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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Clappy who wrote (18059)	4/25/2003 6:07:42 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Mass grave holds victims of Saddam's last purge By Catherine Philp IT WAS the stench that hit us first, gusting like a chemical cloud across the prison courtyard. The smell, unmistakable to anyone who has scented it, of human flesh slowly decomposing just under the surface of the earth. One by one, the grave diggers, toiling in a dust storm under a blazing sky, lifted the crumbling bodies from the clay-lined mass grave stretching along the prison lawn, in the shadow of an empty watchtower on top of the sprawling prison block. Each of the 13 corpses pulled from the ground was still dressed in his blue-and-white-striped prison pyjamas, his hands tied behind his back, a bullet hole in his skull and his face blindfolded by a thin strip of cloth. Anxious relatives of the missing, peering at each swollen face for any sign of recognition, covered their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs against the choking stench as the grisly disinterment rumbled on. I, too, held a handkerchief to my face, but not just against the smell. Exactly a month earlier my boyfriend, the British journalist Matthew McAllester, was arrested in his hotel room in Baghdad and brought to the same cell block in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison as the men now being dug up from the ground. For a week those men were his neighbours, men who ate the same tasteless food and stale bread rolls, who padded silently to the same filthy bathroom at the end of the corridor and gazed across the concrete corridor that ran along the centre of their prison block, reserved for foreigners and suspected spies. After eight days, he and four other Westerners arrested with him were suddenly released and swiftly deported from the country. The other inmates left in the block were to live for just seven more days. But none of us knew that then, of course. Arriving at the prison yesterday Said Hussein, a former inmate, guided us to the block where Matt and the others had been incarcerated. He had been in the neighbouring block, looking out on to the common courtyard, when the guards came for the men in the spy wing. “They took ten men from here and then three more from my block and led them away to the water tower,” he said, pointing along the dingy corridor. “Then I heard gunshots. Then the sound of a mechanical digger.” At first count, there were 16 cells. On further inspection, one was not a cell but a steel cupboard where prisoners “in need of discipline” were shut up for days at a time. Fifteen cells in all. Five Westerners released. Ten Iraqis killed. No one but Matt and the other Westerners had got out of that wing alive. Seven more days and they, too, could have gone down in history as members of Saddam’s final purge. We returned to the mass grave site, where the relatives of the missing were still digging for bodies. The task was hopeless. After more than a fortnight in the ground, the faces of the dead were unrecognisable. Still they carried on digging under the hot sun, gently laying out the bodies and cutting bindings from their wrists, trying delicately to remove the blindfolds melted on to their faces. One corpse pulled from the ground was missing all the toenails from his right foot, a classic method of torture in Saddam’s jails. One man held the identity cards of his son, Amr Abbas Mohammed, a member of the persecuted Sufi religious minority against whom Saddam had started a final crackdown in the last days of his regime. But the handsome young face staring out from the cards bore no resemblance to the bloated bodies. “They said he was a spy because he had a Thuraya phone,” Dasoul Abbas Mohammed said, referring to the make of handheld satellite phone strictly banned under Saddam’s regime. Such equipment was habitually used by members of opposition groups to keep in secret contact with associates outside Iraq, but many were used simply as a means to contact loved ones abroad. Matt’s possession of a Thuraya phone had come up regularly in his interrogations inside Abu Ghraib. For others it had cost them their lives. Hussein Shabani, a relative, spotting the mobile tucked into Matt’s pocket, asked shyly if he could use it to make a call to his relations in the States. Matt dialled the number scrawled on a piece of paper and handed the phone over to the man. It was only then that we realised he was using the phone to break the news of his brothers’ disappearance. “Our family is OK, but we lost two of them, we lost them to the Mukhabarat,” he shouted down the line. “We are looking for our brothers, but we haven’t found them. We will keep on looking.” timesonline.co.uk

