Thomas,
"Really, produce one person and I'll be impressed."
At this point I'd be impressed if there is any evidence you will accept as factual.
I can offer you dozens and dozens of articles like the one below, but you're not going to believe them. 'Propaganda', you will say.
How am I to do produce that one person you have requested? Do I have to present him/her to you in person so that you may interrogate them? Obviously, a written account doesn't impress you.
You just want to believe what you want to believe. Well, that's fine. Keep your head buried in the sand. But don't pretend that you are willing to be swayed by evidence when there is no evidence that you will accept as factual.
Your stand seems to be pretty typical of so many who are defending the Hussein regime.
Revisiting a regime of torture
sunspot.net
Suffering: Men who survived years in Saddam Hussein's jail describe an unceasing agony of beatings, electric shocks and other prisoners' screams.
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By Todd Richissin
Sun Foreign Staff
Originally published April 20, 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Sometime during his imprisonment, maybe when he was hung naked with his arms tied behind him and guards were beating him, Salah Abdul-Kareem was as good as dead. This is known only because he is alive.
He speaks softly, slowly, nervously. When he reaches for the most painful memories, his hands tremble as if a residual shock is passing through them.
Sometimes when he talks he looks intently at a spot only he can see, as if viewing a film clip of the memory he is relaying. When he seems a word or two from tears, he looks up and manages to smile. It is a weak smile, but strong enough to keep him from crying.
"If you lose your life, you lose everything," he says. "I lost my life. I lost everything."
He is exceptionally pleasant and polite and is a handsome man, 33 years old, but the skin under his eyes is darker than on the rest of his face, so he looks older. He is skinny. The watchband on his left wrist is tightened as much as it can be, but he easily could fit two or three fingers beneath it. He gets tired easily.
But he is alive, and he knows that many prisoners are not. Somewhere in Iraq are the missing brothers and sons, thousands of men, perhaps tens of thousands, who have died and will never come back from Saddam Hussein's prisons.
Some of the inmates were common criminals. Others -- it's unlikely the number will ever be known -- were political prisoners, as broadly defined by the regime, and never formally charged with a crime and never brought to trial but nevertheless tortured, imprisoned, tortured more.
"Help us, help us," the families of the missing yell to anybody they think is an American, now that Hussein is gone. But to talk to them is to realize that they suspect their missing are dead.
Abdul-Kareem was, too, as far as he is concerned. So his story, in a sense, might be told by those who are lost, if they could come back as he did. It is a story of secret police and their secret files, of brutality and perseverance and bravery, though Abdul-Kareem would not call it that. There was betrayal and death and, in Abdul-Kareem's case, life again.
At 19 years old and having seen the Iraq-Iran war shred young men by the thousands, Abdul-Kareem decided he would join the army so that he would be an officer, maybe escape any fighting because he was smart and educated and his brains were more valuable than his hands.
The problem with the plan was that once in the army, he could never get out. That was fine with him for a few years; it seemed a decent route considering some half-million Iraqis died in the war.
Change of heart
Then, in 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait.
"I saw what was happening," Abdul-Kareem says. "We were invaders and I didn't like that. I said, 'This is what the army has become?'"
He waited for his opportunity. Iraq was pushed out of Kuwait. He waited some more. At 24 years old, as a first lieutenant in the Iraqi army, he saw what he thought was an opening. A friend in Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, knew someone willing to smuggle him to Turkey for $400.
Abdul-Kareem, the fourth of seven children, adores his family, especially his mother and father. They lived in a comfortable house big enough for all of them, and after each three-week period in the army, usually in Basra, he could return home for a week.
To desert meant that he might never see his family again. And if he decided to leave, he could not tell them beforehand, could not risk what might happen to them.
"I decided, first I get out, then I work to communicate with the family," he says. "I made arrangements so nobody would know I was going, so they would not execute my family."
He sold his car. It was the summer of 1994, he recalls, and he finished three weeks in Basra and was supposed to go home to Baghdad. Instead he headed to Kirkuk, where he began a journey that lasted eight years and killed part of him.
