Poor poor Saddam

[passin thru]

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2005-12-05T181443Z_01_KWA483299_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-SADDAM-TRIAL.xml&rpc=22

By Michael Georgy and Paul Tait
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Men and women were tortured for days and babies left to die in an interrogation facility which featured a meat grinder for human flesh, the first prosecution witness to face Saddam Hussein told the court on Monday.

After weeks of delay and legal arguments over security and the legitimacy of the court, the trial of Saddam and seven co- defendants on charges of crimes against humanity heard confusing but graphic witness evidence of torture and summary execution.

"I swear by God I walked by a room and on my left I saw a grinder with blood coming out of it and human hair underneath," said 38-year-old Ahmed Hassan, who said he had been kept in room 63 at the Hakmiya intelligence headquarters in Baghdad.

Hassan, the first witness to face Saddam in court, said he was 15 when Saddam visited the village in July 1982 and Shi'ite militants tried to assassinate him.

Speaking technically as an individual plaintiff alongside the state, which is pressing charges of crimes against humanity, Hassan said he and his family were among hundreds of people rounded up in a security operation run by Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti after an attempt on Saddam's life in the village.

Barzan, one of Saddam's three younger half-brothers and the former head of the feared Mukhabarat intelligence service, is one of Saddam's seven co-accused in the case relating to the killings of 148 mostly Shi'ite Muslim men from Dujail.

"Barzan was present. He had red cowboy boots and blue jeans and a sniper rifle," Hassan, a stockily built worker with a round face and a graying beard, told the heavily fortified court in central Baghdad.

He said Saddam, from the Sunni Arab minority, asked a 15-year-old boy if he knew who he was. "He said 'Saddam'. Then Saddam hit him in the head with an ash tray," Hassan said.

Hassan risked reprisals by letting his face appear on television as he gave evidence.

Toward the end of his testimony he stood facing Saddam as the former president challenged his testimony. Hassan held Saddam's gaze as Saddam asked how he could possibly remember the names and birth dates of people he said were killed, responding that he had memorized them as they were read out by guards.

With Barzan constantly interjecting from the dock and calling the testimony lies, Hassan said he was among hundreds of people taken from the Shi'ite village to the Hakmiya intelligence headquarters, run by Barzan. Continued ...

 

[Liberty Belle]

More on the Butcher of Baghdad that Ramsey Clark is trying so hard to defend like he has defended so many other monsters. Clark has certainly shown his true colors. I bet you Democrats are proud of him!!!

