The intrepid war reporter Robert Fisk of The Independent in London brings passion and wit to his work and an unsually lively and ironic historical memory. 
On his wall at home in Beirut, where I caught him in conversation today, are the words of the British Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maud taking Baghdad during World War I: “To the people of Baghdad: we come here not as conquerors but as liberators, to free you from generations of tyranny…” The Brits took thousands of casualties and severe reverses on the way into Baghdad in 1917. The resistance thereafter was fierce. And here we are again, the fiery Fisk commented this afternoon.
I’ve come to count on Robert Fisk as a relentlessly observant up-close witness to the cruelty and folly of empire, old-style and new. I’ve heard Fisk say of himself that his life’s work as a correspondent has been covering warfare over the borders that his father’s generation laid out in the years between 1918 and 1920 as they remade the maps of Northern Ireland, the Balkans and the Middle East. Chris Hedges of the New York Times may be Fisk’s counterpart in American journalism–for all his dreadful and deeply considered experience. But Hedges has been on the sidelines in the Iraq War. Fisk has been in the thick of it in Baghdad.
Like many thousands of Internet surfers, I got hooked anew on Fisk’s robustly individual, candid, cautionary voice a year or more ago, during that strange oblivious vacuum of American commentary and debate as the Bush band beat the war drums. Especially since the devastation of the UN headquarters in Baghdad last week, as more and more of Fisk’s warnings (like this, almost two years ago) come true in horrific news, and as the Hutton Inquiry in London revisits the selling of the war in England, I wanted to hear the Fisk take. I wanted his scorecard on the BBC vs. Tony Blair. Fisk insisted on talking about “the real tragedy” unfolding in Iraq: 150,000 American troops in “the biggest rats’ nest in the Middle East, … being attacked daily–one, two, three a day–by people they claim they were coming to liberate. It is a disaster, and it’s going to get worse.” A British soldier had been killed in Iraq a couple of hours before we spoke. “It is going to get more spectacular,” Fisk said, “in the most awful and dreadful sense of the word.”
Robert Fisk’s brave eye is on the misery day-to-day but also, as he told me, on “the malign influence of history, and whether we can escape it.” Listen in.
{ 49 } Comments
Robert Fisk (aka Baghdad Bob II, since his reports, like the statements made by the former Iraqi information minister, routinely stray from the truth) is one of the most biased journalists around. Watch groups, too many to mention, have exposed the lies and glaring distortions found in his coverage of the Middle East. What makes him any more credible now?
You obviously admire him, Chris, but the “brave eye” you praise is a jaundiced one.
I try to respect reports from both sides however biased, and try to come to conclusions based on a juxtapostion of evidence between both sides.
Trying to be as objective as possible, Fisk and Gilligan were two of the most irresponsbile reporters covering the Iraq war. I would say comparable to Geraldo and Bill O’Reily on the right.
That Fisk said the war was based on lies does not suprise me. What I would like to ask him, is if his reports could hold up to the same kind of scrutiny the BBC is facing over the “sexed up” dossier claims.
I think Fisk has been as loose with the facts, if not moreso than Gilligan, and for him to say the war was based on lies is almost laughable to be honest. Sorry for the negative comments, but have to say it like it is.
I ask the first two commenters if they would care to address a specific statement from the Fisk audio clip, or if they prefer only to make vague and unsubstantiated allegations that Fisk is not credible?
I myself have never traveled outside the United States, while Fisk has visited various parts of the Middle East, and has lived in Lebanon for a number of years. I am therefore in no position to personally verify or dispute any claim that Fisk might make, nor any counterclaim made by a critic.
Again I ask the first two commenters: have they ever visited the Middle East? Can they personally dispute any of Fisk’s claims, or do they also rely on second-hand information? And can they tell me which of Fisk’s critics have first-hand experience of the Middle East, and which are themselves only hearing about it second-hand?
Right on Chris Williams! Fisk is the most experienced reporter in the Middle East. His book ,”Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon should be required reading for the first two comentators who obviously don’t have a clue. Someone should write a book “Pity the Nation: The Abduction of US Foreign Policy by the neocon forces of evil in the Pentagon.” In the meantime the US taxpay is being ripped off in the most vicious way.
Here’s one from the web: Via Aziz Poonwalla comes this hard-to-verify but certainly disturbing tale from the cousin of an Iraqi engineer:
As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the South East end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn’t too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward- $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labor, contractors, travel expenses, etc.
Let’s pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let’s pretend he hasn’t been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let’s pretend he didn’t work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf War. Let’s pretend he’s wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated- let’s pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let’s just use our imagination.