He met the smuggler there, got in his car, traveled back roads, sweated the checkpoints, got past them, continued on. He was 50 miles from Zakhu, a few miles from the Turkish border.
"We saw two cars stopped. They were military agents," he recalls. "The smuggler stopped the car near their cars, and one of the military policemen asked me for identification. I said I didn't have any identification. Immediately, he punched me in the mouth. They tied me up and put me in the trunk of a car. They drove me five or six hours, I don't know. When I got out, I was in Baghdad, but I didn't know it."
Tools of brutality
He is still not certain where he was, but undoubtedly, he says, it was one of the jails run by Iraq's secret police. They had information on him, probably from the smuggler, whom the military agents did not touch at that final checkpoint, he thinks.
At one of those prisons run by the secret police, the Security Directorate, the remnants of Hussein's brutality were strewn last week across the ground. Prison photographs of young men. Their fingerprints. Did they survive? What kind of tortures did they go through?
In one room, an S-shaped piece of wrought iron still hung from the ceiling. This is where inmates were hung by their hands, their arms tied behind them. Below still lay the thick hoses that guards used to beat them. The prisoners who were housed there were moved in the days before the war. Nobody seems certain where.
Prisoners who were held there before that and released were picking through the rubble, sharing stories of their days there.
Baker Muzhir, 30, was in a 15-by-10-foot cell with no window, maybe 30 other people living there with him, for seven months. They slept on their sides because there was no room for all to lie on their backs.
Haider Dawood, now 19, recalled his seven months in a similar cell, walked through it and picked up a strand of white cloth, the kind used to keep the prisoners blindfolded for days, weeks, at a time. He was 16 when he was taken there and beaten. Both men were convicted of holding a religious meeting, which they deny.
In some cells, there remained the marks inmates scratched into the walls to count the number of days they were held because there was no other way to tell how long they had been inside.
In a pile in one of the rooms used for torture were textbooks for children: a science book for third-graders, an agriculture book for sixth-graders. Whole families, including infants and toddlers, were held in this prison. This was a form of mercy, this keeping the families together.
Muhammed Tuma, 23, told how he was taken from his house. His arms were tied behind his back and the loop at his wrists was attached to the wrought iron on the ceiling. He swung there naked, he recalls. "I could hear my bones," he says.
Files were strewn on the floor in one of the administrative rooms. Among the papers was a catalog of the spying and snitching and snatching of people that Hussein's government used to keep his brand of order.
"The government will move people from Saddam City to the south," said an entry from June 26, 1991, a reference to the shuffling of Shiites after they staged a failed uprising in the months prior. "A man named Mahmoud Mehy, when he got into a taxi, had 25 counterfeit dinars. He said he got it from a man who sells cigarettes. We arrested both men," said another entry.
And another: "We visited the family of the executed, Jaliel Abid, of the Al-Daawa Party. Three others suspected of being in the party were arrested at his house."
"My first jail was something like this," says Abdul-Kareem. "All the jails were something like this."
Beating by guards
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.
"I could hear sounds from the other prisoners," he recalls. "They were shouting from the pain. I didn't know them and could not see them, only hear them."
After 10 days, the guards blindfolded him and took him to another room. They tied his hands behind his back. They hit him on his legs. "I don't know with what," he says. "Maybe wood."
Then they punched him in the mouth. They knocked out his four front teeth. He points to the replacements.
They asked him no questions for a week. They just tortured him.
"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."
Interrogations begin
After a week of this, with no questions asked of him, he went through the same treatment, but now being interrogated: Where was he going? Why? Was he meeting with people opposed to Hussein?
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.
"I did not know where he was," says his mother, Nahida Al-Bayati, who is 60. "We checked everywhere, called everywhere. We looked in hospitals."
All she knew was that her son had not come home from the army.
She found out where her son was a little more than six months after his ordeal began. He was transferred to the Abu Ghraib prison, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, the largest prison in Iraq, about a mile wide and a mile deep, and which held, by some estimates, as many as 50,000 prisoners at a time.