Witness Tells of Torture by Saddam's Men
Dec 6, 8:31 AM (ET)
By HAMZA HENDAWI
Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A woman testified Tuesday from behind a screen - her voice disguised but her weeping still apparent - that she was assaulted and tortured with beatings and electric shocks by Saddam Hussein's agents in the trial of the former president and seven lieutenants.
Saddam sat stone-faced, taking notes on a pad of paper, as the woman, known only as "Witness A," told the court how she and dozens of other families from the town of Dujail were arrested in a crackdown after a 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam.
"I was forced to take off my clothes, and he raised my legs up and tied up my hands. He continued administering electric shocks and beating me," she said of Wadah al-Sheik, an Iraqi intelligence officer who died of cancer last month.
Several times, the woman - hidden behind a light blue curtain - broke down. "God is great. Oh, my Lord!" she moaned, her voice electronically deepened and distorted.
She strongly suggested she had been raped, but did not say so outright. When Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin asked her about the "assault," she said: "I was beaten up and tortured by electrical shocks."
The witness, who was 16 at the time of her arrest, repeated that she had been ordered to undress.
"I begged them, but they hit with their pistols," she said. "They made me put my legs up. There were five or more, and they treated me like a banquet."
"Is that what happens to the virtuous woman that Saddam speaks about?" she wept, prompting the judge to advise her to stick to the facts.
When asked by the judge which of the defendants she wanted to accuse, "Witness A" identified Saddam. "When so many people are jailed and tortured, who takes such a decision?" she said.
She later quoted a security officer as telling her "you are lucky to be at the Mukhabarat (center) and remain a virgin." She also said that many fellow female detainees lost their virginity to security guards.
The measures taken to preserve the woman's anonymity complicated the testimony. At first, defense attorneys complained they could not hear her because of the voice distortion. The judge then ordered the voice modulator shut off, but then the audience could not hear at all, so Amin ordered a recess, and the modulator was fixed, allowing all to hear.
Defense attorneys insisted on questioning the witness face to face and demanded that the defendants should also see her. So after she gave her testimony for over an hour, Amin ordered the session closed to the public, pulling screens in front of the press and visitors gallery and cut the sound.
Later, a second woman took the stand, identified as "Witness B." She said she was 74 years old and recounted how her family was arrested in 1981 - a year before the Dujail incident.
Until that point in her testimony, her voice was modulated. But again, the judge decided it wasn't working properly. The system was turned off and all of the electronic feeds from the court room cut, including to the press gallery, before the witness could explain the relevance of a 1981 arrest.
Witnesses have the option of not having their identities revealed as a security measure to protect them against reprisals by Saddam loyalists. The first two witnesses - both men who took the stand Monday - allowed their names to be announced and their pictures to be transmitted around the world.
Saddam and the others are on trial for the killing of more than 140 Shiites in the town of Dujail north of Baghdad and could be executed by hanging if convicted. Monday's session was a stormy one, as Saddam repeatedly stood to challenge the judge and witnesses.
But on Tuesday, the ousted leader and his former officials were mostly silent, listening intently as "Witness A" spoke.
She described four years in Saddam's prisons after she and other families were swept up in Dujail following the shooting attack on Saddam's motorcade. She said she was held and tortured at a detention facility there before being taken to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. Later they were taken to a desert facility outside the southern city of Samawah.
At the Dujail facility, she said she was thrown into a room with red walls and ceiling in an intelligence department building and that prisoners were given only bread and water to eat.
"I could not even eat because of the torture," she said.
At Abu Ghraib, the guards stripped one of her male relatives, a deaf mute, and tied a rope to his genitals, pulling him into the cells where the women were kept, she said. Insects were everywhere - in cells and on their clothes, she said, adding that inmates used prison blankets to make underwear and fashioned shoes out of cardboard and strings.
She said one of her relatives wanted to give birth in jail. "The baby was out. When some women tried to help her, the guards prevented them," and the baby died, she said.
"I was freed at the end when I was 20," she said. "All my friends became doctors and teachers, and I am now just a housewife."
The testimony at the trial is the first time the victims of the 1982 crackdown confronted the former leader and his lieutenants.
In Monday's session, a defiant Saddam sought to take control of the proceedings through boisterous outbursts, declaring at one point that "I am not afraid of execution" and denouncing the trial run according to "American rules."
Despite the sometimes chaotic atmosphere Monday, the trial's first witnesses offered chilling accounts of killings and torture using electric shocks and a grinder in the 1982 crackdown.
Ahmed Hassan Mohammed said he saw a machine that "looked like a grinder" with hair and blood on it in a secret police center in Baghdad where he and others were tortured for 70 days. He said detainees were kept in "Hall 63."
Mohammed recalled how security agents rounded up townspeople of all ages, from 14 to more than 70.
"There were mass arrests. Women and men. Even if a child was 1-day-old, they used to tell his parents, 'Bring him with you,'" Mohammed said.
The testimony drew an angry response from Saddam, who suggested that Mohammed needed psychiatric treatment and accused the court of bowing to American pressure.
"When the revolution of the heroic Iraq arrives, you will be held accountable," Saddam warned the chief judge.
"This is an insult to the court," Amin responded. "We are searching for the truth."
"How can a judge like yourself accept a situation like this?" Saddam asked. "This game must not continue. If you want Saddam Hussein's neck, you can have it. I have exercised my constitutional prerogatives after I had been the target of an armed attack.
When Mohammed objected to some of Saddam's remarks, the former president snapped: "Do not interrupt me, son."

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20051206/D8EAP5GG1.html

 

[Red Robin]

War is always a battle between two fear-driven fascists. Both claim to be protecting an innocent victim against someone who is "evil." The evil exists in their mirror.

That is stupid! I believe there is an eviland there is a good. That is the difference between you and me.

 

[Disagreeable]

None of the witnesses have so far testified to what Saddam is charged with.! This kind of testimony would not be allowed in a US court. This trial should not be taking place in Iraq. They should move it out of Iraq, maybe to the Hague. No one seriously thinks he can get a fair trial with his defense attorneys being killed, witnesses names being witheld or testifying behind curtains, judges being threatened. He's making a joke out of what should be a serious discussion of his crimes. But the Bush Bunch wanted to appease the Shiites and let them have their revenge against Saddam. Like too many other bad decisions, it isn't working well.

 

[mp.freelance]

War is always a battle between two fear-driven fascists. Both claim to be protecting an innocent victim against someone who is "evil." The evil exists in their mirror.

That is stupid! I believe there is an eviland there is a good. That is the difference between you and me.

