Revealed: "Secret" Executions Being Carried Out in Saddam's Old

Revealed: "Secret" Executions Being Carried Out in Saddam's Old
Intelligence Headquarters
http://www.alternet.org/rights/101952/
Hundreds of "insurgents" have been executed since 2003, victims of the
same summary justice they mete out to their own
captives.
Like all wars, the dark, untold stories of the Iraqi conflict drain
from its shattered landscape like the filthy waters of the Tigris. And
still the revelations come.

The Independent has learned that secret executions are being carried
out in the prisons run by Nouri al-Maliki's "democratic" government.

The hangings are carried out regularly -- from a wooden gallows in a
small, cramped cell -- in Saddam Hussein's old intelligence
headquarters at Kazimiyah. There is no public record of these killings
in what is now called Baghdad's "high-security detention facility" but
most of the victims -- there have been hundreds since America
introduced "democracy" to Iraq -- are said to be insurgents, given the
same summary justice they mete out to their own captives.

The secrets of Iraq's death chambers lie mostly hidden from foreign
eyes but a few brave Western souls have come forward to tell of this
prison horror. The accounts provide only a glimpse into the Iraqi
story, at times tantalizingly cut short, at others gloomily
predictable. Those who tell it are as depressed as they are filled
with hopelessness.

"Most of the executions are of supposed insurgents of one kind or
another," a Westerner who has seen the execution chamber at Kazimiyah
told me. "But hanging isn't easy." As always, the devil is in the
detail.

"There's a cell with a bar below the ceiling with a rope over it and a
bench on which the victim stands with his hands tied," a former
British official, told me last week. "I've been in the cell, though it
was always empty. But not long before I visited, they'd taken this guy
there to hang him. They made him stand on the bench, put the rope
round his neck and pushed him off. But he jumped on to the floor. He
could stand up. So they shortened the length of the rope and got him
back on the bench and pushed him off again. It didn't work."

There's nothing new in savage executions in the Middle East -- in the
Lebanese city of Sidon 10 years ago, a policeman had to hang on to the
legs of a condemned man to throttle him after he failed to die on the
noose -- but in Baghdad, cruel death seems a specialty.

"They started digging into the floor beneath the bench so that the guy
would drop far enough to snap his neck," the official said. "They dug
up the tiles and the cement underneath. But that didn't work. He could
still stand up when they pushed him off the bench. So they just took
him to a corner of the cell and shot him in the head."

The condemned prisoners in Kazimiyah, a Shia district of Baghdad, are
said to include rapists and murderers as well as insurgents. One
prisoner, a Chechen, managed to escape from the jail with another man
after a gun was smuggled to them. They shot two guards dead. The
authorities had to call in the Americans to help them recapture the
two. The Americans killed one and shot the Chechen in the leg. He
refused medical assistance so his wound went gangrenous. In the end,
the Iraqis had to operate and took all the bones out of his leg. By
the time he met one Western visitor to the prison, "he was walking
around on crutches with his boneless right leg slung over his
shoulder."

In many cases, it seems, the Iraqis neither keep nor release any
record of the true names of their captives or of the hanged prisoners.
For years the Americans -- in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib
prison outside Baghdad -- did not know the identity of their
prisoners. Here, for example, is new testimony given to The
Independent by a former Western official to the Anglo-U.S. Iraq Survey
Group, which searched for the infamous but mythical weapons of mass
destruction: "We would go to the interrogation rooms at Abu Ghraib and
ask for a particular prisoner. After about 40 minutes, the Americans
brought in this hooded guy, shuffling along, shackled hands and feet.

"They sat him on a chair in front of us and took off his hood. He had
a big beard. We asked where he received his education. He repeatedly
said 'Mosul.' Then he said he'd left school at 14 -- remember, this
guy is supposed to be a missile scientist. We said: 'We know you've
got a PhD and went to the Sorbonne -- we'd like you to help us with
information about Saddam's missile project.' But I said to myself:
'This guy doesn't know anything 'bout fucking missiles.' Then it
turned out he had a different name from the man we'd asked for, he'd
been picked up on the road by the Americans four months earlier, he
didn't know why. So we said to the Americans: 'Wrong gentleman!' So
they put the shackles on him and took him back to his cell and after
20 or 30 minutes, they'd bring someone else. We'd ask him where he
went to school and he told us he had never been to school.



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