A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to an American company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around- brace yourselves- $50,000,000 !!
RIGHT ON indeed, these Fisk bashers sure are quick! Its almost as if they are monitoring Chris’s site. Fisk is one of the only reporters who is wiling to take on the other occupying power in the middle east – the one most Fisk critics would rather not have us even mention!
Thank you chris for this! And Thank you Mr. Fisk for doing what you do!
It is funny that neither one of our two instanaysayers even bother to back up a single one of their foul smelling gripes.
From the MP3 transcript:
“This so called september dossier which Blair continues to pathetically defend was mendacious… They could not even be historically accurate about things that happened 10 years earlier, so how can we trust them on the WMD account.” – Robert Fisk
Well I would like to hold Robert Fisk to the same standard of factual responsibility. I will give you 5 blatant errors he has reported recently, if he will agree to address them.
I am not out to slander him, he should just be as responsible with the facts when he accuses others of being “mendacious”.
Cog, I certainly agree with your wish to hold Fisk responsible for his reporting. That’s fair and just. I hope you’ll consider sharing his reporting errors with us, as well as the Foreign Desk at the Independent: foreigneditor@independent.co.uk
If Fisk doesn’t respond then perhaps someone else can.
And in order to make clear what “standard of factual responsibility” you wish to hold Fisk to, here is the complete passage from which you quoted him.
CHRIS LYDON: Robert Fisk, we’re very eager to get an independent view of this showdown between the BBC and Tony Blair, on sexed-up intelligence, on Armageddon weapons, on sexed-up news reporting. What does it look like to you?
ROBERT FISK: Well, from where I am, which is Beirut, which is in the Middle East, which isn’t that far from Baghdad, it looks like a distraction. Um, you know, I remember when the first so-called “dossier” — how the British love the word “dossier” — came out, last September, I thought to myself when I read it, this is a very, very odd document. It was supposedly 50 pages, but only fifteen, one-five, of those pages dealt with weapons of mass destruction. And even then they were dotted with words like “may have,” “could have,” “would have.” The rest of the pages were about Saddam Hussein’s history, the history of Iraq, the history of the British intelligence services, and indeed the history, which is verifiable and correct, of Saddam’s human rights abuses. Even in this element this so-called “September dossier,” which Blair continues to pathetically defend, was mendacious. For example, in one extract it says that, um, in the city of Basra, in the spring of 1991, uh, Shiite Muslims of Iraq staged riots — I use the word “riots,” that’s what they called them — against the Saddam regime, and were ruthless–ruthlessly repressed, with many thousands of dead. Now, the repression and the dead are correct. What the British left out was, this–these weren’t riots, this was a rebellion encouraged by President George Bush Senior and by the British government. But they deleted that, even–they couldn’t even be accurate and historically honest about events that had occurred more than ten years before. So how could we trust them on the weapons of mass destruction? This was the big issue when the dossier came out.
To LninYo:
You’re right there buddy! This is exactly what we did with Germany and Japan – Go to war so we can bilk their countries out of every cent. We spent countless lives so we could destroy those stupid countries just so we could give our buddies some cush jobs for too much money.
I don’t know who you think is running this country but just to be sure you’re up to date… it is no longer Bill Clinton. Most of us these days don’t consider spending the lives of our brothers and fathers and mothers and sisters for wealthy rebuilding contracts and to indicate that all of the people required to sign on within Washington would do so is just silly. I could imagine a whacko or two but all of them? I can say this, while folks like you make these sorts of claims, I’m glad we have leadership who will continue to do what is right and cautious for us. They’re not perfect by any stretch but they don’t spend our troops’ lives for contracts.
I am Liberal who supports the War in Iraq, but I do respect some of the work of Robert Fiske.
The free world needs it’s journalistic muckrakers and I don’t think they always have to be right at the level of their opinions.
But I think that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is much closer to the truth on Iraq than Friedman.
Oops! Mistyped–
I meant to say:
“But I think that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is much closer to the truth on Iraq than Fisk.”
Please try to interview Matthew Parris columnist and former sketchwriter for the Times. He’s a conservative who opposed the war in Iraq on grounds of national interest.
He also writes regularly for the Spectator. His take is almost always refreshing, and his analysis of Alastair Campbell is trenchant.
His best stuff is for the Times and not available on-line anymore, but anyone with access to Lexis should be able to get it.
Christopher, that you would dishonestly give Fisk a credibility undeserved by his long record of proven lies, is one more reason why I’m thankful that you are no longer on the radio.