I believe their is good and evil, and it lies in all of us. We choose to serve the Lord or we choose to serve the Devil. Saddam waves the Koran, but did he follow the Commandments? No. Does Bush? No. Has any rebel? Never.

The Kurds attacked an Iraqi army convoy and started their war with the central government, but they claim they are moral and democratic. They may be democratic, but moral is another story.

The commandments do not say: Thou shall not kill until you see the whites of their eyes. A patch issued by the government does not make it "okay" to kill.

You may believe in evil, but I don't think you appreciate how clever evil is. Evil is all about seducing the righteous into acts of unrighteousness. Everyone denies what they do. Adam in the Garden, Sarah in the tent, Cain slewing Abel.

You can be just as evil as anyone else you think to be evil.
...and only the merciless need mercy. That is the test of faith.

To be merciless to the merciless just makes you merciless, too.

I'm sorry, but you're completely unrealistic. Do you think the Us vs. Them mentality in humans serves no purpose? It's hard-wired, and there's no way around it. Did it ever occur to you God intended Eve to eat the apple, and Cain to slay Abel?

 

[feeder]

Jesus said "turn the other cheek" but he didn't the day he got angry and tipped the table over in the temple. There is a time and place for all things.

 

[Steve]

None of the witnesses have so far testified to what Saddam is charged with.! This kind of testimony would not be allowed in a US court. This trial should not be taking place in Iraq. They should move it out of Iraq, maybe to the Hague. No one seriously thinks he can get a fair trial with his defense attorneys being killed, witnesses names being witheld or testifying behind curtains, judges being threatened.

he has his thugs chuck innocent babies out windows, throws people in a meat grinder, and yet you still defend him.

what part of our constitution applies to him......or for that matter any of the terrorists......

 

[Disagreeable]

None of the witnesses have so far testified to what Saddam is charged with.! This kind of testimony would not be allowed in a US court. This trial should not be taking place in Iraq. They should move it out of Iraq, maybe to the Hague. No one seriously thinks he can get a fair trial with his defense attorneys being killed, witnesses names being witheld or testifying behind curtains, judges being threatened.

he has his thugs chuck innocent babies out windows, throws people in a meat grinder, and yet you still defend him.

what part of our constitution applies to him......or for that matter any of the terrorists......

Gee, Steve, I don't remember mentioning our CONSTITUTION in my post. Bush has claimed he's building a democratic, free country in Iraq. That's why he's spending billions of our dollars, killing thousands of innocent Iraqis, and 2,000+ Americans. So I (silly me) would expect that their courts would be fair. No US court would allow such inflammatory testimony as was presented, testimony that had nothing to do with the charges against him. No court would allow unnamed people to testify. How can the defense refute their testimony when they're not given the names, nor allowed to see their faces or hear their real voice? No court would allow defense lawyers to be murdered. The world is watching and our enemies are using this fiasco as proof that the US is unable or unwilling to give Saddam a fair trial. This is simply fanning the flames to those who already hate us.

 

[Red Robin]

That is stupid! I believe there is an eviland there is a good. That is the difference between you and me.

I believe their is good and evil, and it lies in all of us. We choose to serve the Lord or we choose to serve the Devil. Saddam waves the Koran, but did he follow the Commandments? No. Does Bush? No. Has any rebel? Never.

The Kurds attacked an Iraqi army convoy and started their war with the central government, but they claim they are moral and democratic. They may be democratic, but moral is another story.

The commandments do not say: Thou shall not kill until you see the whites of their eyes. A patch issued by the government does not make it "okay" to kill.

You may believe in evil, but I don't think you appreciate how clever evil is. Evil is all about seducing the righteous into acts of unrighteousness. Everyone denies what they do. Adam in the Garden, Sarah in the tent, Cain slewing Abel.

You can be just as evil as anyone else you think to be evil.
...and only the merciless need mercy. That is the test of faith.

To be merciless to the merciless just makes you merciless, too.

I'm sorry, but you're completely unrealistic. Do you think the Us vs. Them mentality in humans serves no purpose? It's hard-wired, and there's no way around it. Did it ever occur to you God intended Eve to eat the apple, and Cain to slay Abel?

He is not only unrealistic but wrong. Without a standard that is perfect, you can't have a right or wrong. That loving but moronic idea that there is good and evil in all of us is just silly. He kind of infered that "commandments" were some kind of standard but I doubt he even believes in the authenticity of any certain commandments. He believes in the ability to change right and wrong according to him so he is never in any danger of being wrong.