Is Burying People Alive Torture?
Woman: Saddam guards buried people alive
Prison guards under Saddam Hussein used to bury detainees alive and watch women as they bathed, occasionally shooting over their heads, a former female prisoner testified Monday in the genocide trial of the ex-president.
…A prison warden she identified as Hajaj ‘ whose name has been given by earlier witnesses in the trial ‘ “used to drag women, their hands and feet shackled, and leave them in a scorching sun for several hours.”
“Soldiers used to watch us bathe,” said the woman. The guards also fired over the women’s heads as they washed.
The woman said several relatives disappeared during the offensive against the Kurds. “I know the fate of my family (members). They were buried alive,” she testified.
The prosecution presented the court with documents showing that remains of the women’s relatives turned up in a mass grave.
It baffles me that I live in a country where our isolated mistakes are given moral equivalence to the systematic torture of a dictatorial regime and that some how that prior state of affairs was the preferred state between the two.
October 10th, 2006 at 10:58 pm
Hmm. I think you are oversimplifying a bit…
It seems to me we should judge the Iraq war based on three criteria:
1. Did it make us more secure?
2. Did it improve the lives of Iraqis?
3. What is the cost of 1 and 2 (cost has many different dimensions) relative to their value.
1. Can be debated endlessly: Were the WMD trumped up for a admin itching to go to war, thus duping a semi-retarded congress, or did the executive brannch actually believe he had WMD? Are terrorists travelling to Iraq to fight us there rather than here– is it really some kinda new mid east thunderdome where we go to fight freedom haters? Is the social collapse of Irag/Afghan creating a new haven for terrorists to gather and plan? Did the war make us appear weak or strong to states like North Korea and Iran, which are also threats? Did it also rile up their extremist groups against us? Does it really even make sense at all to lump a diverse group our enemies into the single “Terror” bucket and bumble around with a big can of Raid in the middleast :) I guess you can guess my opinion on 1… And I don’t think many legitimate experts, outside of Foxnews chatterheads would argue that we are safer due to our fight in Iraq.
2. This one is harder and more interesting.
Bush himself admitted over a year ago that a minimum of 30,000 civillians have died in Iraq so far.
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ places the count at over 40K. You can take a look at their methods and judge for yourself. Given how conservative their methods are in counting, I would guess its more. We’ve spilled a lot of their blood and our own. 2500 hundred dead on our part doesn’t sound like a lot… but we’ve also taken 20,000 wounded, many of the horribly maimed for life.
Secondly, the level of violence in Iraq is rising, not decreasing. Yes, Saddam did terrible things. Then again, 60 people show up on the streets of Baghdad *today* alone bound, gagged, tortured and executed. I think we’ve all become desensitized to these reports, but for a country of 26M (10M less than the state of california), the violence has touched everyone.
Third, we like to talk about freedom. I guess my question whether the establishment of strict Sharia law in southern Iraq and all the creepy islamofacist rules (to steal a repub word :) is better or worse than Saddam’s dicatorial rule. Long term, I am not sure. Ask yourself, honestly, given that they are a Shia dominated country (putting the Kurds aside in their little kingdom)
Do you really think the whole colored finger voting thing will go on after we leave?
3. 400 Billion or more and rising, depends on how you account for damaged hardware etc. 2500 dead, 20K wounded, so far. And I suspect our diplomatic reputation has been damaged for years to come. Yes, conservatives like to chest beat about “we don’t need europes approval” blah blah blah. To that I would say, look how smoothly Iraq is going without a real coalition? And look how eager we are to get Afghanistan off our hands and into NATO’s. Yes we are superpower, but we do need other nations support…
I guess what I am saying at the end of this long ramble is, 1 is debatable, although to be honest, its slowly not passing the straight face test.
2 the judgement is still out. If Iraq becomes a stable western style democracy then yes, we did the right thing pulling Saddam.. if the country continues to spiral into a fullout sectarian blood path, then we pulled the jagged knife out, only to let Iraq bleed to death….
October 10th, 2006 at 11:02 pm
Oh, I forgot to mention, in regards to your smaller point of: How can we crticize ourselves for a massacre/murder and some torture here and there, when Saddam tortured and masscred LOTS of people….
Come now… Do we really need to answer that? I would hope we hold ourselves to a higher standard
than a barbaric dictator. Even just a harmless smidge of massacre, torture and murder is a smidge too much for me.
“Heyyyyy, Saddam tortured a lotttt, can’t we just torture a little?” — Dick Cheney :)
October 11th, 2006 at 9:12 am
The torture issue is about American democracy. I don’t pay taxes to give money to dictators like Saddam, and I don’t want my taxes going to torture. This is about principles… you perceive it as ‘isolated mistakes’, but I see it as a slippery slope. We’ve already held an American citizen, Jose Padilla, for years without trial, without contact w/ a lawyer or the outside world, etc. That’s terrifying to me, because if this administration can do that just by saying “this man is a threat, so the rules don’t apply” then what’s to stop them from doing it to all their enemies?
To put it in perspective, what if the Clinton administration were doing all this? Would you feel safe then?
October 11th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
“some how that prior state of affairs was the preferred state between the two.”
This is an oversimplification. I think the overwhelming feeling among the antiwar crowd is/was that this was the wrong time for an invasion of Iraq and a misstep in the war on terror.
That doesn’t mean that opponents of the war wanted Hussein to be in power forever.
October 18th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Le flamebait post.
October 28th, 2006 at 10:47 am
I think the anti-war crowd would argue that there is no good time for an invasion of anywhere, for any reason.
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
John Stuart Mill
October 30th, 2006 at 9:18 am
Heh, I find the John Stuart Mill quote/post to be amusingly typical of the conservative defense of Iraq: rather than defend the justification/ execution of the war against legitimate criticism, just question the critics patriotism… Moreover, shrouding this sort of attack within a quote from somone like Mill is an attempt to add weight to the typical “cut and run chatter” I’ve been hearing from the conservative talking heads.
Secondly, asserting the position of the “anti-war” crowd as a straw man to the Mill quote is probably the funniest tactic of all. I don’t believe I’ve heard any legitimage critic of the Iraq policy assert that war is never worth it under any circumstances. We would just like to talk about Iraq.
Third, its easy to forget that in the case of patriotic courage, questioning one’s government is often much harder than blindly following behind it. Its also the kind of courage that holds our democracy together just as much as courage on the battlefield.
And last, this sort of assertion begs the question as to why the republicans are tangently defending the war, as Scott has above, rather than on any real facts.
I think the answer is pretty simple, at this point, the war is indefensible in any rational debate.