|
Banned
|
She spent one year being moved from prison to torture center to prison and back. Her tormenters would hang her from a hook in the ceiling by her arms, which were bound behind her back. Sometimes they added electric shocks. Sometimes they beat her on the soles of her feet until they were engorged with blood and her toenails fell off. She was 25.
"'I was lucky that I became like a dead body,' she said. 'I didn't know what was going on around me. There was no water, no bathroom. The only food was two big pots they brought in, one with dirty rice and one of soup. You had to fight for it. If you were strong and healthy, you'd get food. If you were weak, you'd wait.'
"After the torture came the sham trial, then a sentence to spend her life at Rashad women's prison, a maze of unheated cells where the sewage would float from the one toilet down the corridors and seep onto the women's rough mattresses."
-- The New York Times, June 2, 2003
------
"First they broke his right arm with a pipe. Then they punctured his right eardrum with a skewer. And then they tried to break his right leg with a bat. But when the X-rays that Uday Hussein demanded as proof of their efficiency showed in fact they had not broken Tariq Abdul Whab's leg, his captors took him back to prison where someone smashed his right leg with such ferocity that his toe hit his kneecap. Mr. Whab received all this treatment simply because Uday thought the sports television reporter was being disloyal to him by talking to soccer players he didn't like."
-- The Vancouver Sun, May 3, 2003
------
"...Turkish officials were told how Turkomans and Kurds were tortured together by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi police at the notorious security headquarters of Kirkuk. 'I was taken into custody and forced to sit on my knees for six days in a cell one meter by one meter along with a Kurdish prisoner,' a Turkoman man told the group. The man, who asked not to be named, said, 'Even this shows how we and the Kurds suffered the same fate in this city.'"
-- Turkish Daily News, April 29, 2003
------
"As part of the prison routine, Issa was tortured daily, sometimes twice a day. Battery acid was spilled on his feet, which are now deformed. With his hands bound behind his back, he was hanged by his wrists from the ceiling until his shoulders dislocated; he still cannot lift his hands above his head. The interrogators' goal: 'They just wanted me to say I was plotting against the Baath Party, so they could take me and execute me. If they got a confession, they would get 100,000 dinars [roughly $40].'"
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003
------
"Another former prisoner from Saddam City, Hussein Ali, said he was arrested for participating in the 1998 protest and imprisoned until late last year. During torture sessions, his fingernails were yanked off his fingers. He described his cell as 'a big hole with lots of insects and worms.'"
-- The Dallas Morning News, April 17, 2003
------
"In the night, they took me again to the room, and they made my body wet with water. I was naked," he recalls, and now is when he searches with his eyes for that spot. To cushion his words: They used clamps to connect electrical wire to his genitals and then they sent a current running through him.
"'My whole body shook,' he says. 'I was shouting to them, "I will sign anything! Just stop this!" I was shaking, shaking. I shook until I passed out.'
'The guards shocked him in the same way every night for two weeks. When they feared he would die, they gave him a week off. Then back to the shocking. Always they beat him, sometimes on his back, sometimes on his legs and arms, often on the soles of his feet until they bled. The pattern continued for six months."
-- The Baltimore Sun, April 20, 2003
------
"'Me.' 'Me.' 'Me,' they murmured in response to the question: Whose father, brother, son had been executed by Saddam Hussein's government. Eleven hands in all, raised in the stagnant air inside the low mud-brick house of Sheik Kathem Al Wafi, signalling the death toll here.
"These men and their sheik, the elders of the Al Wafi tribe, are people of the Madan, the marsh Arabs who for five millennia lived in a vast area of wetlands that began about 50 miles north of Basra lived, that is, until 1988, when Hussein's government began a systematic campaign of oppression, execution and internal exile against them."
-- Newsday, April 14, 2003
------
"'I was beaten, refrigerated naked and put underground for one year because I was a Shiite and Saddam is a Sunni,' said Ali Kaddam Kardom, 37. He said he was arrested in the central city of Karbala on March 10, 2000. He returned to the facility in Baghdad this weekend, he said, to help rescue any Iraqis who still might be imprisoned there."
-- USA Today, April 14, 2003
------
"An Iraqi soldier, who according to the facility's records witnessed the beatings, said interrogators regularly used pliers to remove men's teeth, electric prods to shock men's genitals and drills to cut holes in their ankles.
