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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend.... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (5812)	11/10/2004 2:27:58 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Reporter's Notebook: Saddam's 'Killing Field' Sunday, October 17, 2004 By Greg Palkot BAGHDAD, Iraq — The images were shocking. A trench with piles of clothed bodies packed tightly together. Men, women, little children. Even unborn children. Some blindfolded. Some with their hands bound. All slaughtered in cold blood by the henchmen of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (search). All of this horror was discovered in another mass grave in the desert wasteland of northwestern Iraq, near the town of Hatra. It was discovered a year ago, and only now is it being carefully and scientifically excavated by the Regime Crimes Liaison Office (search). This agency, part of the U.S. Justice Department, is working with the Iraqi interim government to map out the horrors of the Hussein past. The head of the unit, Greg Kehoe, who has seen more than his share of horrors in places such as the Balkans, couldn’t believe what he saw. "I’ve never seen women and children executed, defenseless people executed in this fashion," he said. "I mean, you look at a young woman holding her 2-year-old child with a gunshot wound to the back of the head. I can’t find any reason to justify that." When I saw the images I could only think back to Hilla, a town south of Baghdad where I went in the spring of 2003, just after the fall of Saddam. A mass grave of Iraqi Shiites was discovered there. I will never forget it for as long as I live. Thousands of bodies. Thousands of families swarming over piles of clothing and flesh. Earth-moving equipment digging through the raw humanity. Digging up the past. Some of these people were opponents of the regime, gunned down after an uprising against Saddam in 1991 and then dumped in big trenches. Women and civilians were also among the victims. Beyond the visual impression, though, it is the smell that I will never forget. The bodies had been underground for over 10 years, but you could still feel the rot of the past. The remainder and reminder of life, snuffed out by a horrendous regime. The scene was pure chaos. People were running from pile to pile, looking for loved ones long lost. With so much emotion built up you could imagine and understand why no one was carefully going about the business of sorting through the human debris. And the lucky ones were satisfied enough to bring away their family members in crudely made coffins for long-postponed burials. There was only one problem with that scene: Saddam got off the hook. It didn't seem that enough could have been done to carefully record who was killed, how they were killed and where they were found. And so no real evidence could have been gathered that might be used in, say, a war crimes trial against Saddam Hussein and the thugs who took his orders. That is what the team at this latest mass grave is trying to rectify. It is believed these bodies came from Sulamaniyah (search), one of the major cities of Kurdistan. The Kurds were one of the mass groups of people in Iraq that the Iraqi leader despised. At the time of one of the Kurdish uprisings against Baghdad in 1987-88, these people were shuttled over to this desolate spot and killed. But thanks to this isolated location of horror and the team's organization, this "war crime" scene has been preserved and can be handled in a proper way. Body locations are mapped, and then the bodies are exhumed from the location and taken to a moveable morgue where the corpses undergo more scrutiny. All of that information and evidence will then be provided to the Iraqi Special Tribunal, which is preparing the case against Hussein and others. Here’s how archaeologist Sonny Trimble put it: “Our real, ultimate goal is to get evidence that’s so tight that when they bring certain regime leaders to trial, it’s very tight, just like any trial you would have in the United States or anywhere else in the world.” It’s thought that there are as many as 3,000 bodies at this one site alone, but the workers will only unearth 200 to 300. There is not enough time for more, but there are many more sites to examine. By one estimate, 300,000 people were slaughtered during Saddam's rule and dumped in 40 different mass grave sites around the country. There is something else that will come of this: Once the legal value can be obtained from the site, the emotional worth can be salvaged, too. It is said that photographs of all of those found, including just the remains, will be brought to their former home for possible identification by families. Maybe these and other victims of the now long-gone regime can get a proper burial, not just a killing field. foxnews.com

