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Banned
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Her most disturbing memory is of the time she felt nothing but her own pain. After the beatings and electric shocks, Suriya Abdel Khader would find herself once again in the fetid cell, a room so crowded that most prisoners could only stand. The women died upright, then slumped to the floor, but Ms. Abdel Khader remembers registering only a dull flash of annoyance whenever that happened. 'Get this body out of the way,' she would think to herself. 'It's taking up room.' She was imprisoned, she believes, because her four brothers had been arrested in Mr. Hussein's blanket crackdown on Shiites suspected of supporting Iran or the Islamic Dawa Party."
-- The New York Times, June 2, 2003
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"General Jawdat al-Obeidi, the proclaimed deputy head of the Baghdad provisional government, said that about 150 political prisoners were found by US troops in a secret prison in Salman Pak, 35 kilometres south of Baghdad, and another 200 were rescued at a spot he refused to name. In Kadhimiya, a primarily Shiite neighbourhood in Baghdad, 25 people were discovered in an underground prison, he said.
"'Before Baghdad fell, the guards let water flow into the cells to kill the prisoners before they themselves fled. But the prisoners were smart and built ramps to climb on top of. That's why they didn't drown.'"
-- Sydney Morning Herald, April 22, 2003
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"After he arrived in Baghdad, he was placed in a darkened room with only a small red light, no bed. Guards would splash buckets of water through a small gap in the bottom of the door to put an inch or two of water on the floor so that he could not sleep. They gave him tea and a piece of bread for breakfast. Rice and a piece of bread for lunch. He went to the bathroom in his room, on the floor."
-- The Baltimore Sun, April 20, 2003
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"A nondescript five-story building notable only by the extra barbed wire on the roof, the Haakimiya Prison is actually 10 stories. Below ground are interrogation cells where unspeakable horrors were committed. ...A former inmate, Mohsen Mutar Ulga, 34, ...was searching for documents about his cousin, executed under Saddam. Ulga said he was sentenced to 12 years in jail for belonging to an armed religious group called 'the revenge movement for Sadr,' referring to a martyred Shiite cleric. He had been arrested with 19 others; the lucky ones were executed right away. The rest were tortured with electric cattle prods and forced to watch the prison guards gang-rape their wives and sisters. Some were fed into a machine that looked like a giant meat cutter. 'People's bodies were cut into tiny pieces and thrown into the Tigris River,' said Ulga.
"Ulga and the reporter silently walked through the darkened cells at Haakimiya, which was surprisingly clean, except for the graffiti on the walls. GOD I ASK YOUR MERCY, scratched one prisoner who'd marked 42 days on the walls. SAVE ME, MARY, implored another, presumably a Christian. IN MEMORY OF LUAY AND ABBAS WHO WERE TORTURED, read another."
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003
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"When Shias, both leaders and young religious students, were taken into custody, they were often transferred to special torture cells.... 'The method of the investigations was usually to hang someone upside down and beat them, hammering hard on their bones,' Mr Abu Sakkar said, pointing to a hook on the ceiling. Some people would be left here for days upside down and would just die of fatigue and thirst.'"
-- The Daily Telegraph (London), April 23, 2003
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"Upstairs, accessible by a back stairway only, are about 100 individual cells, dark and windowless, stinking of urine. In one sits a plate of half-eaten food, biscuits and rice, still resting on a green plastic tray. At the end of a hallway lies a pile of bindings and blindfolds.
"An elevator, the only one in the place, leads to the basement and more cells. There are shackles in one room, long cables in another. On another floor there is a small operating room, where some former prisoners said doctors harvested the organs of those who did not survive.
"Finally, out back, stand three portable morgues, metal buildings the size of tool sheds, with freezer units attached. Inside one are six aluminum trays, each the length of a body."
-- The New York Times, April 21, 2003
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"Radi Ismael Mekhedi spent 10 years behind bars. Last week, he wandered through the looted prison and stood behind the red bars of his former cell for the first time in over 10 years. 'I was severely tortured during my imprisonment because I was considered a traitor to my country. I never believed a person could be subjected to such treatment by another human being,' Mekhedi says. 'Life was already painful under Saddam, and if you came to the prison, you were always in fear for your life.'"
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003
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"Well, in the beginning, this place looks just like an anonymous office building. And that made it all the more filled with terror, because slowly, prisoners would come up, tell you that they had been held here, that they had been tortured. You look at the walls, and see graffiti written by the prisoners here. And it's heartbreaking, really. Allah, help me. Or, you know, today I'm alive, but tomorrow I'll be underground. You see Iraqi families wandering around trying to find news of relatives, and finding nothing. I was about to leave when a group of agitated Iraqis came up and said, come with me. I have something to show you. It's an execution ground. There are still some bodies there. So I said, ok. Let's go take a look. And indeed, we drove to a very remote part of the prison. It was like a makeshift execution ground. You know, somebody had just hurriedly set some guys up there and shot them. They had been half-buried in the ground."
