Saddam Tortures Children

An assassination attempt on Saddam Hussein?s son Qusai, who is the heir to his throne, means that succession may not be as smooth as Saddam would like. There are rumors that Saddam may want to voluntarily step down in favor of Qusai, in order to gather favor with Europe. He also may want to appease the U.S., since Bush has announced he would like the CIA to do away with Hussein.

Qusai, who is the younger son of Saddam, survived a car bombing on June 9 in Baghdad when his car was booby-trapped. The opposition Supreme Revolutionary Council, a Shiite group backed by Iran, says Qusai was heading for the headquarters of Iraqi General Intelligence when he was attacked. Qusai was about to enter a waiting car that was rigged with a large bomb that came from a Soviet RPG-7 rocket launcher. But before he could get in the car, Qusai was told to get in another car. The Shiite group did not take credit for the assassination attempt.

In 1996, Shiite insurgents tried to kill Uday Hussein, Qusai’s older brother who is said to be a dangerous psychopath. Uday was badly injured and much of his authority was transferred to Qusai.

Meanwhile, Saddam claims that thousands of Iraq?s children are being assassinated due to the U.S. embargo. BBC TV reporter John Sweeney says this isn?t true. In fact, he finds Hussein guilty of actually torturing children.

On a documentary shown in the U.K., Sweeney describes a little girl who was tortured at the age of two. At age four, she still has trouble walking. She was tortured because her father was accused of involvement in the plot to kill Saddam Hussein’s son Uday. He was once part of Saddam?s inner circle. He fled, but the secret police came for his wife and tortured her. When she wouldn’t speak, they tortured her daughter in front of her. The father says, ?They had a wooden stick. They would squeeze her feet and ask, ?Has Daddy called you?? and ?Does Daddy contact you???

Saddam claims that over a million Iraqi children are dead, due to U.S. sanctions, but many Iraqis dispute that number. The little girl?s father says Iraq has faked mass baby funerals, to provide ?evidence? of the 7,000 children under age 5 that Saddam claims are dying each month from the sanctions.

Tiny coffins, decorated with photographs of dead babies and their ages (written in English for the convenience of foreign journalists) are regularly paraded through the streets of Baghdad on the roofs of taxis, led by official mourners.

The father of the tortured girl relates that one taxi driver said to him, ?I went to Najaf [a town 100 miles south of Baghdad] a couple of days ago. I brought back two bodies of children for one of the mass funerals. The smell was very strong.?

He says, ?The taxi driver didn’t know how long they’d been in freezers, perhaps six or seven months. The drivers would collect them from the regions and would be informed of when a mass funeral was arranged so they would be ready. Certainly, they would collect bodies of children who had died months before and been held for the mass processions.? A Western journalist went to the Baghdad mortuary, where a doctor showed him a pile of dead babies, who were waiting for the next official funeral procession. The parents often object to this, since it prevents the immediate burial of their children, which is mandated in the Muslim tradition?but there?s nothing they can do about it.

Saddam claims that children?s deaths in the early 90s, after the Gulf War, were also caused by cancers and birth defects from depleted uranium weapons, but this doesn?t make scientific sense. According to Dr. Nick Plowman, head of clinical oncology at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, the claim ?is ridiculous. It flies in the face of everything learned from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.? Bombs that fell in 1991 could not have caused cancers or birth defects so soon, even if they were fast-growing cancers.

Richard Guthrie, a chemical weapons researcher at Sussex University, says, ?It’s much more likely to be chemical weapons. There are serious clusters of cancers in the south of Iraq near Basra. In the late Eighties, Basra was almost taken by Iranian human-wave offensives, and Saddam stopped these by dropping chemical weapons on them and, by accident, on his own people.?

See June 19 news story, ?Saddam May Step Down Before He?s Taken Out?, click here.

Why were neither of these stories reported anywhere in the U.S. media (except here!) Why aren?t we told what?s really going on in the world? To find out how Big Government and Big Business sugar-coats the news, read ?Into the Buzzsaw? by Kristina Borjesson,click here.

To read about the assassination attempt,click here.

To read about Iraq?s dead babies,11581,742303,00.html,click here.

NOTE: This news story, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.