Another soldier whom Abdul-Kareem had befriended in the prison was being released, and he gave him the phone number to his home and asked him to call. He did.
"I knew the prison was bad," his mother says, "but I was happy he was alive."
On a Sunday a few weeks after his arrival at the prison, Abdul-Kareem went to the area where visitors meet inmates. He was not expecting to see his family. He had just wanted to see who was leaving; maybe he could pass a message to them to give to his family.
He did not know that his mother had awakened at 4 a.m. that day, had shuffled to a taxi, taken it to a bus station and arrived at the prison.
When he looked up in the prison yard, he saw an unmistakable roundish little woman.
"I ran to my mother," he says. "I ran to her and hugged her and we both were crying. We said nothing for five minutes. Just crying."
He did not tell her about the torture he had endured. That would come another day. She would visit him every Sunday, following the same routine.
"The taxi driver would say, 'Where are you going in this dark?' I said, 'I am going to the prison to see my son.'"
She did this for eight years. "Even if I was sick," she says. Like other family members coming to see inmates, she was hit by guards as she entered and left. There was always a crush at the gate. "By force, I had to get in. I picked up people just to get in. I did not want to leave him alone. I wanted to get him money, food."
Prisoners could buy morphine or other drugs with the money, but Abdul-Kareem says he used his mother's money to pay guards for favors, for extra food. His parents sold their house, their furniture, to give him money to give to Hussein's guards.
Now they live in a small apartment, three floors up, the same type of wrought iron that was used to hang her son showing through its crumbling stairs. The living room is about 6 feet by 15 feet. Six people live there. Ten used to.
Prisoners released
In October, after Hussein was "re-elected" with 100 percent of the vote, he released the prisoners of Abu Ghraib and those in many other of Iraq's prisons. Nobody is certain why, but the most common theory is that he was trying to gain support as the threat of war with the United States was increasing.
Abdul-Kareem's mother was visiting that day. She had turned from him and was about to leave the prison when it was announced that the prisoners would be released. She did not hear the news. Her son ran to her, grabbed her and told her. She waited with him for an hour, until visiting time was over. "I told her, 'Get out. This time I will come for you.'" She waited three hours in the sun, outside the prison, then went home.
He was freed.
"I forgot what the cars looked like, what the people were like outside," he says. He had money, from his mother. He had the address to the new apartment and took a bus near it, then walked. Across the block, he saw his father and a brother.
"I ran for them. My father was ill, and he could not move. I threw my bag down and hugged my father strongly and warmly. My father started to cry and so did I."
The son walked up the three floors to the apartment. When he opened the door, his mother was standing in its frame.
"I picked her up, I was so happy to see her."
"I hugged him," she says. "I didn't believe he would ever come back, and I started to cry."
Return to prison
Abu Ghraib prison is empty now. Last week, Abdul-Kareem walked through it, into the cell in which he was held for four years, into the second cell he stayed in for another four years. Both were 15 feet by 15 feet. Thirty men in each.
He went to the execution room, saw the nooses made of heavy rope still hanging at the scene of untold numbers of deaths. The trap doors beneath the rope were open. The levers that opened the doors still operated. Next to that room he walked into another room, where the dead bodies were washed.
He spoke of the men whom he had befriended in the prison. He told how one of them had a heart attack and was left by the guards to die.
"This is difficult for me," he says. "I don't like to remember those days."
At his mother's apartment, though, he says that he cannot forget his days in prison.
"I have to take some rest for my body and soul," he says. "I don't know what I am. I don't know what I will do." But the part of him that died, he says, maybe it is coming back.
"A strong man should be able to change his mind," Abdul-Kareem says. "Thank God I am starting to change my mind -- to not remember so much."
"It was better for him to die than to live through the worst moments," says his mother. "When you saw the people who did that to him, you were better off dead."
In central Baghdad, where U.S. military forces are based, the families of the missing continue to gather, to yell for help finding relatives.
Last week, the first mass graves found since the start of the war were being examined. They were found in Kirkuk, where Abdul-Kareem's journey to Abu Ghraib began.
Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun |
