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Banned
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"'I am still afraid,' he murmured. 'Saddam is alive and so are all those closest to him. We don't know if one day the regime will come back. Those who did this to me are still around, We just don't know their faces. They just took off their uniforms and went home. They are still out there and we are still afraid.'"
-- Mutilation victim quoted in The Sunday Times (London), April 20, 2003
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"Former prisoners of ousted president Saddam Hussein's government are everywhere in Basra, standing on street corners waiting for water, rummaging through papers in the headquarters of the once feared secret police, sitting quietly at home on a hot afternoon. These are the tortures they describe, and more: a prisoner forced to sit on a heated metal stove, electric shocks applied to genitals, a small blade used to slash a prisoner's back. Even doctors became torturers; they cut off army deserters' ears. Servants of the system fell victim to it, too: police officers and prison guards arrested, tortured, then sent back to work. Torture was considered so routine that many former prisoners shrugged at first when asked about it. 'Of course, they tortured me. Beating people here is something regular,' said Maithem Naji."
-- The Washington Post, April 19, 2003
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"The picture that emerged of the intelligence service here was of a kind of sadistic shakedown operation, where agents took prisoners to satisfy their masters but extracted money to satisfy themselves.
"Other men returning here said the interrogators had gone even further, demanding sex with female relatives when no money could be paid. In most cases, the prisoners said, bribes were paid, women were offered, but the prisoner remained in jail.
"'My family paid them everything we had, $25,000, and still they did not release me,' Mr. Masawi said."
-- The New York Times, April 21, 2003
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"Tens of thousands of security files on Iraqis have been found in a huge underground vault beneath the headquarters of Saddam Hussein's most feared secret police agency, the legacy of a Soviet-style domestic spying system that controlled everything from job assignments to whether a person would live or die.
"The files include the mundane -- a man denied the right to leave the country because he refused a job transfer -- and the chilling -- a 19-year-old high school student hanged because he admitted he was the leader of a cell of a banned political party.
"'By God, this is everyone in Iraq,' translator George Yousef muttered as he entered the records vault, about twice the size of a basketball court, discovered two days ago by U.S. marines and visited by a journalist Sunday."
-- Knight-Ridder Newspapers, April 21, 2003
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"Maithan Al Naji had a visit from a United Nations relief team. Anwar Abdul Al Razaq got sick. Zuhair H. Jawa Kubba had American dollars in his pocket. Jawad Abdul Al Naby smuggled some sheep. Because these things happened, these men were beaten with steel rods, had electrodes placed on their genitals, were hung from their arms until their shoulders were dislocated, were suspended by their ankles over the stone floor of a cell while their torturers whipped them with electric cables and pulverized their knuckles with wooden clubs."
-- Newsday, April 21, 2003
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"'I went to kill one person, but suddenly I saw he had guards with him, so I killed four or five of his guards,' Ali recalled. 'After that, we cut off his head and we put it in a bag and we brought it to Baghdad from Karbala at 4 a.m. We put it in front of Uday's office. He asked us to bring his head.'"
-- The Washington Post, April 22, 2003
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"'As I began to cut Uday's hair, this man [Uday's press secretary] was praying as they [Uday's bodyguards] extracted his teeth with pliers. But my hands didn't shake. I was always very careful. I knew a small mistake would be the end of me.'"
-- Marwan Ali, Uday Hussein's barber, Daily Mail (London), April 22, 2003
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"Ali belonged to Saddam's Fedayeen, a security force led by Hussein's elder son, Uday. For the better part of a decade, he recalled, he assassinated opposition figures, broke the backs of those accused of lying to the government and chopped off tongues, fingers, hands and once even a head.
"'It didn't matter if we felt he was guilty or not guilty. We had to do it,' he explained. 'These people were against Saddam Hussein. If we got orders to punish him, we would go and do it. If Uday said to cut off his tongue, we would do it. Or his hands or fingers or his head. Anything. We would do it.'"
"'I just followed orders,'" he said.
-- The Washington Post, April 22, 2003
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"Iraq became one of the few nations that legally sanctioned the use of torture in pre-trial investigations, and as a punitive measure. The death sentence was prescribed for a large variety of offenses including usurpation of public money, corruption, insulting the presidency, and treason -- loosely defined. Law became whimsical and contingent on the will of the party and president. Even foreign investments were dependent on the good will of the ruling elite, often tapping into a network of businessmen sanctioned and protected by a Saddam family clique."
-- Khaled Abou El Fadl, op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2003
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"I was sitting outside my father's house in a village near Tikrit on Friday when two carloads of fedayeen stopped. They got out and began to beat me and accuse me of being a saboteur. Then they shot me in the leg. They took me to the police station and kept me for three nights, saying they would kill me. Then yesterday they just disappeared. And at 7am this morning (Monday) an American Marine came and let me out of my cell. I feel very lucky."
-- Khalid Jauhr, an Iraqi Kurd, in the Daily Mail (London), April 15, 2003
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"'I am from the city of Kirkuk and for the last ten years I have been unable to return to my home there because of Saddam. Seven of my relatives were executed there by his security police when this war started. But God willing and with the help of Britain and the United States I can go back home now and live in peace.'"
