MaxedOutMama

Mr. JANKLOW. Given the fact you are all so highly educated and worldly, what is the difference between being a junior Baathist, if I can call it that, a young Baathist or a member of the Hitler Youth? I mean, what was—is there any difference at all?

Dr. ALATTAR. I don't think so.

Mr. JANKLOW. What was expected of you if you joined the Baath Party? Could you tell me? Once you said yes, what happened?

Dr. ALATTAR. Sure. The major reason why they wanted everybody to join is you are expected to submit reports on your families and friends of their activities. This was a way to break down the networks of the family to create suspicion, to collect reports and activities so they can hold different individuals in prisons. The Communists used that method very effectively to break the nutshell of society.

Mr. JANKLOW. Given the fact—and I ask these questions out of ignorance. You people are helpful. Given the fact that there is such a contemporary professed deep-seated religious base within the country, recognizing that may or may not be accurate, but at least there is a contemporary claim, how does one rationalize any kind of public acceptance for the systematic rape, the systematic torture, and the methodology that was utilized to torture and kill people? I mean, how does that comport with anything that is civilized or accepted in anybody's religion anyway?

Ms. SIRKIN. If I may respectfully respond to that, this really was a society that was completely reined in by fear and anyone who resisted was killed. And we have ourselves interviewed surgeons, for example, who were forced to amputate the ears of those who refused to serve in the Army or those who deserted, and many of the surgeons we interviewed knew that obviously this was a complete and utter violation of medical ethics and a terrible thing for a surgeon to do and yet many of them had to perform these procedures under fear of death or torture themselves. And I don't think it is at all legitimate to say that people accepted what was done. It is impossible to understand the level of constraint that people live under when a regime that is this totalitarian is in place.

Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.

For example, 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.
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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. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.
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A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home.

In 1999, a complaint about prison overcrowding led to an instruction from the Iraqi leader for a "prison cleansing" drive. This resulted, according to human rights groups, in hundreds, and possibly thousands, of executions.

Using a satanic arithmetic, prison governors worked out how many prisoners would have to be hanged to bring the numbers down to stipulated levels, even taking into account the time remaining in the inmates' sentences. As 20 and 30 prisoners at a time were executed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, warders trailed through cities like Baghdad, "selling" exemption from execution to shocked families, according to people in Iraq who said they had spoken to relatives of those involved. Bribes of money, furniture, cars and even property titles brought only temporary stays.

// posted by MaxedOutMama @ 12/30/2006 06:27:00 AM