While googling for info on Al-Marashi I ran across this fascinating article which tells vivid stories about Saddam's Iraq:
(2002/12/07): "Banal, brutal and bestial: inside the tyranny that Saddam built"
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The Times (London)
5 December 2002
By Giles Whittell
A dossier released this week details the abuses in
Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But even more powerful are
documents captured from the Iraqis which condemn the
dictators regime in its own words
WHEN YOU BETRAY your brothers to the Iraqi secret
police, they do write back. They send you a
pre-printed postcard, a sky-blue thank you from a
gangster government, embossed and ready for the
mantelpiece.
“Dear Comrade Citizen,” it reads. “Your participation
in the preservation of the nation’s security is a
service to you and your family, and to the future of
your sons. Your information on the murderous criminals
and agents is a national duty, and may God bless you
for it. We offer you the best of greetings and
encourage you to keep in touch via the following
telephone numbers, staffed 24 hours a day . . .”
The Saddam terror machine takes pride in its velvet
glove. This, after all, is a bureaucracy that has an
entire agency devoted to reminding its members of each
other’s birthdays and wedding anniversaries. But
non-members are more likely to have felt its iron
fist.
“We do not object to the decapitation of traitors,”
says “Chemical Ali” Hasan al-Majid, Saddam Hussein’s
chief enforcer, in response to a query about killing
methods from one of his northern commandants. “But it
would have been preferable if you had sent them to
Security for the purpose of interrogating them.
Security personnel could have extracted significant
information from them prior to their execution.”
Behead by all means, but torture first. Such was the
likely fate, both orderly and savage, of Saddam’s
Kurdish prisoners at the time that their less
fortunate brethren were being gassed before the first
Gulf War. Once Kuwait was invaded, protocol suffered.
One Iraqi general wrote to another that Kuwaitis were
in the habit of praying in large numbers on their
rooftops, to be told that “this can be remedied by
opening fire on the roofs in question, with all
weapons”.
Later the head of Iraqi special forces in the region
issued more detailed instructions for dealing with
troublemakers: “Walk to the demonstration area,
without vehicles and ‘softly, softly’. Get close to
the demonstrators from behind and close their
alternative routes of escape. Open fire with
everything you have, including rifles, automatic
weapons, light artillery and flamethrowers, with the
aim of killing all the demonstrators to serve as an
example to others.”
Saddam’s men seem to have got the message, and then
overreached themselves. A memo of September 26, 1990,
from the Bariq area Special Forces HQ to Chemical Ali,
who by then was running things in Kuwait, reads
simply: “Shot a woman in the head for not stopping at
a roadblock.”
The country that American and British troops are
likely soon to invade is, by the standards of the
information age, extraordinarily hard to know. Its
isolation, strengthened by sanctions, is not
threatened by tourism or the internet. The vast bulk
of the information on which Washington is basing its
drive for so-called regime change is from defectors
and moles who must be taken at their word and
journalists playing cat and mouse with minders.
The rule is that intelligence on Iraq comes
ready-spun, but there is an exception. It weighs ten
tonnes, takes up 40 cubic metres in a series of
federal strongrooms in Colorado, fills 127 CD-Roms in
electronic form and has been compared in terms of its
revelatory potential to the Mitrokhin archive that MI6
started smuggling out of Russia in 1992.
This is the source of the sky-blue thank you card, the
decapitation letter and the memo on the nameless woman
with a bullet in her head. It is an extraordinary haul
of documents, 10 million pages, most of them seized
from Iraqi security forces by Kurdish rebels in 1991
and moved at great cost and risk via Turkey to the
archives of the US Congress.
The documents remain unseen except by a tiny clique of
translators and analysts, but that is about to change.
A sample of the papers — about 10,000 of them — is
being used by academics and Iraqi dissidents to create
the first true self-portrait of Saddam’s vast and
remorseless security apparatus. Seen by The Times in
the Californian research institute where they have
ended up, not only are the documents the fingerprints
of a modern Stalinist dictatorship, they hold up a
mirror to Saddam himself.
They are at once banal and bestial. A pink exercise
book decorated with pretty white flowers turns out to
be a record of the destruction of 397 Kurdish
villages. A short note from the Kirkuk Oil Protection
Forces with a list of families attached (“Please take
the necessary measures against them”) was almost
certainly their death sentence. The fate of an Erbil
man is confirmed in two lines of stone-cold logistics:
“Please tell the family of the below-mentioned
executed person to retrieve his body from the Faculty
of Forensic Medicine, Baghdad.”