What’s the fuss?
Having listened to Fisk just now, and having been an occassional reader of his stuff, I’m wondering just what the heck is so objectionable – here, in the context of this comments box regarding this interview?
I do wish, Chris, that you had been a little tougher on the man. The questions that were begging to be asked – well, now that the Americans and the British are in this rat’s nest – what’s worse? – walking away, sticking it out, or is there a third option? – you failed to ask. Why is building a democracy in Iraq such a self-evident impossibilty? Can you, Fisk, draw any parallel between this ‘occupation’ – its dangers, its ill-conceived nature -whatever – and your time spent in Ulster? Do you think Bush and Blair visiting Northern Ireland together -in what? April? in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq? – might not have had something to do with Anglo-American foreknowledge of the prospects of a long, drawn out urban guerrila war? And so on…
And why – when you have a reporter on the line, who is ‘there’, or close by, in the Middle East, whose main strength is in giving a reader a sense of the scene, in providing details, why would you not at least try to get some sense of what things are like in Iraq at the present time. For Iraqi shopkeepers Coalition troops. Bagdhad taxi drivers. Why the focus on the ‘sexed up’ dossier? which is a distraction, and something he’s not on top of anyway.
Although I’m probably in complete disagreement with any of the other critics in this box regarding Fisk’s value as a reporter and journalist, I did find this interview to be a bit of a puff piece.
Chris, you’re onto a good thing here. But I truly wish you’d stop trying to make friends with your subjects and begin conducting interviews. This isn’t public radio where everyone needs to be – to use a Fiskism – effete.
It’s BlogWorld.
I agree with bmo on that one. less chummy, more crummy (or whatever). hit’em hard. while you got people’s attention.
Tom: despite what Fox News would tell you, “marshall” plan wasn’t to introduce democracies into those two countries. They were proto empires that needed to be neutralized. You had already annihiliated the two countries’ civilians and topped it up with criminal Noo-Kew-Luhr bombings which was just to show the world you were ready to use those monstrous weapons (of mass destrucion?). That was the least the “allied” criminals could do to silence their own conscience for murdering millions of civilians. Maybe you have forgotton the firebombings of dresden, and japanese cities too.. how convenient.
The “liberators” are in Iraq to do one thing. Rape a nation (that they incidentally created during another imperial slaughter of the people) and rob (ROB yes.. Loot) its oil resources. To short circuit the process and be the sellers and buyerers of the oil. This is not a rant against american troops (who by no means are doing a noble thing, but they are just as much a victim of this junta as are the Iraqi people).
The objective is to move the money around from one part of the western economy to the other and in the process get the oil. All the Iraqi’s are gonna be left with, aside from a big dung-bag, would be the “records” of how the money was spent. Without of course, anything to show for it. It all goes up in smoke. Just like it does in Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria.. pick any oil-producing country. If it doesn’t have West’s cronies (numbering only in thousands – but criminal and ruthless to the core) running the show, they are labelled thugs and “un-democratic” (by even what you would call “leftist” media such as new-york-times) . Maybe the world “chavez” rings a bell? Would “Mossadegh” or “Allende” be too taxing right at this moment?
The only problem is that Iraqis have refused (so far) to roll over and play dead (pardon the pun). First you gotta have an environment suitable for looting and plunder. Unfortunately, the current regime in D.C. is ideologically and intellectually incapable of doing that. They like the _idea_ of looting, but they don’t know how to actually do it. For this they must turn to the master criminals for the past 300 years. The British.
Irony of ironies.. every empire turns its oppression to its own “people” sooner or later. If you think “PATRIOT” act may be a teeny bit stepping on your rights (that you probably have already given up in an attempt to be secure from your own Paranoia) Wait till the “PATRIOT FOR DUMMIES” and “COMPLETE IDIOTS ACT FOR PATRIOTICITY” shows up in yer face. And all _you_ wanted was a little security.
The lies that you tell yourself will not exonerate you from your duties as a citizen. You will be judged by what you did or did not do as a citizen of not a totally firked democracy. Where you could have gained control thru the outlets available but you didn’t and instead chose to let vultures feed you with carrion that you willingly took for mannah. Your excuses to your descendants will sound as hollow as the excuses of the german civilians that implicitly supported the genocide and the holocaust. Last time there were actual camps.. this time there are “virutal death camps” spreading across whole nations.. and what do you have to say in your defense? you don’t even know that you are part of the killings.
stay tuned for turbulence as Mr. “President” runs the country into the ground once again.. D’OH!!!!
