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At one end of the building at Abu Ghraib prison, a
whipping wind gusted through open doors. At the far end, the flashlight picked
out a windowed space that appeared to function as a control room. Baggy
trousers of the kind worn by many Iraqi men were scattered at the edges of the
concrete floor. Some were soiled, as if worn in the last, humiliating moments
of a condemned man's life.
The
In the past two months, United Nations weapons inspections, mandated by
American insistence that Mr. Hussein's pursuit of banned weapons be halted,
have ranged widely across the country. But before this became the international
community's only goal, Mr. Bush was also attacking Mr. Hussein as a murdering
tyrant. It was this accusation that led the Iraqi leader to virtually empty his
prisons on Oct. 20, giving Western reporters, admitted that day to Abu Ghraib, a first-hand glimpse of the slaughterhouse the
country has become.
In the end, if an American-led invasion ousts Mr. Hussein, and especially if
an attack is launched without convincing proof that Iraq is still harboring
forbidden arms, history may judge that the stronger case was the one that
needed no inspectors to confirm: that Saddam Hussein, in his 23 years in power,
plunged this country into a bloodbath of medieval proportions, and exported
some of that terror to his neighbors.
Reporters who were swept along with tens of thousands of near-hysterical
Iraqis through Abu Ghraib's high steel gates were
there because Mr. Hussein, stung by Mr. Bush's condemnation, had declared an
amnesty for tens of thousands of prisoners, including many who had served long
sentences for political crimes. Afterward, it emerged that little of long-term
significance had changed that day. Within a month, Iraqis began to speak of
wide-scale re-arrests, and officials were whispering that Abu Ghraib, which had held at least 20,000 prisoners, was
filling up again.
Like other dictators who wrote bloody chapters in 20th-century history, Mr.
Hussein was primed for violence by early childhood. Born into the murderous
clan culture of a village that lived off piracy on the
Since then, Mr. Hussein's has been a tale of terror that scholars have
compared to that of Stalin, whom the Iraqi leader is said to revere, even if
his own brutalities have played out on a small scale. Stalin killed 20 million
of his own people, historians have concluded. Even on a proportional basis, his
crimes far surpass Mr. Hussein's, but figures of a million dead Iraqis, in war
and through terror, may not be far from the mark, in a country of 22 million
people.
Where the comparison seems closest is in the regime's mercilessly sadistic
character. Iraq has its gulag of prisons, dungeons and torture chambers — some
of them acknowledged, like Abu Ghraib, and as many
more disguised as hotels, sports centers and other innocent-sounding places. It
has its overlapping secret-police agencies, and its culture of betrayal, with
family members denouncing each other, and offices and factories becoming hives
of perfidy.
"Enemies of the state" are eliminated, and their spouses, adult
children and even cousins are often tortured and killed along with them.
Mr. Hussein even uses Stalinist maxims, including what an Iraqi defector
identified as one of the dictator's favorites: "If there is a person, then
there is a problem. If there is no person, then there is no problem."
There are rituals to make the end as terrible as possible, not only for the
victims but for those who survive. After seizing power in July 1979, Mr.
Hussein handed weapons to surviving members of the ruling elite, then joined them in personally executing 22 comrades who had
dared to oppose his ascent.
The terror is self-compounding, with the state's power reinforced by stories
that relatives of the victims pale to tell — of fingernail-extracting,
eye-gouging, genital-shocking and bucket-drowning. Secret police rape
prisoners' wives and daughters to force confessions and denunciations. There
are assassinations, in
DOING the arithmetic is an imprecise venture. The largest number of deaths
attributable to Mr. Hussein's regime resulted from the war between
Casualties from
Just as in Stalin's Russia, the machinery of death is mostly invisible,
except for the effects it works on those brushed by it — in the loss of
relatives and friends, and in the universal terror that others have of falling
into the abyss. If anybody wants to know what terror looks like, its face is
visible every day on every street of
"Minders," the men who watch visiting reporters
day and night, are supposedly drawn from among the regime's harder men.
But even they break down, hands shaking, eyes brimming, voices
desperate, when reporters ask ordinary Iraqis edgy questions about Mr. Hussein.
"You have killed me, and killed my family," one minder said after
a photographer for The New York Times made unauthorized photographs of an
exhibition of statues of the Iraqi dictator during a November visit to
Using a satanic arithmetic, prison governors worked out how many prisoners
would have to be hanged to bring the numbers down to stipulated levels, even
taking into account the time remaining in the inmates' sentences. As 20 and 30
prisoners at a time were executed at Abu Ghraib and
elsewhere, warders trailed through cities like
MORE recently, according to Iraqis who fled to
Often, the executions have been carried out by the Fedayeen
Saddam, a paramilitary group headed by Mr. Hussein's oldest son, 38-year-old Uday. These men, masked and clad in black, make the women
kneel in busy city squares, along crowded sidewalks, or in neighborhood plots,
then behead them with swords. The families of some victims have claimed they
were innocent of any crime save that of criticizing Mr. Hussein.