The security apparatus that produced this cheerless
mountain of paperwork is “a direct outgrowth of
Saddam’s mind and outlook”, says Ibrahim al-Marashi,
who has studied both the apparatus and the documents
as closely as anyone. After three years immersed in
them at Harvard and now at the Centre for
Non-Proliferation Studies in Monterey, he has come to
see Iraq’s “Great Uncle” as grotesquely deluded but
also, on one crucial score, consistent.
The delusion is one of strength. “I still think Saddam
feels invincible,” al-Marashi says. “With Russia doing
all it can to avoid a war and Saudi Arabia not letting
the US use its facilities, he thinks he’s got the rest
of the world behind him.” The consistency concerns his
purpose: to survive. He is no longer chiefly a
Baathist, a pan-Arabist or even an old-style
empire-builder. He is the embodiment of his own rabid
personality cult, penned into his own shrunken
country, dedicated only to preserving his own power.
The implications for American military planners are
alarming. “When it comes to Saddam’s decision whether
to use chemical and biological weapons, the fear of
decimating his own troops is not a factor,” al-Marashi
says. “If he believed they would ensure his survival
by making America decide it no longer had the stomach
for the fight, he would use them — even against the
Special Republican Guard, even in Baghdad. He would
equip the troops with masks, but if they didn’t
survive, that’s tough.”
There is no shortage of precedents. Thousands of his
own troops died when Saddam used chemical weapons in
the Iran-Iraq war, and low-flying Iraqi jets sprayed
hundreds of Kurdish villages with chemical agents
during the 1987-88 Anfal campaign, Saddam’s attempt at
a “final solution” to his Kurdish problem.
So far nothing linking Saddam directly to chemical
weapons use has been found in the documents al-Marashi
and his fellow analysts call the Northern Dataset
(there is a smaller southern one, extracted from
Kuwait). Chemical weapons are mentioned, but coyly.
The euphemisms of choice are “special attacks” and
“special ammunition”. When the words are used, the
voice is passive. A 1987 telegram to General Security
department 78 says that three pro-Iranian agents “had
been stricken with chemical substances during the
recent attack mounted by our armed forces”. And when
the effects are enumerated, the tone is robotic. “As a
result of the airstrikes, Omar Abdullah, the brother
of the criminal Mustafa Abdullah . . . was blinded. In
addition . . . a number of saboteurs was killed and
approximately 30 persons lost their eyesight.” (This
memo from Shaqlawa Directorate of Security, like
thousands of others, is headed: “In the Name of God,
the Compassionate, the Merciful.”)
The closest thing to a smoking gun is a Baath Party
order of June 14, 1987. “The entry of any kind of
human cargo, nutritional supplies or mechanical
instruments into the prohibited villages . . . is
strictly prohibited,” it reads. “It is the duty of the
armed forces to kill any human being or animal found
in these areas.”
Iraq is a caricature of a police state. It has five
major security agencies employing 32,000 men. Each has
a secret counter-coup unit within it. Each competes
with the others for informers and for bragging rights
as the most effective corps of interrogators. Each
reports directly to Saddam but also to his second son,
Qusay, who heads the elite, 5,000-strong al-Amn
al-Khas (Special Security Force), which itself
subdivides repeatedly into uniformed and plainclothes
paramilitary units liable to pull rank over each other
and the lesser forces — not to mention the regular
police — at any time, in any place, on virtually any
pretext. It is a recipe for chaos, but also for deep,
pervasive fear.
The American journalist Mark Bowden has shown how that
fear can be channelled into frenzied activity,
describing an afternoon in the life of a construction
engineer, Entifadh Qanbar. Assigned to build an ornate
wall and gateway round Saddam’s Baghdad palace, Qanbar
had left the brickwork till last so that works traffic
could come and go at will. Then the Great Uncle passed
by in a blacked-out Mercedes and was displeased. His
chief bodyguard told Qanbar that the motorcade would
return that evening, by which time the wall had to be
finished.
“Two hundred workers were quickly assembled. They set
up floodlights. Some of the guards came back with
trucks that had machine guns mounted on top. They
parked alongside the worksite and set up chairs,
watching and urging more speed as the workers mixed
mortar and threw down line after line of bricks.”
The wall, which would ordinarily have taken a week,
was built in four hours flat.
The security forces have mushroomed with each coup
attempt that Saddam has survived. “Whenever he sees a
failure within the intelligence apparatus his response
is to create a new agency to do a better job and
balance the power of the others,” al-Marashi says.