P.S. Your mention of “your” “Leadership” is so familiar. Maybe it is North Korea? or the old Stalinists that you sounded like? (or perhaps even Nazi’s?) This unfortunate, unelected, incompetent “leadership” that you crow about should provide a lot of entertainment (grotesque at best) for generations to come, not only here at home for that matter. To be the international laughing stock is another thing altogether, especially when you happen to be the most violent and most powerful country on the bloody planet (again.. no pun intended). I suppose guns can not bring you respect just like they couldn’t bring respect to Saddam and his cronies.
“The ‘Liberators’ are in Iraq to do only one thing. Rape a nation…”
This kind of delusional far-Left nonsense is why the Democrats will likely not be in power for a long time to come.
In the meantime, I’m hoping for a wiser and more pragmatic Left to rise from the ashes of the old.
Phil Murray
“The ‘Liberators’ are in Iraq to do only one thing. Rape a nation…”
This kind of delusional far-Left nonsense is why the Democrats will likely not be in power for a long time to come.
In the meantime, I’m hoping for a wiser and more pragmatic Left to rise from the ashes of the old.
Phil Murray
“The ‘Liberators’ are in Iraq to do only one thing. Rape a nation…”
This kind of delusional far-Left nonsense is why the Democrats will likely not be in power for a long time to come.
In the meantime, I’m hoping for a wiser and more pragmatic Left to rise from the ashes of the old.
Phil Murray
“The ‘Liberators’ are in Iraq to do only one thing. Rape a nation…”
This kind of delusional far-Left nonsense is why the Democrats will likely not be in power for a long time to come.
In the meantime, I’m hoping for a wiser and more pragmatic Left to rise from the ashes of the old.
Phil Murray
!!***Sorry,
That triple post was not intentional.
–Logging on from a beat-up-old laptop at work.
Phil Murray
Webmaster,
Please delete all but one copy of my last post (sorry).
Phil Murray
Lol, we are there to rape Iraq and rob its natural resources, and conservatives are fascist [love the Nazi germany reference].
Two of the most ridiculous and unfounded arguments, much in the vain of Robert Fisk’s reporting. Bravo.
Importing gas to help with the fuel crisis, trying to fast track an Iraqi police/militia force that respects human rights, trying to instill a representative democracy…. yes, these are things that didn’t work in Nazi Germany LninYo.
No you’re there to give them democracy because they are just all loin-cloth wearing, beard-growing, kinda funny smelling, desert-iguana huntin know nothing lesser people (almost like your pets that you want to shave and put clothes on to make’m look like you) that YOU, in all YOUR wisdom, have to go and fuck-in-the-internal-affaires-with. Because its your G*D given right.. RIGHT?
Took you 20 years to give them the Saddam govt. that murdered and chemical bombed their asses. Lets see how long it takes for you to teach them human rights.. Now THAT is hilarious. Starting a Concentration Camp in the Bay of americans in Cuba and going round the world telling others about human rights _that_ is laughable.
Maybe you ought to check out the Amnesty International website and do a search on your favorite Fascist state. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of baseless leftist propaganda which you cal laugh at to your hearts content.
Not nearly as ridiculous as believing USA is there for Noble purposes. And please don’t invvoke the troops. You have blackmailed America enough dragging the deadbodies of kids that the fascists-in-conservativ’s clothing don’t have the NUTS enough to emulate and go fight and die in unkown lands. Most of you DOOM playin’ generals rather do it from behind the warm glow of Fox News. And leave the ugly business of dying (for what you are duped into believing as a Noble cause) to someone else.
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win!”
step 3 anyone? Now it might be helpful to actually provide counter arguments as opposed to just kind-heartedly pointing to the apparent comedic potentials of my comments Cog!
Gettin close to step 4. Ciao!
“Bmo” said: “Chris, I wish you would have been a little tougher on the man[i.e.Fisk].”
Of course, Chris challenging incredulous nonsense coming from a Leftie in the same way he would challenge incredulous nonsense coming from a conservative; would be the intellectually honest thing to do. But we are talking about Chris Lydon after all. His idea of intellectual honesty is to claim that a position on how much Public radio revenue he is “entitled” to, has “nothing at all to do with money”.
That you have no outrage for the nations that led the military support for Saddam pre-GW1 [Russia, China, France] or post-GW1 [(allegedly) Russia, Jordan, Germany, France)] just demonstrates your bias.
Bias much in the vain of an average Robert Fisk report.
