Reply #118: Iraq is the Tin Foil Hat nation of the world; however here is the info [View All]

[beachmom]

This was in the NYT originally, but here it is from a blog:

http://donkeyod.blogspot.com/2006/06/day-to-day-in-iraq-parting-thoughts.html#links

Day to Day in Iraq - Parting Thoughts: Context, Context, Context

June 16
10:30 pm
Ayad Rahim

A lot has been made of Zarqawi’s televised beheadings, the first of which, of Nicholas Berg, was broadcast a month after I arrived in Iraq, on April 4, 2004. A few days before I left Iraq in April 2005, I saw on Iraqi state television a video from 1998, in which Saddam’s Fedayeen cut the tongues and lopped off the heads of three men in the center of Nasiriya, and then jumped around, waving the heads in the air – having recited Koran verses to begin the affair. In their waning days, the Baathists beheaded 250 to 400 women in Basra (putatively for prostitution; actually, for dissent), and posted their heads in public .

Saddam’s Fedayeen were not shy about their deeds. Huda and Ismail, who arrived in Cleveland in 1998, have told me about a Fedayeen training video that was broadcast repeatedly on Iraqi television. The video showed the men chasing down a dog (I’ve also heard about this, with a rabbit), then pulling out its spinal cord, passing it around and running it through their teeth.

* * *

Much remains unknown about Iraq – in particular, what happened during Saddam’s time. Human rights organizations estimate that he’s responsible for killing 2 million and 5 million people, which puts him behind only Hitler, Stalin and Mao. In addition, nearly 5 million Iraqis were deported or fled. Iraq’s population figures over the past three decades are quite telling. While Iraq’s population has grown by 50 percent, some of its neighbors’s populations have tripled (Syria’s, for example, went from 6 million to 18 million). Put another way, all things being equal, Iraq’s population is missing 25 million souls – its population could be 50 million instead of 25 million.

Something I’ve wondered about for a dozen years is how many people were executed each day in Iraq under Saddam. Former prisoners and guards have reported that prisons had two to three execution sessions a week, with four or five prisoners executed each time. Assuming one prison per province (there are 18), I initially came up with 20 to 38 people executed a day. In the ensuing years, as more information has emerged, I’ve had to keep upping that estimate. Recently, I heard the interior minister say that there are 1100 prisons and jails across the country. Supposing that in a quarter of those, inmates were executed at the rates reported by former prisoners and guards; that would come to 314 to 580 executions a day.

Here is Wikipedia on the author:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayad_Rahim

It's unclear whether he favored the invasion of Iraq or not. But it sounds like he has been studying the crimes of Saddam Hussein for a long time.