To: Clappy who wrote (18059)	4/25/2003 6:17:44 PM
From: T L Comiskey	Respond to of 89467

warped minds........ 'I think not'......<g> Anatta - The Teaching on Not-Self Who am I? One of the most challenging teachings of Buddhism is that relating to the idea of 'not-self' or anatta. Whereas both Christianity and Islam have the notion of an individual soul, and whereas Hinduism has the idea of atman, Buddhism offers a different perspective altogether. Buddhism argues that there is no such thing as a permanent self or soul, a very difficult notion to grasp, even on a conceptual level, let alone realizing it experientially. But if there is no such thing as a permanent self or soul, then the obvious question is - who is this person that eats, drinks, breathes, thinks, forms relationships and has a career? Who am I? The Five Khandhas Although Buddhism denies the existence of a permanent self, it does explain that each of us is made up of five personality factors known as khandhas, namely, feeling, corporeality, consciousness, perception and mental formations (including volition or will). None of these either collective or individually can be said to constitute a permanent self, an undying essence. Each is subject to the laws of change and disintegration that govern all phenomena. I am not exactly the same person as I was yesterday - my body has aged: it may be my perspective on life has change, however, minutely; I'm feeling happy today whereas yesterday I was feeling miserable. To cling to any of these khandhas is to try to hang on to things that are impermanent, that will eventually pass away. This immediately brings us back to the four noble truths. Suffering is caused by craving. Consequently, if we try to cling to these ever-changing factors is to heap up on ourselves a whole lot of suffering. Rebirth? But if there is no permanent self, what happens to me, as a person, when I die? Buddhism, of course, has the idea of rebirth, which needs to be distinguished from the word 'reincarnation', a term used more often to describe the passage of a soul from the body of this life to a new one in the next. In Buddhism, the consciousness that arises at conception is not the same as the consciousness of the individual at death but nor it is totally different. It's best to see the movement from this life to the next as a continuum rather than the passage of one self-contained essence into a new body. There is no transference of a permanent self as there is no permanent self. It's not that Buddhism denies the obvious fact that we, as individuals, exist. We exist, yes, but not in the way we think we do!

To: Clappy who wrote (18059)	4/25/2003 6:47:50 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 89467

Torture files offer chilling details Niko Price The Associated Press Friday, April 25, 2003 BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The file drawers fill room after room, papers spilling out. Inside, recorded with chilling bureaucratic detail, are the informants' reports, court records, confessions and execution orders for thousands of Iraqi dissidents. The government files, shown yesterday to The Associated Press, could be the basis for Iraqis to begin to come to terms with their past -- or could be the catalyst for a new wave of bloodletting. "Saddam Hussein kept these files because he thought he would rule forever," said a dissident who was imprisoned, Ibrahim al-Idrissi. "He is a terrorist, the No. 1 terrorist in the world." The files have been collected over the past two weeks by the Committee of Free Prisoners, a group of Iraqis who had been arrested for dissident activities but were freed. The files chronicle the cases of thousands of prisoners who never made it out. The files were maintained by the General Security Directorate, Iraq's equivalent of the FBI. Mr. al-Idrissi refused to say exactly how they were obtained, but his colleague Satar Jabar Mohsen said some were discovered in a room inside the al-Mansour Shopping Centre; others were taken from private businesses and homes. The covers of the files, many held together by yellowing tape, list names, professions, birth dates, birthplaces and charges. Inside are documents related to their cases. There are also photographs, including before-and-after snapshots of torture victims. One man is shown in a long beard in what appeared to be a booking photo. Another picture in the file shows the same man, his left arm cut off just below the shoulder, his ribs exposed where the skin over his chest had been seared off. Mr. Mohsen said the man had been tortured with electric shocks and mutilated. Members of the Committee of Free Prisoners said they were not permitting the public to see the files yet, for fear that they would inspire revenge against informants. Guards with Kalashnikov rifles watch the building where the files are now housed. Iraq Aftermath © Copyright 2003 The Ottawa Citizen canada.com