Who armed Iraq? Very good information here. Particularly the stuff about Saddam’s torturing civilians.
You have to wonder when Amnesty International is talking about going after Bush for war crimes (for the flushing of the Koran?), nobody’s talking about the atrocities that Saddam committed. I don’t even see the story about the 7 businessmen who were flown to the United States after Saddam had their hands cut off. They came to the United States and got prosthetic hands and the brands on their foreheads removed.
With all the fictitious mumbo jumbo that I keep seeing across the internet–absolute hatred and downright photoshopped atrocities, it’s time talk about the real thing. The mass graves and the real atrocities that occurred under Saddam Hussein for 35 years…and before that. Because killing and torture were how he got to where he was.
Some excerpts from that article, but know that you can buy that article and have it in your hot little hands to refer to. These are eyewitness accounts (in some cases accounts from the actual victims) of what happened under Saddam Hussein, these aren’t photoshopped images from the Demoscummic Underpants.
One key scientist, Hussein Shahristani, resisted Saddam.
“He went to prison; he was tortured; he was made to watch a 7-year-old boy hanged from his wrists and then executed for the sin of writing on the blackboard “Saddam is a buffalo.”
“Shahristani still refused to break. He spent eight and a half years in solitary. He was allowed one visit with his wife in the very early days and their newborn child. And he watched a Republican Guard snatch the child from his wife’s arms and hold a gun to the child’s head while he had a five-minute meeting with his wife. His captors asked, “Do you wish to persist with your refusal?” Begging his wife for forgiveness, he said, “Look, I can’t take part in this.”
Shahristani, who now works to help Iraqi refugees, told a British news conference in December last year:
“My most vivid memory is hearing the screams of very young children being tortured in the neighboring torturing rooms.
“However, I was more fortunate than many of my fellow political prisoners in the country. I did not have holes drilled into my bones, as happened in the next torture room. I did not have my limbs cut off by an electric saw. I did not have my eyes gauged out.
“Women of my family were not brought in and raped in front of me, as happened to many of my colleagues. Torturers did not dissolve my hands in acid. I was not among the hundreds of political prisoners who were taken from prison as guinea-pigs to be used for chemical and biological tests.
“They only tortured me for 22 days and nights continuously by hanging me from my hands tied at the back and using a high voltage probe on the sensitive parts of my body and beating me mercilessly. They were very careful not to leave any permanent bodily marks on me because they hope they can break my will and I will agree to go back and work on their military nuclear program.
“In a way I was lucky to spend 11 years in solitary confinement because I did not have to see what was going on in the larger prison – the country of Iraq – in which 20 million people were kept captives. I did not have to witness the ceremonies in which mothers were ordered to watch public executions of their sons and then asked to pay the price of the bullets that were used in the executions.
“I did not have to watch people’s tongues being pulled out and cut off because they dared to criticize Saddam or one of his family members. I did not see young men’s foreheads branded and their ears cut off because they were late for a few days to report to their military duties. I did not see the beautiful southern Iraqi Marshes drained and the reeds burnt and the Marsh Arabs massacred and their old ways of life destroyed. I did not see the beheading of more than 130 women, who were beheaded in public squares in Iraq, and their heads put out for public display.
“In many ways I was fortunate to have survived it all to tell the stories of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who are not here to tell their stories. These atrocities have been going on for over two decades while the international community have either silently watched it, or at times even tried to cover it up.
“Saddam is not a run-of-the-mill dictator; he is exceptional. Weapons of mass destruction in Saddam’s hands are dangerous to the Iraqi people and to mankind.”
As McGrory’s book notes, rape was also a tool of the regime.
“The man would arrest senior figures in the administration for no reason other than to get to their wives. In one case, a woman (she told us herself — she is now living in Scotland in absolute peril) was forced into a room where Saddam was staring at a file on his knee. He didn’t look up, just beckoned her over and she had to sit on his knee like some kind of recalcitrant child; she reports Saddam said, “Your husband has been a very naughty boy.” And, with that, he raped her in the room, watched over by several guards.
“When another woman came in, she was so appalled with what he was about to do to her that she scratched her own face with her fingernails and blood began to pour down her face. Saddam is a fanatically fastidious man who hates any kind of dirt and when the blood dripped onto his suit, he pushed her away. Disgusted with what she had done, he said to the guards, “Take her outside and you deal with her.” And four or five Republican Guards took her outside and raped her.”
And this-Saddam being a Stalinist and someone who adored Hitler:
“They have some appalling people. There are a couple of German scientists who were taken over to Iraq who actually worked for Hitler. They were still alive, these old boys, and they felt their worth was not really recognized in Germany. They were tempted by the fast buck and went over to Iraq. One man used to play Hitler’s speeches in his room and said quite openly, “The only other leader I would work for other than Adolf is Saddam Hussein; they are two of a kind.” Well, they are.