"In one instance, the soldier recalled, he witnessed a Kuwaiti soldier, who had been captured during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, being forced to sit on a broken Pepsi bottle. The man was removed from the bottle only after it filled up with his blood, the soldier said. He said the man later died.
"'I have seen interrogators break the heads of men with baseball bats, pour salt into wounds and rape wives in front of their husbands,' said former Iraqi soldier Ali Iyad Kareen, 41. He then revealed dozens of Polaroid pictures of beaten and dead Iraqis from the directorate's files."
-- USA Today, April 14, 2003
------
"Saturday, former prisoners and Iraqi soldiers said they heard screams of 'help' from men who were still there. Several soldiers who tried to enter the underground prison through a manhole said they found the area flooded and doors locked. Kanan Alwan, 41, who worked in the facility's administrative office, said the intelligence officers of the facility programmed the prison's computers, which control the water flow, so that the water level would exceed the height of the prison doors.
"'They are drowning in there, and there's nothing we can do for them,' Alwan said. 'The real criminals fled. But the innocents who probably did nothing wrong have been condemned to death.'"
-- USA Today, April 14, 2003
------
"'They took my brother in 1998,' said Sabah Al Wafi, 24, a relative of the sheik, 'and they executed him. I was arrested later. I had a letter from a Kuwaiti prisoner of war'one of 605 Kuwaitis still recorded as missing from the 1991 Gulf War 'and they found it when they searched my house. They tortured me with electricity. They made me sit on hot metal plates. They used to drink and laugh as they tortured me.'"
-- Newsday, April 14, 2003
------
"The ordeal of one...victim of the secret police, a woman identified only as Laila, is recounted in A Book of Cruelty An Attempt to Spoil What Has Remained of Your Lives, by Amer Badr Hassoun. According to Hassoun's account, the woman, a young law professor, was taken into custody for refusing to join the Baath Party. She was transferred from a Baghdad prison to a series of prisons in the north before ending up at the Baghdad security directorate. One of her torturers there was a former student who kicked her and administered electric shocks before killing a 13-year-old boy who was also a prisoner. During one torture session, she passed out and was taken to the adjoining Security Hospital and subsequently to the nearby al-Kindi Hospital. She was threatened with execution if she spoke of her torture to doctors or nurses. When a doctor asked her if she had been tortured, she responded with silence.
"She was later tried by a judge named Awwad al-Bandar on the charge of not joining the Baath Party. After being refused permission to represent herself, she was convicted and given a life sentence. She was ultimately released during one of Hussein's amnesty declarations and later told her story to Hassoun. Her current whereabouts are unclear."
-- Knight-Ridder Newspapers, April 14, 2003
------
"The male warders made her wear pants, an offense to Shiites' strict female dress codes; without a belt they often fell down. The low point of every day was the daily torture session; the high point, gruel in a bowl, the prisoners' only meal. Even that was denied her if "I made some mistake." Hashmia's jailers scored her back with a hot poker, beat the soles of her feet with sticks, made her pull up her baggy pants and whipped her legs. The sexual humiliation may have been even worse than the pain, but that was serious. 'They slapped me so hard that my neck hurts from it even now.' The torturers wanted her to confess to plotting against the Baathist regime, but she knew that would mean a death sentence."
-- Newsweek on line, April 12, 2003
------
"For five years Hashim, a teacher of English at a local secondary school, was held in an Iraqi prison and tortured. His scarred arms bore witness to how, he said, he was strung from the ceiling and beaten by members of the Iraqi secret services.
"'I had refused to join the party. They hit me a great deal and I was made to eat my meals like a dog with my hands tied behind my back. But I knew I could never join the Baath Party. How could I and keep my conscience clean?' he said.
"'If you want to stay out of trouble you have to join, and then you could be promoted in the party from the street level to representing the city. But then take part in beatings and the burning of property of the people they don't like. I was one of the people they didn't like.'"
-- The Irish Times, April 8, 2003
------
"Naji Abbas headed out for a couple of hours one day in 1985 to buy some medicine and never returned. Thirteen months later, family members say, the police told them they could pick up his body at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Abbas, who, according to relatives, was guilty of nothing more than being a Shiite Muslim in Sunni-ruled Iraq, had been tortured, an eye poked out, an arm broken and his chest burned with electrical wires. The regime of Saddam Hussein then delivered the clincher: Family members were asked to pay 30 dinars, a month's wages, for the bullets that killed him."
-- Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2003
------
"...in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk."
-- Eason Jordan, CNN chief news executive, in The New York Times, April 11, 2003
|