Cont'd from story.news.yahoo.com
What followed, with disastrous consequences for Baghdad's museums
and libraries, for some of its hospitals, and for virtually all government
ministries, was an orgy of looting. For many Iraqis, this blunted, even
eradicated, much of the gratitude to the Americans. Especially among the
middle class, many of whom had found ways to live comfortably under
Mr. Hussein, the mood shifted.
"Tell Mr. Bush that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this
is no liberation," said Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammad, an archaeologist
standing amid the shattered, emptied showcases of the National
Museum. "Tell him, if we had stayed under the rule of Saddam Hussein, it
would have been much better."
But there were few misgivings in the ruins of Mr. Hussein's bombed
palaces, where those who arrived to plunder, by car, on motorcycles,
with handcarts and even with double-decker buses, came from every
walk of life. For them, picking out a chair or a sofa from the rubble, or
even a cut-crystal ashtray, was not so much an act of lawless self
enrichment as a gesture of self assertion, a chance to strike back, a
moment to stand up after years of subjugation.
A woman who said she was a pharmacist paused for a moment outside
the Sajida Palace, named for Mr. Hussein's wife, with her husband, an
orthopedic surgeon, and their two daughters. "I feel no shame," she said,
gesturing to a few bags filled with tokens from the palace. "We paid for
these things a hundred times over." She paused. "Not a hundred times,"
she said. "A thousand times."
Just then, a middle-aged man passed by, and asked, like so many Iraqis
in recent days, for assurance that Mr. Hussein was truly gone. "Hello
mister," he said in broken English. "Saddam not come another time?
Saddam go, stay away? Tell me, mister, please, Saddam gone?"
Secrets and Lies
A rigorous system for controlling and monitoring Western journalists has
been in place in Iraq for decades, based on a wafer-thin facade of
civility. As the strains of the war mounted, that facade progressively
slipped away, revealing the realities of threat and extortion that Iraqis
confronted almost every day under Mr. Hussein.
Long before the war, many reporters had adjusted to the pressures by
seeking the approbation of the Information Ministry officials who
approved visas, assigned minders and controlled special favors. Bribes
were endemic, with some officials demanding sums in the thousands of
dollars for visa approvals and extensions, or obtaining exemptions from
the AIDS (news - web sites) tests required for any reporter remaining in
Baghdad for more than 10 days.
A tacit understanding, accepted by many visiting journalists, was that
there were aspects of Mr. Hussein's Iraq that could be mentioned only
obliquely. First among these was the personality of Mr. Hussein himself,
and the fact that he was widely despised and feared by Iraqis, something
that was obvious to any visitor ready to listen to the furtive whispers in
which this hatred was commonly expressed.
The terror that was the most pervasive aspect of society under Mr.
Hussein was another topic that was largely taboo. Every interview
conducted by television reporters, and most print journalists, was
monitored; any Iraqi voicing an opinion other than those approved by the
state would be vulnerable to arrest, torture and execution. But these were
facts rarely mentioned by many reporters.
Some reporters bought expensive gifts for senior ministry officials,
submitted copies of their stories to show they were friendly to Iraq, or
invited key officials like Uday al-Ta'ee, director general of information,
for dinners at the expensive restaurants favored by Mr. Hussein's elite.
Mr. Ta'ee, in his early 50's, previously worked at the Iraqi Embassy in
Paris where, French intelligence officials said, he ran a network of Iraqi
agents in Western Europe. Eventually, he was expelled from France, a
subject that still rankled years later.
Before the war, this reporter was already on a blacklist Iraqi officials
maintained for journalists considered hostile to Iraq, mainly because of
articles about the system of terror that sustained the power of Mr.
Hussein that appeared from Baghdad in the closing months of last year.
For two months, in January and February, the Information Ministry
blocked my visa requests. Eventually, through contacts in Amman,
Jordan, I obtained a Foreign Ministry visa that allowed me to enter Iraq
to cover the "peace movement," as represented by Western protesters
then gathering in Baghdad. The visa came without Information Ministry
approval.
On arrival in Baghdad, I sought a meeting with Mr. Ta'ee, the
Information Ministry director. After three days, he met me in his office,
and immediately referred to stories printed in The New York Times in
previous months that chronicled the torture and killing in Iraq's jails. Mr.