“In fact, early on, Saddam used to carry around a copy of “Mein Kampf” like it was a Bible. His father had run off and left him, before he was born, and he was brought up by an uncle — a dreadful man — and this man taught Saddam from the time he could walk and talk that the Nazis were a great power. His uncle’s philosophy was that the Jews are lower than flies. And, when Saddam came to power, he allowed his uncle to publish his appalling rantings and insisted that everyone in Iraq should receive a copy of his thoughts.”
McGrory also told WorldNetDaily of the vast personal fortune compiled by Hussein while his citizens starved under UN sanctions.
“It is thought to be in the region of US$100 billion. This could be one of the richest countries in the world. It oozes oil; it has fantastic agriculture; it has everything going for it and he has just wastefully, wastefully frittered it away along with his sons and relatives. The indulgences are shocking. The truth is, they whine about sanctions, saying they are hurting people, but you go to Baghdad and you see the fastest and finest cars. Uday at one stage had 34 cars.”
But perhaps the last word on the threat that Saddam Hussein posed prior to US intervention should be left to Kenneth Joseph, one of a number of antiwar demonstrators who travelled to Iraq as would-be human shields.
Joseph’s group found the experience a real eye-opener, and his group managed to film 14 hours of uncensored video footage before they wereasked to leave Iraq with the rest of the human shields.
UPI news agency reported Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, as saying the trip “had shocked me back to reality.”
Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera “told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn’t start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam’s bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head.”
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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Awesome Cao! Keep preachin the truth!
i don’t condone repression, oppression, brutality, torture, or murder in any form… and yes, saddam was guilty of all of those and, yes, i am glad he’s gone… what troubles me is this…
-the reasons we were given for attacking iraq were baseless… wmd did not exist and whether our intelligence was either seriously flawed or was shaped to fit a preconceived plan are both equally disturbing… (the weight of evidence for the fact that attacking iraq had been decided upon as early as spring 2002 continues to pile up…) even more disturbing is the fact that, as mohamed al baradei and hans blix had both repeatedly stated, saddam had complied and was continuing to comply with u.n. inspections… whether he would have continued to do so is, of course, open to speculation…
-the stated objective following 9/11 was to pursue al qaeda as the nucleus of the war on terror and osama bin laden as the principal head of that group… with no demonstrable link between iraq and al qaeda, despite false claims to the contrary, vast resources that could have been otherwise directed toward al qaeda were diverted, giving al qaeda breathing space to re-group and re-organize – which they used to their advantage…
-the reasons given now for attacking iraq have significantly shifted from the reasons originally given… deposing a brutal ruler and seeding a middle east country for the growth of democracy, no matter how noble, are, in the contexts in which they are usually presented, extremely disingenuous, since they are virtually never accompanied by any acknowledgement that they are indeed rationales after the fact…
-president bush signed a memorandum in 2002 waiving geneva for detainees… subsequent directives authorized interrogation techniques based on that memo, the most notable of which were outlined in the memorandum from general ricardo sanchez (see full details at http://takeitpersonally.blogspot.com/2005/04/gen-sanchez-approved-torture.html) pertaining to abu ghraib, authorship of which was later denied by general sanchez in sworn testimony before the senate armed services committee… as information continues to emerge, it is clear that abu ghraib is far from an isolated instance and that, in fact, guantanamo was the model which later was imported to abu ghraib, bagram and elsewhere… if the u.s. is to have any hope of “seeding democracy” in the rest of the world, we cannot compromise our own stated principles and values in doing so… saying that it is a “different type of war” and a “different type of enemy” is no justification for the abandonment of moral principles, the principles upon which the u.s. was founded…
my humanity and desire for justice is all-encompassing and cannot exclude my own country… i feel as strongly about tyrants like saddam as i do about the vile leader in uzbekistan, musharraf in pakistan, mubarak in egypt, and anyone who either directly or indirectly condones and/or promotes human suffering… for president bush to call allegations of detainee torture “absurd” (as he did just the other day) is itself absurd… i intensely dislike being lied to and manipulated… anyone who can step forward and tell the truth, no matter how difficult it might be, has my respect… clinton lost it and bush lost it long ago… our country is better than this (or at least i thought it was)…
one last word on humanity and life… i value ALL life… let me repeat – ALL life… i regard life in every form sacred whether it be animal, vegetable or mineral… i believe that discriminating about which forms of life are sacred and which are not is the basest form of hypocrisy… while that view is often portrayed as soft and weak, it is neither… true love and respect for all life requires a degree of spiritual strength that seems to be sadly lacking in these times…
oh i see you have a troll too. congrats. awesome post cao. really chilling. hard to read. but important to read.
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That’s merely child’s play. Let’s talk about what real oppression and brutality is, for just a second, ok? Let’s talk about this and this. Let’s talk about how terrorists do not fall under the Geneva Convention.
