While the sentence handed down to Saddam yesterday was great news it appears not everyone is happy about it. You just knew some lefties would be up in arms about justice being done.
Take for example this unbelievable piece by a European dimwit:
Saddam had tied down revolutionary Iran, the most potentially destructive force in the region, in an eight-year war, at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties. Any Islamic terrorists found on Iraqi territory were summarily executed. The Middle Eastern oil that underpins our society, and therefore the values that our Prime Minister holds so dear, flowed freely into our refineries. Within Iraq itself, a secular state offered women opportunities unimaginable in nearby countries, and provided a standard of living far from unreasonable by the standards of the developing world.
Is that the sound of your jaw hitting the floor? According to the writer, David Cox, Saddam’s Iraq was just as Michael Moore pictured it. Kite’s flying, children playing, women working…..
Problem is that in reality nothing could be further from the truth. Here is the British’s own report on this tyrant:
Iraq is a terrifying place to live. People are in constant fear of being denounced as opponents of the regime. They are encouraged to report on the activities of family and neighbours. The security services can strike at any time. Arbitrary arrests and killings are commonplace. Between three and four million Iraqis, about 15% of the population, have fled their homeland rather than live under Saddam Hussein’s regime.
These grave violations of human rights are not the work of a number of overzealous individuals but the deliberate policy of the regime. Fear is Saddam’s chosen method for staying in power.
[…]Torture is systematic in Iraq. The most senior figures in the regime are personally involved. Saddam Hussein runs Iraq with close members of his own family and a few associates, most of whom come from his hometown of Tikrit. These are the only people he feels he can trust. He directly controls the security services and, through them and a huge party network, his influence reaches deep into Iraqi society. All real authority rests with Saddam and his immediate circle. Saddam is head of state, head of government, leader of Iraq’s only political party and head of the armed forces.
[…]Saddam has, through the RCC, issued a series of decrees establishing severe penalties (amputation, branding, cutting off of ears, or other forms of mutilation) for criminal offences. In mid-2000, the RCC approved amputation of the tongue as a new penalty for slander or abusive remarks about the President or his family.
These punishments are practised mainly on political dissenters. Iraqi TV has broadcast pictures of these punishments as a warning to others.
According to an Amnesty International report published in August 2001, ‘torture is used systematically against political detainees. The scale and severity of torture in Iraq can only result from the acceptance of its use at the highest level.’ Over the years, Amnesty and other human rights organisations have received thousands of
reports of torture and interviewed numerous torture victims.
They even detail one case of the REAL torture (meaning no panties put on their heads) of one family:
A family, arrested in late 2000, were taken to two separate interrogation centres within Republican Guard facilities located along the road to Abu Ghraib. The husband was held in one centre whilst the wife and children were held at a women’s facility. The husband and wife were interrogated under torture about the husband’s sale of a vehicle which, the interrogators said, had been captured by Iraqi security forces during a raid on Iraqi oppositionists.
The interrogators said separately to both husband and wife that they would cease the torture if they signed confessions admitting to be collaborating with the oppositionists. They refused. The wife was stripped naked and cigarettes stubbed out on all parts of her body whenever she refused to implicate her husband. She was beaten and thrown around the interrogation room. Her children were forced to watch the torture. She was eventually released, having been told that her husband would continue being tortured until she returned to confess. She was arrested again two weeks later and the same pattern of torture was repeated, leaving her a psychological wreck.
During his interrogation, the husband’s arms were tied behind his back and he was then suspended in the air using a hook hung from the ceiling. This caused intense pain as his shoulder muscles and ligaments were torn. After a period, the interrogators entered the room and the husband was unhooked and placed in a chair in the middle of the room. From close range, he was then shot at with a pistol whenever he refused to agree to sign his confession. Sometimes shots were fired which missed his body, at other times the pistol muzzle was placed against his fingers, toes or arms and fired so as to mutilate these areas
More?
There is first-hand evidence that the Iraqi regime tortures children. In June, a BBC correspondent, John Sweeney, visiting the Kurdish safe haven of northern Iraq, reported the story of Ali, an Iraqi who used to work for Saddam’s son Udayy.
Some time after the bungled assassination of Udayy, Ali fell under suspicion. He fled north, leaving his wife and two-year-old daughter behind. The secret police came for his wife. They tortured her to find out where Ali was.
When she did not tell them, they tortured the daughter, half-crushing her feet. When John Sweeney met Ali and his daughter two years later, she was still hobbling. Ali feared that his daughter had been crippled for life.Mr Sweeney also met six other witnesses in northern Iraq with direct experience of child torture, including another of Saddam’s enforcers – now in a Kurdish prison – who told him that an interrogator could do anything. ‘We could make a kebab out of a child if we wanted to’ he told Mr Sweeney and chuckled.
How about their treatment of women?
