It's difficult to believe that humans can be this cruel. Catching and killing Saddam will not occur quickly enough. In fact, I believe he should receive the same treatment that he gave his fellow countrymen. Saddam's crimes against his people are reason enough to have intervened, regardless of whether or not we find WMD. Ox ------------------- Posted on Mon, Jun. 23, 2003 Iraqis recount torture at Saddam's hands By DANA HULL, TOM LASSETER and NATALIE POMPILIO, Knight Ridder Newspapers BAGHDAD, Iraq - You can find just about anything at the Baab al Sharjee market in the center of Baghdad. Air conditioners, electric fans, radios, satellite dishes. And short videos that chronicle the torture chambers of Saddam Hussein. One video - "Saddam's Crimes and His Followers: Mukhabarat Torturing" - shows men lying on the ground as their legs are tied to a stick in the air. They writhe in pain as military officers whip the soles of their bare feet. Another shows a grenade being strapped to the chest of a blindfolded man. A few minutes later, he's blown up. "Thousands of people have bought them," said Taha Adnan, 16, a vendor in the market. The world long has known that Saddam used chemical weapons against the Kurds and brutally repressed Shiite Muslims, has known of his secret police and torture chambers. But until his regime disintegrated in the face of a U.S. onslaught, it seldom heard the cries of his victims or their survivors. Now they are starting to tell their stories. Basima Hamid last saw her husband, Naser al Saadi, one morning in 1999. He left to visit his family, and when he arrived, the Iraqi Intelligence Service was waiting at the house and arrested him. His crime: studying to be a sheik. For years, Hamid wondered if he was alive. One of Naser's older brothers has been missing since 1982. When Baghdad fell April 9, the family contacted the Committee of Free Iraqi Prisoners, a group founded by former prisoners. The organization has scoured documents retrieved from intelligence offices and has posted lists of thousands of names of those executed by the regime. Hamid learned that her husband was lynched at 2 p.m. on Aug. 9, 2000, at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. U.S. forces discovered 993 unmarked graves at the prison; her husband's body was in Number 860. The family found his bones and reburied them in Najaf, a city that's holy for Shiite Muslims. "Please, find out all of Saddam's crimes and let the whole world know about the reality of Saddam," said Hamid, who's still wearing black mourning clothes and raising two young sons. "He is the evilest man that I ever saw." Hamid would like to see Saddam captured and brought to a trial. "They should cut out his tongue, cut off his ears, so that he feels pain," said Hamid, dark eyes flashing with anger. "Everything that he did to us should be done to him." Naser Kasem was 29 when he got fed up with the Iraqi military and the beatings that came with service. So he deserted. The police picked him up at a checkpoint in Karbala. He was dragged from a small, pitch-black concrete cell every two hours and taken to a torture room. There, he said, a man would crank up a small generator as another man got the wires ready. They shocked the bottoms of his feet and made him clutch the live wire with his hands. They poured molten plastic on his feet and pushed lit cigarettes into his flesh. They beat him with a stick and with an electrified rod. Two hours later, he was taken back to his cell for two hours of sobbing, and then the police returned to give him some more. Then came two years in jail. The other men in the room looked away, or down at the ground. Asked what he did when he finally got out of jail, Kasem shrugged. He went back into the military, he said. What else was there to do? Abbas Fadel, a large, muscular man, has a picture of his brother Ali hanging from a nail in front of his small grocery store in southeast Baghdad. The inscription under Ali Fadel's face reads, "He was arrested by the criminal Saddam Hussein." "I couldn't show it to people in the past because of the regime," Fadel said. "Now I hang it up to show respect." Ali Fadel was arrested and then killed in 1983 - hanged in prison - for no apparent crime other than reading in a library. Police found anti-Saddam graffiti on a wall near where Ali had been studying and rounded up more than 25 people who had been seen there that day. Someone had written, "Saddam is a coward. Saddam has no honor." There was no proof that Ali was involved, but the police wrote in their report that he was a Shiite Muslim, and that, Abbas Fadel said, was enough. The family never got his body back, and is still making trips to mass graves in hopes of finding his bones. Capt. John Morgan, a spokesman for the U.S. Army's V Corps, said it would be impossible to calculate the damage Saddam wrought to his people. The psychological effects, he said, will be felt for generations. Each new report of mass graves, or the revelation that athletes were tortured in a chamber under the Olympic stadium, turns his stomach. "That is the kind of guy Saddam Hussein was. He took his Olympic athletes and if they didn't perform, he tortured them," Morgan said. "This one place where there was an olive branch to reach out to other nations, he tainted that." Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the former head of coalition troops in Baghdad, recently called Saddam Iraq's biggest weapon of mass destruction. Hussein Abed Ali's only crimes were being a Shiite and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was 16 in 1991 when Iraqi police arrested him and 60 neighbors and accused them of participating in anti-Saddam uprisings. Held in captivity for 45 days, he was the only one who came home. "We were terrified. We nearly died of fear," Ali said. "We were just waiting to be killed." Ali can't forget the first time he saw a man murdered. Hours after he'd been arrested, a local Baath Party leader came to check on the prisoners and noticed that two of the men had been shot. He pulled out his own handgun. "He said, 'How are these dogs still alive? They should have been dead a long time ago.' And he pulled out a pistol and he shot them both in the forehead. He enjoyed killing people," Ali said. Ali saw men beaten to death with pipes. One man who dared ask, "Why are you doing this to me?" had his hands cut off before he was shot in the head. His torturer said, "This is how people are treated when they go against Saddam." "I could see it in other people's eyes. They died of fear before the bullet or the pipe got them," Ali said. "I was 16 years old and afraid to die, but I was just waiting my turn." Ali went days without eating, and learned not to trust prison food when a rare meal left a handful of other prisoners with fatal diarrhea. A so-called "investigation" into the prisoners' actions ended with at least one man crucified. Ali was lucky: They let him go home. "For every 100 people, they let one person go, to tell the people of the city what happened to the rest," he said. Ali was arrested a second time a year later and held for more than two years but, again, managed to survive. He described the tortures during his second incarceration - the beatings with electrical cables, the day his feet were pounded with bats and his toenails were pulled out - in a low, matter-of-fact voice. He's 29 now, an electrician and a volunteer at the cultural center in Musayeb, where the bodies from mass graves are counted and the families of missing persons come searching. "I help them find the people who weren't so lucky like me," Ali said. "If it weren't for God, maybe my family would be looking for me now." __________________ "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right".