The basis for the Red Cross’s conclusion appears to have more to do with institutional self-aggrandizement than with international law. Many leftist academics and activists insist that the Geneva Conventions must be universally applied. Yet, that argument is undercut by those treaties’ texts. The Third Geneva Convention explicitly states that parties need not apply it to all conflicts, especially when the foes are not parties, and when enemies do not abide by its terms.[1 Geneva Convention (III), art. II, para. 3.]
No terrorist group is a party to the Geneva Conventions. They have not signed, much less ratified, those treaties. Moreover, it is evident that Hamas, Hezbollah, and members of the global Al-Qaeda network spurn both the spirit and the letter of international treaties designed to ameliorate the cruelty of war. Bloody attacks in New York, Jerusalem, Bali, Madrid, and Beslan are testament to the fact that these groups seek to kill civilians rather than to take captives. And when Islamist terrorists do seize hostages, brutality rather than protection appears to be the rule.
Iraqi insurgents beheaded 26-year-old American businessman Nicholas Berg and shot 20-year-old Keith Matthew Maupin shortly after the June 28, 2004 transfer of sovereignty. On July 22, Iraqi police found the beheaded corpse of a Bulgarian hostage. The Arabic satellite television network Al-Jazeera had confirmed on July 13 that it had a tape showing his execution.[2 CNN.com, July 13, 2004, here .] Iraqi captors have also executed Pakistanis, a Turk, and a South Korean, among others. Such mistreatment of prisoners is not a new phenomenon among terrorist groups. In the 1980s, Hezbollah captured a number of Westerners in Lebanon, among them priests, journalists, professors, a librarian, and even the president of the American University of Beirut. Hezbollah tortured and hanged U.S. Marine lieutenant colonel William Higgins. Iraqi insurgents who decapitate civilian hostages have no more international legal claim to protection than did Hezbollah kidnappers.
By violating every tenet of international law regarding treatment of prisoners, terrorist groups forfeit any entitlement to protection under the Geneva Conventions. U.S. forces would be within their legal rights to treat captured Al-Qaeda members as they did Nazi saboteurs during World War II—trial by military commission and execution by firing squad.[3 Ex Parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942).]
To say that a woman with a man on a leash is comparable (American at Abu Ghraib), or that infidels touching the Koran without white gloves fits in this category also (infidels are considered unclean), is not to admit or reality the grandiose scale on which these people have not only defied international law, but continue, according to their Al Qaeda manuals, to lie (al-Taqiyya), murder, rape, cut off feet and hands, etc., (all of which are sanctioned and suggested in the Koran) to further the cause of Islam.
Torture Methods in Iraq Medical experimentation
# Beatings
# Crucifixion
# Hammering nails into the
fingers and hands
# Amputating the ***** or
breasts with an electric
carving knife
# Spraying insecticides into a
victim’s eyes
# Branding with a hot iron
# Committing rape while the
victim’s spouse is forced
to watch
# Pouring boiling water into
a ******
# Nailing the tongue to a
wooden board
# Extracting teeth with pliers
# Using bees and scorpions
to sting naked children in
front of their parents
Some old scientists who worked under Hitler worked under Saddam Hussein; they were more than happy to do this dirty work for the cause, just as they did under Hitler.
As far as wmd is concerned, you don’t know much about that subject, either, from the sound of it. We found a lot, and not only that, but the Syrians were paid about $35,000 to bury truckloads of it in the Bakaa Valley. I’m sure that history will prove that Bush was right, regardless of the media wailing today about “no WMD”. There were many other reasons why we went over there. Not the least of which was this.
Every time evidence of illegal weapons (like the ricin in north Iraq) or dual-use material (like the so-called “pesticide” in south Iraq) was discovered, the Left brushed it off. Even Dr. David Kay’s reports of Iraq’s undisclosed WMD research (including Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever) could not penetrate their intransigence. They demanded that President Bush quickly produce huge stockpiles of WMDs or be branded a liar. Note that the kind of stockpile the Left demanded as evidence of Saddam’s non-compliance would have been impossible to hide even from the bumbling Hans Blix. As Paul Leventhal testified before the Senate in March 2000,
The Left ignored Hans Blix’s background. The Left ignored every piece of evidence that Saddam had ever had WMDs. The Left has ignored everything that justified the Iraq war so far, because a just war doesn’t fit their predetermined position. (You know the position: Bush is evil, he’s controlled by Halliburton, aliens and/or Israel, Iraq was all about oil, world imperialism and/or personal revenge, etc.)
By “weapons of mass destruction,” what liberals mean is: missiles pointed at Washington, D.C., with their “Ready to Fire” lights blinking ominously and their warhead payloads clearly marked “Weapons of Mass Destruction! Next Stop, The Great Satan America!” — basically what you might see on an episode of Batman.