To: Sully- who wrote (5812)	12/2/2004 4:39:55 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Jane Galt - Anatomy of Evil From a New Yorker article on De-Baathification: I asked Alusi what Baathism had meant to him as a young man. "It was like magic," he said. "The Baath Party gave us the opportunity to do something important." One of the opportunitites enjoyed by young Baathists was access to power. Under Saddam, the Party was melded with the secret police and the state intelligence organisation. Membership was a requirement for many government jobs, and Baathists were required to inform on their neighbours, their co-workers, and one another. During one of Saddam's hallmark purges in 1979, several ministers were handed weapons and ordered to kill colleagues whom Saddam had just declared to be "traitors". One of the steps in teh appeals processs for former Baathists was attendance at a thirty-day de-Baathification course . . . I attended a graduation ceremony in a seminar room in Baghdad University, where a hundred or so middle-aged men and women, most of them professors and doctors, sat expectantly. Alusi walked in with a half-dozen bodyguards. He took the microphone, smiled, and began to talk in a rambling fashion about how the United States had liberated Iraqis, how the Coalition was on a par with the alliance against Hitler, and how Iraq now depended upon the good will of the U.S. Men from Alusi's office began taping posters to the wall behind the stage. The posters showed decayed bodies and skeletons piled in unearthed mass graves, and they elicited muffled exclamations from the audience. A man raised his hand. "Why are you putting up those posters?" he asked. "Everyone here was forced to join the Baath Party. We didn't have anything to do with those crimes." "These are the bodies of Iraqis," Alusi replied. "Why shouldn't we look at them?" A man called out, "Mr. Alusi, I feel frightened when I see these pictures. Many people may not distinguish between the criminals who did these things and innocent people like us." "The Iraqi people are not idiots," Alusi replied. "I know there are good citizens among you, but we cannot close the files, because the files are full of crimes. The problem is for those who committed crimes. What shall I do, put away the posters, omit the truth? No, we cannot. If we omit this, we omit our history." The man smiled politedly but didn't say anything. Alusi stood up, and the people in the room filed over to officials sitting at tables to obtain their de-Baathification certificates. Later, Alusi told me that he had meant to be provocative. "There is a duality in Baathists," he said. "You can find a Baathist who is a killer, but at home, with his family, he's completely normal. It's like they split their day into two twelve-hour blocks. When people say about someone I know to be a Baathist criminal, 'No, he's a good neighbor!' I believe them. The Baath Party is like the Nazi Party, or like the Mafia. If you meet them, they are simpatico. And this is why it's very difficult for us to do our work, which is to change--really change--Iraqi society." janegalt.net

To: Sully- who wrote (5812)	12/14/2004 6:43:14 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Uh huh! Bush was soooo wrong for removing Saddam. Tell that to the dead that we keep digging up in mass graves.... New Iraq Mass Grave May Contain 500 Bodies Outside the beltway Posted by James Joyner at 09:30 New Iraq Mass Grave May Contain 500 Bodies (Reuters) Laborers digging on a construction site in northern Iraq uncovered human skulls and bones on Tuesday, which interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said were part of a mass grave believed to contain some 500 bodies. Allawi told Iraq's National Council in Baghdad that the grave was found near the city of Sulaimaniya in the autonomous Kurdish region in the northeast of the country, where Saddam Hussein's forces carried out atrocities in the late 1980s. "Today a mass grave was discovered in the city of Sulaimaniya, with the initial number of 500 martyrs," he said. *** The work of excavating those mass graves already discovered around Iraq has been greatly complicated by an insurgency among Saddam's Sunni Arab minority. Investigators have been unable to visit many sites because of fighting. >>> An amazing juxtaposition, indeed, with people fighting against the forces which liberated the country from such as this. outsidethebeltway.com

To: Sully- who wrote (5812)	12/16/2004 1:29:56 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 35834