That Cog doesn’t know the difference between ‘vein’ and ‘vain’ should tell us a lot about his credibility as a critic of foreign reportage.
Well, relying on a typo or a misquote is often the proof for a conspiracy isnt it?
It is weird that you focus on a typo I made on a messageboard, while ignoring factual errors in Fisk columns that have made him a laughingstock among credible journalists.
“Fisking” someone is now synonymous with fact checking an error filled report.
Shedding Light On a Symbol Of Iraqi Terror
Ex-Prisoners Describe Horrors, Call for Justice
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 6, 2003; Page A01
ABU GHRAIB, Iraq — Prisoners were brought to Iraq’s most feared prison in an ice-cream truck, a soft cone painted on its side. After sentencing at the nearby Revolutionary Court, following a perfunctory trial, the prisoners were hustled outside and loaded in the back.
“We were waddling like penguins because of the torture,” recalled Ahmed Mohammed Baqer Attar, a 41-year-old Baghdad physician. “And then we saw an old ice-cream truck.”
“It’s hard to believe,” he continued, a smoker’s laugh rising from his chest. “But everything was hard to believe.”
On the short ride to the prison, a forbidding structure that sprawls over 280 acres about 20 miles west of Baghdad, the men who had just been sentenced to death kissed those who had received jail terms and begged them to get word of their fate to their families. “They were weeping and trembling and they made us swear,” said Karim Hassan Jabbar, 45, another physician who spent nine years in the prison.
In the shuddering whispers of this formerly closed society, Abu Ghraib was known as a colossal dungeon where the silent screams of its captives became the symbol of state terror. Abu Ghraib was the Iraqi gulag.
Some of those in the ice-cream van, facing 20 years in this prison rather than death, wondered if they were the unlucky ones. “I felt such agony, such despair, it felt like a knife turning in my stomach,” said Hakem Kharqani, 43, of the moment he crossed the prison’s threshold in 1982. He had already endured torture at the headquarters of the secret police in Baghdad, including electric shock. He feared it would continue without end.
For thousands of political prisoners crudely executed by hanging in its ghoulish death chamber, Abu Ghraib was the final station in an excruciatingly brutal system. Thousands more who eluded the hangman were forced to survive in overcrowded, putrescent, disease-infested cells where the threat of violence, including beatings, torture and summary execution, was ever-present.
Today, Abu Ghraib’s political prisoners are giving witness to the apparatus of repression under former president Saddam Hussein. The survivors are providing detailed, firsthand testimony, one at a time, about the system’s capricious barbarism. A more complete historical accounting is likely to take years. The prospect of trials, both for the country’s onetime leadership and its functionaries, remains distant.
Among survivors, there is a strong desire that the pain of Abu Ghraib not be forgotten. They want a new legal system to exact retribution, and they want the lessons of the past to be etched into memory as a guarantee of Iraq’s future freedom.
“The prisoners are Iraq’s best teachers,” said Kharqani.
Arrest and Torture
The secret police, dressed in civilian clothes, came for Kharqani at home. It was just hours after an evening celebration at Baghdad’s Alwiya club where his civil engineering class marked its graduation. Upon his return from the club, his family showered him with chocolates, an Iraqi tradition. He was the first among seven children to get a university degree.
Away from the neighborhood, in the back of the vehicle, Kharqani was blindfolded and handcuffed. He was taken to the headquarters of the Directorate of General Security, where he was chained to a radiator in a corridor outside interrogation rooms, a hood still over his head. He could hear the screams and moans of prisoners undergoing questioning.
“They softened you up by forcing you to listen,” said Attar, who was arrested after he was summoned from a class on microorganisms to the deputy dean’s office at Kufa University. Two agents quietly led him away and then drove him to Baghdad.
Occasionally, a passing guard whacked the shackled prisoners with a stick. They flinched at footsteps, barely breathing in their shrouded darkness. Some prisoners had already soiled their pants.
After several hours, the prisoners were brought into an interrogation room. The questions began with the routine: name, age, occupation. Then, an offer to confess now, and avoid the worst. Some prisoners, like Kharqani, had no sense of the charges against them. Others, like Attar, understood that admitting to membership in prohibited groups, such as the Shiite Dawa party, meant death.
The word of an informer, the forced confession of a friend or, in some cases, genuine intelligence led to the arrests. Islamic activists, Communists and Kurds all shared the same fate.
Kharqani was the unwitting acquaintance of a student involved in an Islamic opposition group accused of attacking Tariq Aziz, then deputy prime minister, with a grenade as he opened a student conference. Attar moved in religiously active student circles at his college in southern Iraq, near the holy city of Najaf.