-- Prshing Mohamed, Iraqi Kurd in Northern Iraq, in the Daily Mail (London), April 10, 2003
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"Ahmed [writer Ahmed Shawkut] went to prison again in 1997. This time, it was his second collection of short stories that did him in. The government had approved the book, but Ahmed sneaked into one of the stories a poorly veiled allegory criticizing Hussein.
"The Mukhabarat was not amused. Agents collected the entire 1,000-copy print run from the Mosul bazaar, piled the books on the ground and ordered Ahmed to torch them. After that, all he needed to do to make things right for the regime was to serve nine months of solitary confinement in a rat-infested cell."
-- San Francisco Chronicle, April 2, 2003
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"The few Iraqi men of Pumping Station No. 1 tried to protect it as if it were their own. In the end, they lost tools, spare parts and important records to gangs ransacking the oil complex. But they saved the new red fire engine; a quick-thinking operations manager drove it home.
"Over the weekend, the men sat silently, their faces clouded with doubt and fear, as an American oil engineer tried to convince them the station - and the oil flowing through it - really do belong to them and the Iraqi people.
"Under Saddam's regime, the workers said, the station was a place where they had to be careful in their work and careful what they said. On the payroll as a mechanic was a Baath Party official whose real job was to ensure loyalty to the Iraqi dictator.
"Any workers who complained 'would disappear in the night,' said Muslim Yehia, a technician. 'We don't know if they were killed or tortured or ran away.'"
-- USA Today, April 14, 2003
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"U.S. soldiers with tanks and armoured vehicles took over the sprawling compound of Baghdad's military intelligence headquarters on Friday after local people thronged the compound searching for missing relatives.
"Reuters correspondent Khaled Yacoub Oweis said he heard one explosion. It was not clear what caused it. Earlier, Iraqi civilians had been digging feverishly, saying they believed relatives were trapped in underground dungeons used by Saddam Hussein's feared security apparatus."
-- Reuters, April 11, 2003
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"The Baath Party completely dominated life in Iraq. Until this week, every neighborhood had a Baath official who kept tabs on the area, ran a network of informants and recruited members into the party, say Iraqis. It wasn't difficult to figure out who they were: They had the best cars and the nicest houses and they had money to throw around."
"It didn't take much to run afoul of the party. A wrong word or chance comment within earshot of an informant often was enough to earn an interrogation or worse, according to residents of southern Iraq. There was little accountability, charges were difficult to counter and informants were eager to turn in 'troublemakers' to prove their own value."
"Ordinary people living in this kind of pressure cooker, where any misstep could be fatal, generally avoided sharing their true feelings with anyone but their closest friends and relatives. Making sure children didn't say an errant word before they understood the implications was also an essential survival tactic. 'You only talked when you were sitting with your very, very closest friends,' said Raheem Khagany, 24, an assistant engineering professor. 'If a Baath member heard you, you could be executed.'"
-- Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2003
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"...[S]ecret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails). One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss."
-- Eason Jordan, CNN chief news executive, in The New York Times, April 11, 2003
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"U.S. soldiers with tanks and armoured vehicles took over the sprawling compound of Baghdad's military intelligence headquarters on Friday after local people thronged the compound searching for missing relatives.
"Reuters correspondent Khaled Yacoub Oweis said he heard one explosion. It was not clear what caused it. Earlier, Iraqi civilians had been digging feverishly, saying they believed relatives were trapped in underground dungeons used by Saddam Hussein's feared security apparatus."
-- Reuters, April 11, 2003
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"The Baath Party completely dominated life in Iraq. Until this week, every neighborhood had a Baath official who kept tabs on the area, ran a network of informants and recruited members into the party, say Iraqis. It wasn't difficult to figure out who they were: They had the best cars and the nicest houses and they had money to throw around. ... It didn't take much to run afoul of the party. A wrong word or chance comment within earshot of an informant often was enough to earn an interrogation or worse, according to residents of southern Iraq. There was little accountability, charges were difficult to counter and informants were eager to turn in 'troublemakers' to prove their own value. ... Ordinary people living in this kind of pressure cooker, where any misstep could be fatal, generally avoided sharing their true feelings with anyone but their closest friends and relatives. Making sure children didn't say an errant word before they understood the implications was also an essential survival tactic. 'You only talked when you were sitting with your very, very closest friends,' said Raheem Khagany, 24, an assistant engineering professor. 'If a Baath member heard you, you could be executed.'"
-- Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2003
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"A burly 39-year-old man named Qifa, assigned by Mr. Hussein's Information Ministry to keep watch on an American reporter, paused at midmorning, outside the inferno that had been the headquarters of Iraq's National Olympic Committee, to ask the reporter to grip his hand. The building, used to torture and kill opponents of Mr. Hussein, had been one of the most widely feared places in Iraq.
"'Touch me, touch me, tell me that this is real, tell me that the nightmare is really over,' the man said, tears running down his face."
-- New York Times, April 4, 2003
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"One middle-aged man held up a huge portrait of Saddam and used his shoe to beat the face of the Iraqi leader, a particular insult. 'This man has killed 2 million of us,' he yelled as bystanders milled around approvingly.
"The looters roamed unhindered through police stations, government ministries and other buildings. A favorite spot was the Al-Sinaa sports complex that held thousands of new athletic shoes and was alleged to be the site of an Iraqi torture chamber."
-- Orlando Sentinel, April 10, 2003
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