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| Double think in action.
Witness Tells of Torture by Saddam's Men Associated Press | December 6, 2005 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." 'Witness A' tells Saddam trial of electric shocks Reuters | December 6, 2005 BAGHDAD () - The first woman to testify against Saddam Hussein, hidden behind a high curtain, recounted on Tuesday how she had been made to strip naked, beaten and given electric shocks during weeks of interrogation. Identified only as "Witness A," she told the court how she had envied camels their freedom while she was held with hundreds of others rounded up after an attempt on Saddam's life in the village of Dujail in 1982. She said she was moved from one prison to another over four years during Saddam's rule, and had spent a bitter winter at the Abu Ghraib jail in western Baghdad before being driven through the desert to another jail. "I saw camels and I was envious because they were free," she said. In the desert prisoners had to forage for food from rubbish and walked three km (two miles) to gather firewood, she said. Her voice was heavily modified through a computer to protect her identity. She wept as she told of being forced by an interrogator soon after her detention to strip in custody while five officers watched. "I was forced to take my clothes off. They lifted my legs up, they tied my hands, they beat me with cables and (gave me) electric shocks," she said. She was then thrown into a small room with only red lighting, where she used her shoes for a pillow, she testified, adding that she was interrogated for weeks. "From a small window, they gave us two loaves of bread," she said. "After all that torture, do you think we could eat?" Later she was taken to Abu Ghraib, she said, where the water was freezing cold in winter, prisoners' hair crawled with lice, and women pulled threads from blankets to sew clothes. "We had no shoes, we used to go barefoot," she recounted. "We would use cardboard and fashion a shoe out of it to go to the restroom." Witness A frequently referred to torture she saw inflicted on others, but was cut short by the judge who told her stick to incidents that had happened to her. Still, she managed to recount how a deaf and mute male relative was held by his penis and mocked in front of women and children. At other times, men would be lined up and threatened with beating unless they ran. Guards stopped the women from helping one woman give birth, even when the baby was stuck between her legs, she said. Saddam, who regards the trial as a sham and has repeatedly questioned the court's authority, sat largely impassively through the testimony. He and seven others are accused of crimes against humanity over the killings of over 140 men from the Shi'ite village of Dujail after a failed assassination attempt on the then president in 1982. Poll Shows Divide on Question of Torture Associated Press | December 6, 2005
WASHINGTON -- Most people in eight countries that are American allies don't want the United States conducting secret interrogations of terror suspects on their soil, an AP-Ipsos poll found. Anxiety about recent reports of secret prisons run by the CIA in eastern Europe has been heightened by the ongoing debate on the use of torture. The poll found Americans and residents of many of the allied countries divided on the question of torture, with about as many saying it's OK in some cases as those saying it never should be used. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is traveling in Europe this week, said Monday the United States is following all laws and treaties on the treatment of terrorism suspects and has shared intelligence with its allies that has "helped protect European countries from attack, saving European lives." Like other U.S. officials, Rice has refused to answer the underlying question of whether the CIA operated secret, Soviet-era prisons in Eastern Europe and whether CIA flights carried al-Qaida prisoners through European airports. She said the U.S. "will use every lawful weapon to defeat these terrorists." About two-thirds of the people living in Canada, Mexico, South Korea and Spain said they would oppose allowing the U.S. to secretly interrogate terror suspects in their countries. Almost that many in Britain, France, Germany and Italy said they feel the same way. Almost two-thirds in the United States support such interrogations in the U.S. by their own government. Officials with the European Union and in at least a half-dozen European countries are investigating the reports of secret U.S. interrogations in eastern Europe. The EU has threatened to revoke voting rights of any nation in the European Union that was host to a clandestine detention center. After the report of secret prisons overseas, President Bush said, "We do not torture." U.S. military forces have held hundreds of suspects at known installations outside the United States, including at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The U.S. has adopted aggressive interrogation techniques since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks _ techniques some fear occasionally cross the line into torture. "I thought we were the good guys," said Alan Schwartz, a political independent who lives near Buffalo, N.Y. "I thought we were the ones with the high standards." Almost four in 10, 38 percent, in the United States said they thought torture could be justified at least sometimes. About one-fourth said it could be justified rarely, and 36 percent said it could never be justified. About four in 10 in Mexico and France said torture is never justified. About half in Britain, Spain, Germany and Canada felt torture could never be justified, while only one in 10 in South Korea said torture is never OK, according to the polls of about 1,000 adults in each of the nine countries. They were conducted between Nov. 15 and Nov. 28. Each poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The strongest opposition to torture came in Italy, where six in 10 said it is never justified. "It doesn't matter if these people are dangerous, they still have a dignity and the right not to be tortured for whatever reason," said Maurizio Longo, an Italian real estate agent. The Bush administration has taken the position that some terrorism suspects are "enemy combatants" not protected by the Geneva Conventions, which are international treaties that, among other things, spell out the rights of prisoners of war. In 2002, a group of Justice Department lawyers prepared internal memos that gave the government more freedom in the aggressive interrogation of terrorist suspects. "The Bush administration policy is against torture of any kind; it's prohibited by federal criminal law," said John Yoo, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor who helped write the internal memos while at the Justice Department. "The debate is whether you can use interrogation methods that are short of torture. Some who have been critical of the Bush administration have confused torture with cruel, inhumane treatment." Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is pushing to ban the use of torture as well as "cruel and inhumane treatment" and said this week on NBC that he will accept no compromise. The government has been redefining what counts as torture, said Gregg Bloche, a Georgetown law school professor and fellow at the Brookings Institution. Some interrogation techniques adopted by intelligence agencies and the military for locations like Guantanamo spread to other places like Iraq, he said. Bloche said it will be difficult for the United States to reverse policy changes on aggressive interrogation because that might require an admission of wrongdoing. "Once you're in the game," Bloche said, "it's hard to get out."
Infowars.com is Copyright 2005 Alex Jones |
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