06-23-2003, 08:59 PM	#2
NRAJOE Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Toledo,OH Posts: 19,043 Images: 3	Sadistic bastage! __________________ U.S. Army 1976-1979 237th Combat Engineers Heilbronn, Germany

06-23-2003, 09:21 PM	#3
Oxford Super Moderator Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Gladstone, Missouri Posts: 13,022 Blog Entries: 4	He should have each finger, toe, arm, leg pulled off one at a time like he tortured his prisoners. __________________ "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right".

06-24-2003, 12:49 AM	#4
Sniper[MI] Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Future 51st state, "New Hope" Posts: 3,796	Evil, evil, evil! And worse yet are the Liberal Democrap bastages in our own Gubmint that are whinig that we should not have gone in to remove soddom Hussein! In my mind, these anti war, anti Bush, we shouldnt have gone there traitors arte no better than Hussein himself! I think them liberal traitor, commie pigs should have to go to Iraq and talk to these survivors and tell them we should never have been there. See what a free Iraqi can do to a Saddam sympathiser now! dam n, now I am so pissed! Where is a Democrat to punch when ya need one?!?!?!? __________________ FNUH! Last edited by Sniper[MI]; 06-24-2003 at 12:52 AM.

06-24-2003, 09:45 AM	#5
dhermesc Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: East Central Kansas Posts: 1,762	I really hope that he is captured by the people of Iraq and killed by them in reminisce of the way the Italians killed El Duce. If he is captured by American forces and tried in court the Shiites and Kurds will say it wasn't enough and the Baath supporters will say he died a martyr, either way the US loses. __________________ Liberty is for those that claim it.

06-24-2003, 09:48 AM	#6
Bert24b Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Hampden, Maine Posts: 144	If/when we ever find the guy, I think the most fitting thing we can do is to simply turn him over to his own people. Just handcuff him and drop him in the middle of Baghdad. They've had 20+ years to come up with an appropriate fate for him, and it's probably far more horrible and far more appropriate than anything we'd think up. -Bert

06-24-2003, 10:56 AM	#7
Lenny2 Guest Posts: n/a	http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanista...665939,00.html Keep in mind that we are just as guilty. We do not do it in our borders, but that does not make us any less guilty of torturing people.

06-24-2003, 11:01 AM	#8
Oxford Super Moderator Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Gladstone, Missouri Posts: 13,022 Blog Entries: 4	I stand corrected. Raise up the guillitine and hold back on the whips! for a while. On second thought, I believe you guys are right with your solution. We (the USA) can't win in any public relations war with anyone if we subject Saddam to what he really deserves. Like you said, turn him over to his own people (pre-screened, of course to get those who hate him the most...and there should be plenty people in this category) and they'll make short work of dispatching him to another world. Then we can point to them and say that's what Saddam's own people wanted to happen to him. The world will be a better place when his remains turn back to dirt. Ox __________________ "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right".