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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neeka who wrote (171417)	6/27/2006 5:25:50 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 793843

I read that too, Neeka, and didn't know it. But as I've said many times, I'm not afraid of the chemicals...but rather the Bio weapons. Any of those droplets let loose that killed millions before, could easily do it again...especially if the original spores have been altered to do even worse damage than they did hundreds of years ago. Plague, for instance. Or smallpox. and heaven only knows what else.

To: Neeka who wrote (171417)	7/10/2006 1:33:45 AM
From: KLP	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793843

From Reuters, of all places: Hi-tech lab unearths horrors from Saddam's graves Sun Jul 9, 2006 9:49am ET BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Case No. 19 was about six months old when Iraqi soldiers forced the 300 women and children, one of them holding the baby, into a mass grave in the desert and killed each of them with a shot in the back of the head. Holding the infant among the piles of bodies was case No. 20, a woman in her thirties wearing purple and green Kurdish dresses, killed by a shot from the same 9 mm pistol. With the help of cutting-edge technology, U.S.-led forensic experts are uncovering evidence from mass graves of alleged victims of Saddam Hussein that Iraqi prosecutors hope will offer damning evidence in his trial for genocide against the Kurds. The bodies, believed to be from the Anfal campaign for which Saddam will face charges next month, have been painstakingly unearthed and analyzed in a laboratory near Baghdad and the graves mapped with digital photography and laser technology. The results are three-dimensional digital maps that allow experts to reconstruct anything from the trenches where victims were taken before being shot, to the trauma they suffered, to the bullets' trajectory or the exact position of the killers. As Saddam's trial for crimes against humanity for the killing of 148 Shi'ites in 1982 winds down, with defense lawyers due to make final arguments on Monday, experts say forensic evidence will play a crucial role in the Anfal case. "Almost everything we do is electronic," said Michael "Sonny" Trimble, a forensic archaeologist from Missouri who leads the team excavating the mass graves in Iraq. "We didn't have this technology 10 years ago," said Trimble, whose team has experience in Kosovo, Bosnia and Rwanda. Continued... The Dujail case over Shi'ite villagers, the first of many trials Saddam is likely to face for crimes during his rule, has rested almost entirely on witnesses' accounts and documents. The Anfal case is the first in which Saddam will be confronted with evidence from mass graves. By some estimates 4,500 villages were razed and hundreds of thousands killed during a 1988 campaign that still haunts northern Kurdistan. SYSTEMATIC KILLINGS The team has uncovered six grave sites, including one in northern Nineveh province, where experts exhumed the bodies of 123 women and children, all shot at close range. Three fetuses were also found at the site, which held a total of 300 bodies. In another grave in the south, experts exhumed 114 bodies, including 79 infants and children, of victims who were marched into a knee-high trench before being sprayed with bullets from AK-47 automatic rifles. "You can see they were sprayed left to right, top to bottom," said Christopher King, a pathologist in charge of putting together the trauma profile of each victim. Pointing to a hole in a femur lying on a table covered in a white cloth in his air-conditioned tent, King said: "It's an AK-47 bullet." The bodies are brought to the laboratory by helicopter after being exhumed from the graves. The bones undergo digital X-raying and are sealed. Many victims were carrying identification cards hidden in secret pockets or sewn inside clothes. Experts speculate they were suspicious when told they were being relocated from their Kurdish villages and brought their cards with them. Continued... "The women brought kitchen utensils and clothes for their children. They thought they were going on a trip," said Ariana Fernandez, an anthropologist in the cultural objects section. Fernandez has dressed mannequins in the victims' clothes, showing the bullet holes. One mannequin is a woman in the seventh month of pregnancy, dressed in a flowery green dress. "When I dress them I feel I am lifting the victims from the grave and giving them some height again. What's striking is that many of these women were wearing lively dresses with flower patterns when they were killed in the graves." Case No. 20, the woman found holding the baby, had a wooden spool, a comb and a makeup tin with her. She must have liked earrings. Her case file says that among her belongings were five pairs of earrings, including "one tear-drop-shaped medallion with mounted stones and gold beads." Case No. 19, who King believes was 6 months to a year old, was wearing a white T-shirt bearing the word "Summer". The mud-caked shirt is kept in Fernandez's tent. A DNA test will determine the relationship between Cases 19 and 20. "I sometimes wonder who died first. Was she her mother, her sister? Did they know where they were going? We will never know all their story," Fernandez said. (Baghdad newsroom, editing by Tim Pearce)