Thus, in 1973, Saddam founded the dreaded
al-Mukhabarat (General Intelligence) after a failed
putsch by al-Amn al-’Amm (General Security). In 1992
he set up al-Amn al-’Askari (Military Security)
because al-Istikhbarat (Military Intelligence) had
failed to prevent uprisings in the North and South the
year before.
Mutiny brings wholesale reorganisation. Mere
insubordination may warrant only a purge. Either way,
blood flows.
Saddam perfected his style of leadership through
terror early in his reign, arresting 60 “traitors” at
a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council to
cement his rise to power in 1979. On the videotape of
the arrests, Saddam is seen weeping. He later had all
60 traitors shot with tape across their mouths. Capone
himself could not have matched it for theatricality or
ruthlessness, and the blood-letting grinds on to this
day.
The closest parallel in recent history to Saddam’s
Iraq is to be found in Stalin’s Russia. Like the NKVD
at Stalingrad, Iraq’s Military Intelligence shot
deserters on sight during the Iran-Iraq war pour
encourager les autres. Like the KGB and its
precursors, Iraq’s General Security officers were
urged in their annual “Plan of Action” for 1992 to
recruit “a shadow in every house”; to do whatever
worked to extract information from prisoners,
including “merciless beating to death, threats,
indefinite incarceration, raping of their loved ones
in their presence”; and to compromise potential
informers by whatever means necessary, including
“engaging in sexual acts, entering nightclubs and
participating in drunkenness”.
The echoes of history would be uncanny if they were
not entirely deliberate. Saddam is an abject
Stalinophile. He has an entire roomful of biographies
of Georgia’s most murderous son, and as a young man
boasted openly that he would turn Iraq into ”a Stalin
state”.
His endlessly expanding security web can seem confused
and wasteful even by Stalin’s standards — except that
it isn’t. Seen through the lens of his paranoia, it is
quite logical. It exists so that he survives, and to
see how well it works, it is worth considering what an
assassin would have to do to get to him.
First, he would have to find him, which is impossible
without intelligence from his closest confidants,
because he employs eight doubles, moves constantly,
sleeps only in anonymous private houses (never his
palaces) and has every meal prepared in several
different places, descending on the chosen one with
little or no notice.
If the assassin had a pretext for an audience, he
would be strip-searched before it and shot dead by
bodyguards of the Special Protection Apparatus if he
came within striking distance of his target during it.
If not, he would have to penetrate two further layers
of security: the 15,000-strong Special Republic Guard,
and Qusay’s al-Amn al-Khas. Beyond these, the hitman
would still have to reckon with Saddam’s all-day body
armour, including a Kevlar-lined straw hat.
Assassinations require planning, and it is said that
when three or more Iraqis plan anything they stand to
be exposed by an informer. The CIA learnt this to
their cost in 1996, recruiting agents from Saddam’s
inner circle and equipping them with special mobile
phones.
Once all the traitors had been arrested, tortured and
killed, an Iraqi voice used one of the phones to call
the CIA. “Your men are dead,” it said. “Pack up and go
home.”
A key question facing Western Intelligence agencies is
whether any of Saddam’s security chiefs will ever turn
on him successfully. Britain’s Foreign Office thinks
it could happen, but there are plenty of reasons for
it not to. Every head of the Iraqi security hydra is
implicated in Saddam’s reign of terror and knows
revenge from its enemies will be swift and brutal when
it ends.
As Saddam himself once told a plaintiff brave enough
to complain that a relative had been unjustly
executed: “Do not think you will get revenge. If you
ever have the chance, by the time you get to us there
will not be a sliver of flesh left on our bodies.”
In the meantime, would-be traitors know that their
fate, if caught, will mirror that of Saddam’s own
sons-in-law. They defected to Jordan in 1995 and told
the West of the extent of Iraq’s chemical and
bioweapons programme. They were lured back with
promises of clemency, only to be separated from their
wives and summarily killed.
Saddam’s rule is thug rule. It wields carrots as well
as sticks — security personnel earn fat wages and have
comfortable flats — but its structure and methods
still resemble those of the Mob. In the run-up to the
Gulf War its chief thugs even looted like the Mob,
squabbling over Kuwaiti zoo animals and the Kuwaiti
royal family’s fleets of Cadillacs and power yachts.
Posterity may yet grant Iraq one redeeming feature —
that it betrayed itself by writing everything down.
And its victims can still hope for some rough justice
in the manner of Saddam’s departure; though he has
lived like Stalin, he could still die like Hitler. “I
don’t see him dying in his bed,” says al-Marashi. “I
see him in a bunker, going down fighting.”
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