http://histclo.hispeed.com/essay/war/iraq/war-idt.htmlTorture is a principal feature of Saddam's regime. Conditions in Iraqi prisons are notorious. At the Mahjar prison in Baghdad, prisoners are
beaten twice daily. Female inmates are
routinely raped. In some prisons, inmates are kept in casket-like boxes until they either confess or die.
British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook reported, "A speciality of his torture is the beating of the soles of the feet, indeed last year his son Udai ordered this punishment for the entire Iraqi football team after they lost a match to qualify for the World Cup. A repeated horror story from those who escaped from Saddam's jails is the exposure of prisoners to ravenous dogs." One report describe an cell with pipes in the ceiling that drip acid on a naked prisinor, often driving him mad before he is killed by the acid. Some reports virtually defy belief. The torture can not only be directed at an individual, but his loved ones. Other accounts indicates that Saddam's security forces starve babies or gouge out the eyes of children within the sight of their horrified parents mothers in an effort to force confessions from the parents. There are also accounts of children being thrown out of helicoptors, again to extract confessions from parents.
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Compare it to this:
Other pictures, which the world has not seen, but which are in the hands of the US military, include shots of a dog attacking a prisoner. An accused soldier says dogs are “used for intimidation factors”.
There are also pictures of an apparent male rape. An Iraqi PoW claims that a civilian translator, hired to work in the prison, raped a male juvenile prisoner. He said: “They covered all the doors with sheets. I heard the screaming ... and the female soldier was taking pictures.”
The British pictures show a hooded Iraqi aged between 18-20 on the floor of a military truck being brutalised. According to two squaddies who took part in the torture, but later blew the whistle, the Iraqi’s ordeal lasted eight hours and he was left with a broken jaw and missing teeth. He was bleeding and vomited when his captors threw him out of a speeding truck. No-one knows if he lived or died.
One of the British soldiers said: “Basically this guy was dying as he couldn’t take any more. An officer came down. It was ‘Get rid of him – I haven’t seen him’.” The other whistle-blower said he had witnessed a prisoner being beaten senseless by troops. “You could hear your mate’s boots hitting this lad’s spine ... One of the lads broke his wrist off a prisoner’s head. Another nearly broke his foot kicking him.”
According to the British soldiers, the military police have found a video of prisoners being thrown from a bridge, and a prisoner was allegedly beaten to death in custody by men from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment.
http://www.sundayherald.com/41693
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