-- Newsweek reporter Melinda Liu interviewed on NBC Nightly News, April 22, 2003
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"Almost as large as Saddam's palaces are his many prisons, where countless Iraqis were tortured and killed. We take you now inside one of Saddam's most notorious prisons, 18 miles west of Baghdad, and it's hard to imagine a grimmer place. US soldiers are searching what remains of one of the biggest and most elaborate prisons in the world. Saddam Hussein never cut corners when it came to punishment. Abu Ghraib once held tens of thousands of human souls -- criminals, political enemies, and those who just happened to get in the way. A 12-year-old Iranian boy visiting his grandmother near Basra in 1985 was swept up in an Iraqi invasion. He was still here 15 years later.
"[H]e lived with 28 other detainees in a nine-meter-square cell, dividing up 1.5 kilos of rice and porridge a day. 'It was so cramped we couldn't sleep on our backs, we had to sleep on our sides, like spoons. And they brought us polluted water to drink, so we all had diarrhea.' Ulga was released last fall during Saddam's surprise general amnesty. 'Most people don't know that before the amnesty, they executed 450 prisoners so they would never go free,' said Ulga."
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003
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"'Adnan Agari, who never returned, was taken away with his brother Ghassan and his cousin Khatar. They were taken to Baghdad and tortured with electrified wire, Ghassan said. 'The screaming terrified me,' he recalled of the dark, poorly ventilated torture chamber. 'I was a boy then, 15. I have never heard anything like that before or since.'"
-- The New York Times, April 17, 2003
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"There in the corridor were the punishment units where men were stuffed into windowless cinder block cells, one metre by 50cm. On the left was the yellow holding pen where prisoners fought to sleep next to the open pits that served as latrines, suffering the stench for a few inches more space."
-- The Guardian (London), April 17, 2003
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"The massive prison cast a shadow over the entire neighborhood. Yehiye Ahmed, 17, grew up nearby. The prison guards were his neighbors; the inmates' screams were the soundtrack of his young life. 'I could hear the prisoners crying all the time, especially when someone was killed. I could hear everything from my house or when we played soccer behind the prison,' says Yehiye, a quiet boy, with large, haunted brown eyes and a body that suggests malnourishment.
"Yehiye and his friends would often go inside the Abu Ghraib compound to sell sandwiches and cigarettes to visitors, guards, and sometimes even prisoners. 'I saw three guards beat a man to death with sticks and cables. When they got tired, the guards would switch with other guards,' he recalls. 'I could only watch for a minute without getting caught, but I heard the screams, and it went on for an hour.'"
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003
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"Some former inmates say that in the 1990s, the prison became so crowded, Saddam's son, Uday, ordered hundreds executed to make room for more."
-- Dan Rather, CBS Evening News, April 14, 2003
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"They wandered the abandoned corridors of one of the most frightening buildings in the Middle East searching for their brothers, desperately trying to ignore the logic that told them there was little hope of finding them alive. Other searchers were lifting trapdoors and banging pipes and marble tiles trying to find the underground cells reputed to hold hundreds of political prisoners under the ominous headquarters building..."
-- The Australian, April 13, 2003
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"Sheikh Lami Abbas Ajali looked around at the small cell where he spent several bleak weeks of his life and recounted the torture: How he was hit, prodded, had his eyelids pulled back, electric shocks applied to his temples and genitals, how he was handcuffed with tight manacles and then lifted into the air from behind.
"He recalled Saturday how torturers stuffed 10 suspects into an eight-foot by six-foot room so only two could sleep at any given time while the other eight were forced to stand. And how he was kept blindfolded, never quite sure where he was, where they were taking him, what would hit him next."
-- Gulf News on line (UAE), April 14, 2003
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"Hassan Ali Rasan has clawed for days in the rubble of the Detention and Security Center, searching for a piece of hope. Amid twisted wire, bricks and unexploded rocket-propelled grenades, Rasan hunts for traces of his cousin Kasem, missing for 12 years since Saddam Hussein's agents paid him a visit when he was a student.
"'He's an only child. His mother cries every time she thinks of him,' explained Rasan, 25, a muscular ex-soldier who on Sunday patiently picked through documents and files that litter the crumbled torture chamber, blitzed by U.S. warplanes two weeks ago.
-- Knight-Ridder Newspapers, April 14, 2003
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"Coalition forces have discovered an abandoned military prison here, where discarded gas masks and used atropine injectors suggest the recent presence of chemical weapons and human testing. ... There was no sign of what happened to the inmates and no indication of what their crimes were. But the punishment seems to have been severe. ... There is also evidence of crude torture. Electric cords snake through a tiny window in one cell, the frayed ends dangling from an anchor in the ceiling. Similar sets of wires trail into other concrete rooms. ... 'I'd hate to think of what those clamped onto,' said one U.S. soldier, who speculated the far end would be attached to a generator. 'It's just evil in here.' ... At least a half-dozen gas masks were scattered near the prison's entrance and inside one of the wire-enclosed walkways of the white cinder-block prison. There were also several spent auto-injectors of atropine, a powerful drug that is administered as an antidote to nerve gas."
–- The Washington Times, April 11, 2003
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