Mohammed Aish Jassem, an ex-prisoner, showed me how he was suspended from the ceiling by Captain Amar al-Isawi, who believed Jassem was a member of the religious Dawa party. "They put my hands behind my back like this and tied them and then pulled me into the air by my tied wrists," he told me. "They used a little generator to lift me up, right up to the ceiling, then they'd release the rope in the hope of breaking my shoulder when I fell."
The hooks in the ceiling are just in front of Captain Isawi's desk. I understood what this meant. There wasn't a separate torture chamber and office for documentation. The torture chamber was the office. While the man or woman shrieked in agony above him, Captain Isawi would sign papers, take telephone calls and - given the contents of his bin - smoke many cigarettes while he waited for the information he sought from his prisoners.
Were they monsters, these men? Yes. Are they sought by the Americans? No. Are they now working for the Americans? Yes, quite possibly - indeed some of them may well be in the long line of ex-security thugs who queue every morning outside the Palestine Hotel in the hope of being re-hired by the US Marines' Civil Affairs Unit.
The names of the guards at the Qasimiyeh torture centre in Baghdad are in papers lying on the floor. They were Ahmed Hassan Alawi, Akil Shaheed, Noaman Abbas and Moham-med Fayad. But the Americans haven't bothered to find this out. So Messrs Alawi, Shaheed, Abbas and Fayad are welcome to apply to work for them.
There are prisoner identification papers on the desks and in the cupboards. What happened to Wahid Mohamed, Majid Taha, Saddam Ali or Lazim Hmoud?A lady in a black chador approached the old torture centre. Four of her brothers had been taken there and, later, when she went to ask what happened, she was told all four had been executed. She was ordered to leave. She never saw or buried their bodies. Ex-prisoners told me that there is a mass grave in the Khedeer desert, but no one - least of all Baghdad's new occupiers - are interested in finding it.
And the men who suffered under Saddam? What did they have to say? "We committed no sin," one of them said to me, a 40-year-old whose prison duties had included the cleaning of the hangman's trap of blood and faeces after each execution. "We are not guilty of anything. Why did they do this to us?
Article comments
1 - SlackMFer
wow, you really care about the poor suffering iraqi's...now that it fits with your anti-bush agenda. before, when it wasn't against bush to give a shit about the iraqi's, left-wingers just said "fuck 'em."
2 - san
I think concern for the Iraqis has always been a big part of us "left-wingers'" argument against this war.
U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
3 - SlackMFer
US out of iraq, huh? if you care so much about them why would you want us to abandon them to certain misfortune? do you think it wouldn't be disastrous to just leave now? some new dictator would just take over (if not saddam himself) and the country would be back where it was.