Abdul Hussein Faraj, 47, and arrested in 1988, admits now that he was a member of the banned Dawa party.
Once one member of a family was arrested, other relatives were exposed. Kharqani’s younger brother, Raheem, later disappeared, and his father died within a day of being released from the General Security headquarters. The family suspects he was poisoned.
In the interrogation room, the hoods were removed. The prisoners had their hands tied behind their backs with cuffs and rope; Faraj’s wrist is still cross-hatched with scars from when he was bound. They were then hoisted by a rope attached to a hook in the ceiling so they dangled above the ground, the tendons in their shoulders tearing under the strain. The ball and socket in the shoulders of some prisoners completely rotated, Attar said.
The prisoners were lashed with cables. Clips were attacked to their earlobes, nipples and genitals and they were administered electric shocks. When they passed out, as they almost invariably did, they were dragged back to the corridor and cuffed again to the radiator, a dozen former prisoners recalled in interviews.
This torture continued for several days, hours at a time, even after the prisoners broke. Nearly all eventually signed forced confessions put in front of them and stamped them with a single fingerprint, their hands lifted to the paper by the guards because the prisoners no longer had the strength.
Prisoners who held out longer than expected were subject to further horrors. Faraj saw his mother dragged in front of him. His mother’s gown was roughly lifted, exposing her bare legs and underwear as the police said they would rape her. The humiliation, he said, was unbearable. Kharqani and two other inmates were forced to watch three other prisoners killed with acid.
When the torture ended, the prisoners were bundled into one of a number of fetid basement cells so crowded that prisoners created their own rotation for lying down, sitting and standing. Newcomers were greeted with the only gift in the power of the prisoners. “All the new prisoners were washed by the others,” said Attar. “You couldn’t use your hands so they helped you with the toilet,” a hole in the ground. The cells were about nine feet by six feet and each held between 35 and 40 prisoners, former inmates said.
For months, sometimes years, the prisoners said, nothing more happened. Kharqani was arrested in December 1980 and brought to trial in July 1983. They subsisted on small rations, thin soup and bread, sitting in their underwear because of the hot, pungent air. In whispers, those who had memorized the Koran recited it.
Eventually, they faced a trial before the Revolutionary Court, set up in 1968, when the Baath Party came to power, to try “spies, agents and enemies of the people.” On the morning of Attar’s trial, the court was presided over by Muslim Hadi Jubouri, who condemned the 45 prisoners assembled in front of him as “criminal scum” when the proceeding began. The signed statements obtained by the secret police lay before him.
That day 37 men were sentenced to death, five men to 20 years imprisonment and three men to seven years. The whole proceeding lasted 20 minutes, Attar said.
The Death House
Abu Ghraib’s death house, shaped like an ankle-boot, is a modest building. From the main entrance, there are 10 tiny cells on the right, which held up to 25 prisoners in each. Graffiti where prisoners scratched the passing days are still on the wall, along with pleas to Allah. “God save me,” reads one inscription, “and I will pray 70,000 times.”
Shedding Light On a Symbol Of Iraqi Terror
But there was no hope; decisions of the Revolutionary Court could not be appealed.
U.S. officials who are renovating Abu Ghraib, where 1,000 people have been incarcerated since the occupation began, estimate that 30,000 people were hanged there in the Hussein years. The total may be higher. Ahmed Abbas, a statistician at the prison from 1999 to 2001, said he recorded about 2,500 executions a year of both criminal and political prisoners. The execution rate in the prison was higher in the 1980s, when the government launched oppressive campaigns against its perceived enemies in both the Shiite and Kurdish communities, and again in 1991, when it put down revolts following uprisings in the Shiite south and Kurdish north.
In the early 1980s, the hangman was known as Abu Widad, according to former prisoners and guards. A tall muscular man, whom the prisoners called the “sword,” he carried on his hip a pistol engraved with Saddam’s name.
Executions were scheduled for Wednesdays and Sundays, beginning in the early evening and continuing for hours until, on some days, as many as 50 or 60 people had been hanged, said Kudhair Atwan Jabr, 46, an ambulance driver who witnessed the killing and then removed the bodies from the chamber.
The smell of whiskey was always on Widad’s breath, he said.
Prisoners were led bound from the cells to the building’s dank lobby where a committee, sitting at a table, read the death sentence. The execution chamber lay just beyond. They were then walked up a ramp and placed on one of two square trapdoors embedded in the floor. The doors split in the middle.
