Secrets of Iraq's death chamber - Robert Fisk

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/secrets-of-iraqs-death-chamber-953517.
html

Like all wars, the dark, untold stories of the Iraqi conflict drain from
its shattered landscape like the filthy waters of the Tigris. And still
the revelations come.

The Independent has learnt that secret executions are being carried out
in the prisons run by Nouri al-Maliki's "democratic" government.

The hangings are carried out regularly – from a wooden gallows in a
small, cramped cell – in Saddam Hussein's old intelligence headquarters
at Kazimiyah. There is no public record of these killings in what is now
called Baghdad's "high-security detention facility" but most of the
victims – there have been hundreds since America introduced "democracy"
to Iraq – are said to be insurgents, given the same summary justice they
mete out to their own captives.

The secrets of Iraq's death chambers lie mostly hidden from foreign eyes
but a few brave Western souls have come forward to tell of this prison
horror. The accounts provide only a glimpse into the Iraqi story, at
times tantalisingly cut short, at others gloomily predictable. Those who
tell it are as depressed as they are filled with hopelessness.

"Most of the executions are of supposed insurgents of one kind or
another," a Westerner who has seen the execution chamber at Kazimiyah
told me. "But hanging isn't easy." As always, the devil is in the detail.

"There's a cell with a bar below the ceiling with a rope over it and a
bench on which the victim stands with his hands tied," a former British
official, told me last week. "I've been in the cell, though it was
always empty. But not long before I visited, they'd taken this guy there
to hang him. They made him stand on the bench, put the rope round his
neck and pushed him off. But he jumped on to the floor. He could stand
up. So they shortened the length of the rope and got him back on the
bench and pushed him off again. It didn't work."

There's nothing new in savage executions in the Middle East – in the
Lebanese city of Sidon 10 years ago, a policeman had to hang on to the
legs of a condemned man to throttle him after he failed to die on the
noose – but in Baghdad, cruel death seems a speciality.

"They started digging into the floor beneath the bench so that the guy
would drop far enough to snap his neck," the official said. "They dug up
the tiles and the cement underneath. But that didn't work. He could
still stand up when they pushed him off the bench. So they just took him
to a corner of the cell and shot him in the head."

The condemned prisoners in Kazimiyah, a Shia district of Baghdad, are
said to include rapists and murderers as well as insurgents. One
prisoner, a Chechen, managed to escape from the jail with another man
after a gun was smuggled to them. They shot two guards dead. The
authorities had to call in the Americans to help them recapture the two.
The Americans killed one and shot the Chechen in the leg. He refused
medical assistance so his wound went gangrenous. In the end, the Iraqis
had to operate and took all the bones out of his leg. By the time he met
one Western visitor to the prison, "he was walking around on crutches
with his boneless right leg slung over his shoulder".

In many cases, it seems, the Iraqis neither keep nor release any record
of the true names of their captives or of the hanged prisoners. For
years the Americans – in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison
outside Baghdad – did not know the identity of their prisoners. Here,
for example, is new testimony given to The Independent by a former
Western official to the Anglo-US Iraq Survey Group, which searched for
the infamous but mythical weapons of mass destruction: "We would go to
the interrogation rooms at Abu Ghraib and ask for a particular prisoner.
After about 40 minutes, the Americans brought in this hooded guy,
shuffling along, shackled hands and feet.

"They sat him on a chair in front of us and took off his hood. He had a
big beard. We asked where he received his education. He repeatedly said
'Mosul'. Then he said he'd left school at 14 – remember, this guy is
supposed to be a missile scientist. We said: 'We know you've got a PhD
and went to the Sorbonne – we'd like you to help us with information
about Saddam's missile project'. But I said to myself : 'This guy
doesn't know anything 'bout fucking missiles.' Then it turned out he had
a different name from the man we'd asked for, he'd been picked up on the
road by the Americans four months earlier, he didn't know why. So we
said to the Americans: 'Wrong gentleman!' So they put the shackles on
him and took him back to his cell and after 20 or 30 minutes, they'd
bring someone else. We'd ask him where he went to school and he told us
he had never been to school.

"Wrong person again. It was a complete farce. The incompetence of the US
military was astounding, criminal. Eventually, of course, they found the
right guy and brought him in and took his hood off. He was breathing
heavily, overweight, pudgy, disoriented, a little bit scared."

On this occasion, the Americans had found the right man. The British and
American investigators asked the guards to remove the man's shackles,
which they did – but then they tied one of the man's legs to the floor.
Yes, he had a PhD.

Again, the official's testimony: "We went through his history, what he'd
worked on – he was obviously just a minor functionary in one of Saddam's
missile programmes. Iraqi scientists didn't have the knowledge how to
make nuclear missiles nor did they have the financial support necessary.
It just remained in the dreams of Saddam."

The scientist-prisoner in Abu Ghraib miserably told his captors that
he'd been arrested by the Americans after they'd knocked on his front
door in Baghdad and found two Kalashnikov rifles a woman's hijab, verses
from the Koran and, obviously of interest to his captors, "physics and
missile textbooks on his bookshelves." But this supposedly valuable
prisoner was never charged or previously interviewed even though he
admitted he was a rocket scientist.

"I don't know what happened to him," the former official told me. "I
tried to tell the UK and the US military that we've arrested this man
but that he's got a wife, children, a family. I said that by locking up
this one innocent person, you've got 50 men radicalised overnight. No, I
don't know what happened to him."

For many of the investigators working for the Anglo-American authorities
in Baghdad, the trial for the crime for which the Iraqi dictator was
himself subsequently hanged was a fearful experience that ultimately
ended in disgust. Through captured documents, they could see the dark,
inner workings of Saddam's secret police. The idea of the Saddam trial
was less to bring members of the former regime to justice than to show
Iraqis how justice and the rule of law should operate.

"It was exhilarating to see Saddam being cross-examined," one of the
court investigators said. "The low point was when he was executed. What
drove me on was seeing how Saddam dealt with his victims – I was looking
at a microcosm of all the deaths that had taken place in Iraq. But when
he was executed, it was done in such a savage way."

Saddam Hussein was hanged in the same "secure" unit at Kazimiyah where
Mr al-Maliki's people, in an echo of Saddamite Baathist terror, now hang
their victims.

Iraq The death penalty

*The death penalty in Iraq was suspended after Saddam Hussein was
deposed in 2003. It was reinstated by the interim government in August 2004.

*The United Nations, the European Union and international human rights
organisations all spoke out against the reintroduction.

*At the time, the government claimed the death penalty was a necessary
measure until the country had stabilised. Amnesty International claims
that "the extent of violence in Iraq has increased rather than
diminished, clearly indicating that the death penalty has not proved to
be an effective deterrent."

*Saddam, left, his half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and Iraq's former
chief judge Awad Hamed al-Bandar were hanged at the end of 2006 for
their part in the killings of 148 people in the mainly Shia town of
Dujail in 1982. Illicit videos of all three executions later became
public. Saddam's body could be seen on a hospital trolley, his head
twisted at 90 degrees. Barzan – Iraq's former intelligence chief –was
decapitated by the noose. Officials said it was an accident.

*According to Amnesty, there were at least 33 executions reported in
Iraq last year. About 200 people were estimated to have been sentenced
to death.

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