Over One Million Still Missing From Saddam's Reign Command-Post From the AFP via the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) : <<< Iraq has urged the international community to help it find more than 1 million people who have gone missing or disappeared over the past 25 years, mainly during the rule of Saddam Hussein. It also pushed the plight of some 1.5 million Iraqis who have been displaced inside the war-weary country as the cold winter months draw in. Officials from about 60 countries, including the United States, Britain and Japan, UN agencies and other advocacy groups met with Iraq’s Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin and Justice Minister Malek Dohan Al Hassan in Geneva to discuss plans to improve the country’s human rights situation. “One important issue we are [exploring] with the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross and we are looking for international support for it is the issue of missing persons, disappeared and mass graves,” the human rights minister, Mr Amin, told reporters. “We have more than 1 million missing persons and possibly disappeared people and we have found, up to now, 283 mass grave sites in Iraq,” he said. The people included those who vanished during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the first Gulf War in 1990-1991 and last year’s US-led invasion, said John Pace, the Amman-based head of the United Nations human rights office at the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq. In addition, some 700 to 800 bodies needed to be identified every month in the Baghdad area alone, Mr Amin told a news conference, noting that the country had no DNA laboratories and a severe shortage of forensic experts. >>> As reported in a previous post, European Forensic experts have declined to help in Iraq, due to the possibility that their evidence might be used to convict Saddam Hussein of capital crimes. Posted By Alan E Brain command-post.org

To: Sully- who wrote (5812)	4/15/2005 6:17:58 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (11) \| Respond to of 35834

More mass graves found..... Iraqis Find Graves Thought to Hold Hussein's Victims The New York Times By ROBERT F. WORTH Published: April 15, 2005 AGHDAD, Iraq, April 14 - Investigators have discovered several mass graves in southern Iraq that are believed to contain the bodies of people killed by Saddam Hussein's government, including one estimated to hold 5,000 bodies, Iraqi officials say. The graves, discovered over the past three months, have not yet been dug up because of the risks posed by the continuing insurgency and the lack of qualified forensic workers, said Bakhtiar Amin, Iraq's interim human rights minister. But initial excavations have substantiated the accounts of witnesses to a number of massacres. If the estimated body counts prove correct, the new graves would be among the largest in the grim tally of mass killings that have gradually come to light since the fall of Mr. Hussein's government two years ago. At least 290 grave sites containing the remains of some 300,000 people have been found since the American invasion two years ago, Iraqi officials say. Forensic evidence from some graves will feature prominently in the trials of Mr. Hussein and the leaders of his government. The trials are to start this spring. One of the graves, near Basra, in the south, appears to contain about 5,000 bodies of Iraqi soldiers who joined a failed uprising against Mr. Hussein's government after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. Another, near Samawa, is believed to contain the bodies of 2,000 members of the Kurdish clad led by Massoud Barzani. As many as 8,000 men and boys from the clan disappeared in 1983 after being rounded up in northern Iraq by security forces at the command of Ali Hassan al-Majid, widely known as Chemical Ali. It remains unclear, however, how the victims ended up in the south. Investigators have also discovered the remains of 58 Kuwaitis spread across several sites, including what appears to be a family of two adults and five children who were crushed by a tank, Mr. Amin said. At least 605 Kuwaitis disappeared at the time of the first gulf war, and before the latest graves were discovered, fewer than 200 had been accounted for, he added. A smaller site was discovered near Nasiriya earlier this week. Arabic satellite television showed images of residents digging up remains there. Mr. Amin declined to give the exact locations of the graves, saying it could endanger witnesses to the massacres and anyone working at the sites. One obstacle to exhuming bodies has been an absence of DNA labs and forensic anthropologists in Iraq, Mr. Amin said. In the aftermath of Mr. Hussein's fall, thousands of Iraqis overran mass grave sites, digging for their relatives' remains with backhoes, shovels, even their bare hands. A number of sites were looted, making identification of victims difficult, said Hanny Megally, Middle East director for the International Center for Transitional Justice. The American occupation authority, after some initial hesitation, began classifying grave sites, and international teams began traveling to the sites in 2003 to conduct assessments or exhumations. But toward the end of 2004, rising violence led nearly all the teams to abandon their work. Only one site has been fully examined, a grave of Kurdish victims in northern Iraq, Mr. Megally said. That work was overseen by the Regime Crimes Liaison Office, which is gathering evidence for the trials of Mr. Hussein and his deputies. The interim Iraqi government, working with the United Nations, has drawn up plans for a National Center for Missing and Disappeared Persons that would have authority over all aspects of the process, from exhumations to providing assistance to victims' families. nytimes.com