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Maddman Hussein
Rich Galen Friday July 2, 2004
On Day Three of the new Iraqi government, Saddam Hussein was hauled before a judge and charged with seven counts ranging from mass murder to the invasion of Kuwait.
I was going to write a parody of Saddam claiming - as he did when he was captured hiding in a filthy hole outside Tikrit - that he was still the President of Iraq, but the record of his offenses is so horrifying that his arraignment deserves to be taken seriously.
During my time in Iraq, a wonderful young lawyer, Sandy Hodgkinson, and I led a team to a mass grave site in the south of Iraq. You can read the short portion of a longer Travelogue about that by clicking here: In a War Zone; Near a War Zone.
We went to this mass grave site to, among other things, gather evidence against Saddam in the case which began yesterday. We went to the site in secret and, even in the Travelogue I didn't give any clues as to where it is, other than to say it is in the South.
That, in and of itself, is significant, because - the scientists and lawyers believe - the remains of some 1,200 Kurds are buried there. The Kurdish lands are in the north.
These people were rounded up, killed, trucked the length of Iraq, and buried in a desolate part of the southern desert. And they were buried in the most despicable assembly-line fashion. As the forensic archeologist along with us explained:
Saddam's henchmen went in with a backhoe, dug a pit maybe three meters wide by 10 meters long with a dirt ramp at one end. A truck would back down the ramp and dump, perhaps, 100 bodies into the ditch, pull out and the pit would be backfilled.
Then they moved to the next spot and repeated the process - a dozen times.
But these 1,200 murders pale before the 1988 incident where Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan Majeed - Chemical Ali - bragged about using poison gas to murder the inhabitants of the Kurdish town of Halabja.
According to a Washington Post piece written by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Fred Barbash, Human Rights Watch released the transcript of Chemical Ali's voice:
"I will kill them all with chemical weapons. Who is going to say anything? The international community? [Expletive] them -- the international community, and those who listen to them. I will not attack them with chemicals just one day, but I will continue to attack them with chemicals for 15 days."
The Washington Post piece goes on to remind us that Saddam wasn't content to kill Kurds in the North, he also "killed an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 Shiites, most of them civilians, according to human rights organizations."
And none of that even begins to consider reports which, according to the BBC "indicate that up to 182,000 people were killed." Nor the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Nor the billions he allowed to be diverted from the Oil-for-Food program (which, anyone who has spent more than 12 minutes inside of Iraq knows should be called the Oil-for-Palaces program). Nor the thousands of people who were murdered, raped, and/or tortured for any number of reasons, by any number of Hussein family members or loyalists.
There are video tapes of torture. There are records of murders. There are eye-witness accounts of rapes. There are survivors of forced amputations. There is forensic evidence of mass graves.
The Western news media should appoint a joint team of investigative reporters to sift through the mass of evidence which has already been collected and classified so a doubting world better understands what the removal of Saddam Hussein from power means to the 26 million Iraqis who are now free of his brutal regime.
On the Secret Decoder Ring Page today: A link to the Washington Post piece, and a link to the BBC's thumbnail description of the crimes on which Hussein has been arraigned.
--END --
Copyright © 2004 Richard A. Galen
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