Najat Mohammed Haydar, an obstetrician in Baghdad, was beheaded in October 2000 apparently on suspicion of prostitution, according to Amnesty International. Even by Iraqi standards her execution was an outrage.
There was no evidence to support the charge of prostitution and she was reportedly arrested before the introduction of the policy to behead prostitutes. The real reason for her death was her criticism of corruption in the Iraqi health service
Under Saddam Hussein’s regime women lack even the basic right to life. A 1990 decree allows male relatives to kill a female relative in the name of honour without any punishment.
Women have been tortured, ill-treated and in some cases summarily executed too, according to Amnesty International. Su’ad Jihad Shams al-din, a 61 year-old medical doctor, was arrested in Baghdad on 29 June 1999 on suspicion that she had contacts with Shia Islamist groups. The soles of her feet were beaten during frequent torture sessions before she was released without charge or trial on 25 July 1999.
Human rights organisations and opposition groups continue to receive reports of women who have suffered psychological trauma after being raped by Iraqi personnel while in custody. Raping female political prisoners is part of the regime’s policy, as the box illustrates.
According to Amnesty International, in October 2000, dozens of women accused of prostitution were beheaded without any judicial process, together with men accused of pimping. Some of the victims were reportedly accused for political reasons and had not been involved in prostitution. Representatives of the Ba’ath party
and the Iraqi Women’s General Union witnessed the killings, carried out by members of the Saddam Fidayeen (the militia created in 1994 by Saddam’s elder son, Udayy Hussein) using swords to behead victims in front of
their homes.
An example of this is reported by Amnesty International:
Amnesty International (2001) – A 25 year old woman known as Um Haydar was beheaded in the street without charge or trial at the end of December 2000 after her husband, suspected by the authorities of involvement in Islamist armed activities, fled the country. Men belonging to Saddam Fidayeen took Um Haydar from her house in al-Karrada district, in front of her children and mother-in-law. Two men held her arms and a third pulled her head from behind and beheaded her in front of the residents. The beheading was also witnessed by the ruling Ba’ath Party in the area. The security men removed the body and the head in a plastic bag and took away the children and mother-in-law.
I could go on and on with example after example. We all know about the rape rooms, the acid baths, and the wood chippers. We all know about the genocide that Saddam committed on the Kurds.
But this liberal believes that hey, just because he killed hundreds of thousands of people using torture and chemical weapons doesn’t mean he was all that bad:
So, why are the Iraqis better off without him? The only answer available is that now they are “free”. Well, we all value freedom. Some value it more than life, and those who do certainly go on about it. Nonetheless, they are probably a minority.
Living under tyranny may not be ideal, but it is not impossible. In the Soviet Union, life took on a character of its own, in which the human spirit managed to flourish in spite of the political constraints. The literature generated in those conditions can still inspire us. Today, many former Soviet citizens feel no more free under the yoke of global capitalism than they did before, and some would like to see the return of Stalinism. The people of China seem in no rush to jettison a regime that holds out the prospect of prosperity at the expense only of liberty.
[…]Saddam offered his people a harsh deal. Yet, their lives were at risk only if they chose to challenge his authority. Now, they die because of the sect to which they happen to belong. Soon, their country may fall prey to a savage civil war. If that happens, the Iranians will doubtless intervene, along, perhaps, with Turkey and Israel. No one can predict where that might lead, but the outcome is unlikely to be positive for peace, prosperity, justice or, indeed, human rights.
If Saddam were still in power, he would have stopped this happening. Iraq’s dissidents would have paid a price, but the rest of us would be a lot better off. As he goes to meet the hangman, the world has cause to rue his demise.
Ok, imagine for one moment if this David Cox were alive and writing in the early 1940’s. What would he have written then about Hitler? That even though the Jews are getting a raw deal at least he kept everyone in check? The only ones to get harsh treatment were those who challenged his authority or just so happened to be Jewish? I mean lets be fair. At least Hitler had the trains running on time.
I mean what the flying hell happened to these people where their wires are this crossed?
Saddam was an evil man who deserves to be put through one of his wood chippers. The west is not evil.
We freed a whole country and the Iraqi’s are now living in a free society.
While there are plenty of security problems going on over there at the moment, those can be fixed. But to come to the conclusion that Saddam should of been left in power because he was so brutal, so effective, that no problems occurred in the region is just plain ignorant, and dangerous.
Other’s Blogging:
Ok, imagine for one moment if this David Cox were alive and writing in the early 1940’s. What would he have written then about Hitler? That even though the Jews are getting a raw deal at least he kept everyone in check? The only ones to get harsh treatment were those who challenged his authority or just so happened to be Jewish? I mean lets be fair. At least Hitler had the trains running on time.
See author page
Woops sorry bout that- forgot the link if youre interested in reading it- nothign special- just some pontification on Dave Cox & his obvious lobotomy inspired bigotry