A thick noose hung from a crescent-shaped piece of steel set in the roof over each door. The U.S. occupation authority has the last two noose ropes found at Abu Ghraib, U.S. soldiers at the prison said.
The noose was placed over each prisoner’s neck and a green hood was put over his head. A lever opened the two doors and the loud clang of them banging open signaled to the prisoners still in the cells that an execution had taken place.
Another hangman, known as Akeel, who served in the late 1980s, would sometimes stand on the trapdoor with the prisoner, embrace and fall with the condemned men to ensure they died quickly. “He always hugged the thin ones and fell with them so it would be a mercy to them,” said Jabr, who worked at the prison from 1987 to 1991. The whereabouts of the executioners’ are unknown.
Sattar Latif Ridha was executed by hanging in Abu Ghraib on Jan. 30, 1982. He was 18. Recently graduated from Kadhimiya high school, he was “a handsome young man,” according to his religion and Arabic teacher, Aldin Ahmed Morad.
Ridha was one of a group of religiously active students from the same neighborhood picked up in the fall of 1981 and taken to the General Security headquarters. He was minding a friend’s store. And then he was gone. “Young people like my brother tried to fight the regime,” said Jamal Latif Ridha, Sattar’s older brother. “And Saddam destroyed them.”
In April 1993, a political prisoner, Awda Hamdan, received word from his family that his young son had died. Nearly hysterical with grief, Hamdan shook his fist at one of the ubiquitous portraits of Saddam Hussein that were hung or painted throughout Iraq’s largest prison. Someone shouted, “Don’t do it,” Kharqani recalled.
The picture fell, the glass in the frame shattering, and a brief, fearful silence descended on the hallway where it had hung. Hamdan, about 28 years old, quickly insisted it was an accident, but an orderly reported him to security officers. He was savagely beaten with sticks and iron bars and tossed in one of the solitary cells just inside his ward, known as K2, Kharqani said.
Five days later, Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan, Saddam’s maternal half-brother and director of Iraq’s General Security Directorate from 1991 to 1996, arrived at the prison.
Hamdan was dragged out to the exercise yard and tied to a stake. A group of prisoners, about 50 or 60 in all, were summoned from different wards in the political section and ordered to sit on the dirt. Hamdan was shot repeatedly by one of the bodyguards of Hassan. “Sabawi said it was a lesson,” Kharqani recalled.
A Treacherous Place
The construction of Abu Ghraib, commissioned and designed in the 1950s, was shelved until the mid-1960s, when conditions in Baghdad’s Ottoman-era prison forced the government to start the building. It was completed in 1969, just after the Baathists seized power.
“A building or a place is not evil,” said Abdul Kareem Hani, 75, who was appointed minister of labor and social affairs in 1963 and ordered the prison built. He ended up a prisoner in Abu Ghraib in the 1990s after failing to report a plot against Hussein in which a friend was involved. “The men who run it make it evil. Abu Ghraib was supposed to be a modern, progressive institution.”
Surrounded by nearly three miles of 20-foot-high, cinder-block wall and 24 watchtowers, Abu Ghraib was divided into five sections, each with its own walled security perimeter: long-term criminal; short-term criminal; the Arabs and foreigners section; the death house; and the political section, which in the 1980s was subdivided into closed and open sections.
The prison had a 20-bed hospital, large exercise yards, agricultural land to teach farming and numerous workshops, including one for sewing and embroidery, as part of its original mandate to rehabilitate prisoners. Built to house 1,500 inmates, the prison at times held 25,000 men within its walls.
After the treatment prisoners had endured at the hands of the secret police in Baghdad immediately following their arrest, including severe torture, the conditions in Abu Ghraib, bizarrely, were something of a relief. “To be put in a cell where you could breathe, where you could lie down on your back to sleep, where you talk, it seemed like a mercy,” said Abdul Kareem Shaneen, 46, who spent nine years in the prison.
But as the numbers swelled through the 1980s, medical problems, in particular, began to proliferate in filthy, lice-infested cells. The numbers in the political section grew so large that two warehouses were built to hold the overflow, including army deserters who also had their ears cut off as punishment.
“About 50 percent of the prisoners had tuberculosis,” said Attar, the physician. The prison authorities only occasionally provided medicine — streptomycin — which the prisoners who were physicians administered. “We often used one needle over and over without hot water to sterilize,” he said.
The death of a 25-year-old prisoner from tuberculosis finally sparked a revolt in 1988. The prisoner had been coughing blood for months and the guards had ignored all pleas to get him medical help. He died in his cell, and as the prison guards attempted to remove his body, his cell mates attacked the guards, forcing them to retreat and seizing their keys. They opened the other cell doors, although the 20-cell ward itself remained in lockdown.