Ta'ee's opening remarks were remarkable. "You have written a great
deal about killing in Iraq, and this is good," he said. "This is a shame for
Iraq. But now America will be killing Iraqis. Will you write about that?"
Assured that I would, he shook my hand, and said I would be issued the
accreditation necessary to work in Iraq.
But other Information Ministry officials warned me that this was a ruse,
and that I would henceforth be "under the control" of the intelligence
agencies, not of the Information Ministry. A senior intelligence agent, who
gave his name as Sa'ad Muthanna, was assigned as my minder. Mr.
Ta'ee distanced himself, calling out, often in the presence of other Iraqi
officials and Western reporters, what was either a black joke or a threat.
"Ah," he would say, "the most dangerous man in Iraq!"
Personal Experience
None of this made much practical difference until eight days before the
tanks of the Third Battalion of the First Marine Expeditionary Force
drove from southern Baghdad to take control of the two hotels.
At midnight on April 1, without warning, a group of men led by Mr.
Muthanna, identifying themselves as intelligence agents, broke into my
room at the Palestine Hotel. The men, in suits and ties, at least one with a
holstered pistol under his jacket, said they had known "for a long time"
that I was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites),
that I was from that moment under arrest, and that a failure to
"cooperate" would lead to more serious consequences.
"For you, it will be the end," Mr. Muthanna said. "Where we will take
you, you will not return."
The men gathered up all the equipment belonging to me and to Tyler
Hicks, a staff photographer of The New York Times, including four
laptop computers, a satellite telephone, two cameras and a printer, and
then demanded money, taking $6,000 from a plastic zip-lock bag. Then
they left, ordering me to remain in my room until "more senior"
intelligence men arrived.
From that moment until the arrival of the American tanks, I lived a
clandestine existence, using darkened hotel stairwells in place of
elevators, sleeping and working in other reporters' rooms.
The fact that the men never returned and never broke into other rooms
where they must have known I was hiding suggested, in the end, that the
break-in of April 1 was a shakedown. Some missing equipment turned
up later in a room at the Palestine Hotel that had been abandoned by
intelligence agents. The rest, excepting the two cameras, was returned by
an Iraqi man with links to the mukhabarat, the principal intelligence
agency, who led me to his home and handed the equipment over. The
money remains missing.
To many Iraqis who heard of the experience, it was unexceptional, save
for the fact that I suffered no physical harm. For years, Mr. Hussein's
security agents had been breaking into Iraqis' homes, arresting people at
will, and taking them away to the gulag of torture centers and prisons.
Some emerged weeks, months, or years later, many of them disfigured,
with eyes gouged out, hands and fingers mangled. But tens of thousands
never returned, dying under torture, or being summarily executed.
The anguish of their families, lining up to wave photographs and shout
names at American troops guarding the now abandoned interrogation
centers and prisons, has been among the most distressing scenes since
the fall of Mr. Hussein. For them, there is unlikely to be any of the
catharsis that came at the Palestine Hotel in the 12 hours before the
marines arrived.
Mr. Ta'ee, in the hours before midnight, toured the rooftop positions of
Western television networks, demanding immediate cash payment, in
dollars, of the exorbitant fees imposed by the ministry on all Western
journalists. Offering no receipts, he gathered a hefty sum estimated by
some of the networks to be in excess of $200,000 then disappeared.
One of his underlings, a Mr. Mohsen, the Information Ministry's press
center director, known for his lugubrious manner, delayed his getaway
until the following morning. His ambitions were set on the property of a
group of Italian journalists who had driven into southern Iraq after the
war began without visas. They were arrested, brought to Baghdad, and
placed under guard in the Palestine Hotel, with their vehicles and all their
equipment confiscated, along with the vehicles' keys.
Early on the morning of April 9, with the marines less than three miles
from the hotel, one of the Italians spotted Mr. Mohsen loading booty into
one of the confiscated vehicles. Thinking quickly, the Italian used his
penknife to slash the vehicle's tires. Other Italian journalists described
Mr. Mohsen fleeing on foot, up the Tigris embankment to the north,
pursued by the men he hoped to rob. After a few hundred yards,
exhausted, he stopped, turned to face his pursuers, and, as if to establish
that he was done with Mr. Hussein and all his works, reached into his
pocket for his Information Ministry identification card. After ripping it to
shreds, he set off again, to what fate nobody knows. |
