[In the first place, I think it really gets across exactly what the real dictatorial horror of Saddam's regime was: that if you talked critically about it, you would be thrown in a dungeon and then killed. It was that simple and that awful.]
[Personally, I think all this stuff about mass graves is a bit disingenous. Killing masses of people in wars, killing masses of people in the course of putting down serious uprisings that threaten the regime -- this is not unusual. It's the normal way of the world. And it is certainly nothing the US can feel superior about. It's not only that we backed that war, supplied that gas, covered up for those Kurdish killings, and caused and then betrayed those uprisings. It's that those are all things we've done many, many times. We as a country are responsible for mass graves like this all around the world. All over Latin America, to start with. To think that condemning this in others is a sign of our virtue is truly shameless.]
[But when it comes to a getting killed by a laughing secret police because you whispered something critical about the regime in private, no, that's a different kind of horror. That was the evil side of Saddam. You could get disappeared by brutal bastards for speaking out in Latin America under regimes we created. But it was something that happened at random and was about stands you took in public -- tyranny tempered by slovenliness, as was once said of the Austro-Hungarian empire. But in Iraq, you could bank on it, and it followed you into the deepest recesses of privacy and slaughtered your family in almost biblical fashion. In that way, Saddam laid a lead blanket of oppression over his country that was rare for its terribleness.]
[That said, two other things struck me. One is that this description of this guy's time in prison, "not knowing what time of day it was," "afraid he might be killed at any moment," "standing in a tiny space" -- I greatly fear that is exactly how detainees of the US are now treated. And I think that's a horrible thought. We may not kill them at the end in spectacular fashion as we did to this man's cousin. But what they did to him -- the dungeon part, the psychological torture of threats of death, and the kafkaesque terror of feeling there is no way out and no way to tell anyone where you are -- I think we are doing that right now to hundreds of people, and it makes me really ashamed. And I think it's probably just as bad as they describe it here -- and not as clinical as it is usually described it when we're consciously talking about us.]
[And the third thing is: the last line. When a guy like this can say a thing like that, it's gotta make you think.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/31/international/middleeast/31SURV.html
Michael