http://www.msnbc.com/news/902240.asp?0ql=c7p
…One former prisoner he talked to, Anwar Abdul Razak, remembers when a surgeon kissed him on each cheek, said he was sorry and cut his ears off. Razak, then 21 years old, had been swept up during one of Saddam Hussein’s periodic crackdowns on deserters from the Army. Razak says he was innocently on leave at the time, but no matter; he had been seized by some Baath Party members who earned bounties for catching Army deserters. At Basra Hospital, Razak’s ears were sliced off without painkillers. He said he was thrown into jail with 750 men, all with bloody stumps where their ears had been. “They called us Abu [Arabic for father] Earless,” recalls Razak, whose fiancee left him because of his disfigurement…
…
Kubba’s money insulated his family from mayhem, but it did not shield him from witnessing the almost casual slaughter of his people. Last week he recalled a “scene that haunts me still.” Kubba was driving his Mercedes through Basra’s Saad Square when he came upon some 600 men who had been detained while police checked their IDs. According to Kubba, “Chemical Ali” Hassan al-Majid, Saddam’s half brother and the tyrant of southern Iraq, stopped and inquired, “No IDs? Just shoot them all.” Kubba watched as “they shot over 600 people in front of me.”…
…NEWSWEEK’s Liu, prowling the dank and empty halls, ran into a former inmate, Mohsen Mutar Ulga, 34, who was searching for documents about his cousin, executed under Saddam. Ulga said he was sentenced to 12 years in jail for belonging to an armed religious group called “the revenge movement for Sadr,” referring to a martyred Shiite cleric. He had been arrested with 19 others; the lucky ones were executed right away. The rest were tortured with electric cattle prods and forced to watch the prison guards gang-rape their wives and sisters. Some were fed into a machine that looked like a giant meat cutter. “People’s bodies were cut into tiny pieces and thrown into the Tigris River,” said Ulga…
Can someone please tell me again how it is that the Americans are the evil ones?