“It was mayhem,” Attar recalled.
A delegation of officials from Baghdad decided to negotiate rather than crush the small uprising, Attar said. They asked for a list of demands. In return for promises of good behavior, the prisoners in the closed sections were allowed family visits and care packages, including food, blankets and mats; guards routinely extracted bribes for their safe delivery, prisoners said.
Over the next few years, Arabic, philosophy and other classes began in the cells. Attar taught a course on logic. Hani, the former labor minister, taught English. Conditions became so lax during the Persian Gulf War that some prisoners, including Hussein Shahristani, a nuclear scientist, were able to escape.
But the prison remained a treacherous place. The authorities maintained informants to report on political activism. “You had to think of anyone you didn’t completely trust as an informant,” said Hani, who was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib from 1995 to 2001.
Prisoners found with radios, which were banned, or proscribed books, such as those by leading Shiite clerics, were removed to one of the security offices in each cellblock where they were tortured. One security officer, Falah Aqula, was named by seven prisoners in separate interviews, as well as by former guards, as the prison’s principal torturer. Aqula fled as the war ended.
The accounts of victims are supported by former prison guards. “There were bad cases that we were forced to beat,” said Jafir Sadr Mohammed, 56, a former prison captain at Abu Ghraib. “Some of them you wanted to kill. If we suspected something, we would take their confessions while we beat them and then put them in solitary.”
Hussein issued several amnesties, but each time they passed Kharqani by, because he had been convicted under an espionage statute. “I thought I would die in Abu Ghraib,” he said.
But on Oct. 20, 2002, the prison loudspeaker announced, “We have happy news for you.” Names were called until the prison authorities simply let everyone out. Kharqani emerged to a mob scene of news media cameras and frantic relatives who had gathered by the thousands outside the prison gates.
His mother and sister were in the crowd, but he didn’t see them. He and some friends, all long-term prisoners, eventually found a taxi, and the driver was so pleased for them, he gave them a tour of the city before dropping them off in their different neighborhoods.
“There was so much I didn’t remember,” said Kharqani. “I didn’t even know my way home. I was like a child in the city.”
[B]THIS is the Iraq that the far-Left wanted to protect. And THIS is the Iraq that too many on the Left wanted to turn a blind eye to.[/B]
Phil
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[B]Liberal, yes, but not willing to do nothing in the name of ‘peace’. Your so called ‘peace’ is described above.[/B]
Interesting…
Nice
jYZE4G r u crazzy? I told u! I can’t read!
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In your opinion Fisk has been in the thick of it in Baghdad? He has spent less time there than most other western reporters which isn’t saying a whole lot for his point of view. Everyone outside of the “progressive” circles knows him for what he is-A propagandist for any group who wars against the West. See and read Karsch’s reviews of his latest book.
Nice post and blog
Thanks for sharing
Fisk like Said is interesting to listen to for his counterpoints.
Like the above commenter, I often read the independent and Fisk’s work to get the counterpoint. Whether I agree or not with it, he writes well and represents one end of the political spectrum. I would not say the middle of that spectrum however.
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This was a definitely wonderful post. In theory I’d like to create like this also – getting time and real work to make a great article… but what can I say… I procrastinate alot and by no means appear to get something carried out.
I’m not sure I agree with Fisk on this. But as always Lydon does a great job getting to the facts.
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Not nearly as ridiculous as believing USA is there for Noble purposes. And please don’t invvoke the troops. You have blackmailed America enough dragging the deadbodies of kids that the fascists-in-conservativ’s clothing don’t have the NUTS enough to emulate and go fight and die in unkown lands. Most of you DOOM playin’ generals rather do it from behind the warm glow of Fox News. And leave the ugly business of dying (for what you are duped into believing as a Noble cause) to someone else.
Not nearly as ridiculous as believing USA is there for Noble purposes. And please don’t invvoke the troops. You have blackmailed America enough dragging the deadbodies of kids that the fascists-in-conservativ’s clothing don’t have the NUTS enough to emulate and go fight and die in unkown lands.
You have blackmailed America enough dragging the deadbodies of kids that the fascists-in-conservativ’s clothing don’t have the NUTS enough to emulate and go fight and die in unkown lands.
The intrepid war reporter Robert Fisk of The Independent in London brings passion and wit to his work and an unsually lively and ironic historical memory.
I love it at SBBC as well! Great school and great environment!
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