On the way to the 2003 Iraqi Invasion, press reports appeared in Britain and the United States from the plastic crusher or wood chipper in which Saddam and Qusay Hussein fed the opponents of their Baath powers. These stories drew the attention of the world and encouraged support for military action, in stories with titles like "Look at those grated, then say you do not support the war". A year later, there was not enough evidence to support the existence of such machines.
Video Saddam Hussein's alleged shredder
Laporan pers
The mention of the first destroyer occurred at a meeting of 12 March 2003, when James Mahon addressed the British House of Commons after returning from research in northern Iraq.
Ann Clwyd wrote in The Times six days later, an article entitled "Look at the shredded people, then say you do not go back to war," saying that an unnamed Iraqi said Hussein used a crusher to kill cruelly male opponents, and use their shredded bodies as fish food. Then he will add that it is believed to be placed in Abu Ghraib prison, and talks with an unknown person who claims that the shredder was dismantled "just before the military arrived there". Two days later, Australian Prime Minister John Howard referred to the "human destruction machine".
Melanie Phillips wrote on The Daily Mail, saying that the machine produced "corpses... chewed from foot to head". In William Shawcross's 2003 book Allied: The United States, Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq, he claims that Saddam Hussein "feeds people into large shredders, the first legs to prolong suffering". Political editor Sun Trevor Kavanagh wrote in February 2004 that "Public opinion swings behind Tony Blair when voters learn how Saddam feeds dissidents first into the industrial shredder."
There is no further evidence of the existence of a shredder ever published, although a witness named Ahmed Hassan Mohammed at Saddam's trial in December 2005 claimed to have seen it. Saddam's half brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, verbally attacked the witness, shouting that he "must act in the cinema."
Maps Saddam Hussein's alleged shredder
Rev. Kenneth Joseph
For Americans, the main domestic source for the story of the shredder is the testimony of the Assyrian Christians, Ken Joseph Jr. Joseph, a priest who entered Iraq in 2003 and whose family is from Mahoudi in northern Iraq. He has reportedly found that far from avoiding conflict, Iraqis support the American invasion, and "will commit suicide if American bombing does not begin." He immediately reversed himself and left the country after hearing this and the first-hand account of Saddam's destroyer: "Their stories of torture and murder are slow making me sick, as people put large shredders for plastic products, first legs so they can hear their shouts when the corpses are chewed from head to toe. "Johann Hari, a British supporter of the Iraq war, quotes Joseph as saying the trip" shocked me back to reality "in the column on The Independent on 26 March 2003. The work of "I Was Wrong" became a very important argument about the idea of ​​liberating Iraq.
Doubt surface
Brendan O'Neill was the first Western journalist to seriously challenge the existence of a shredder, in a report for The Spectator and The Guardian in February 2004. He asked Clwyd and Mahon to provide evidence or the names of the Iraqis who gave them the story. He spoke with a doctor who handled prisoners executed in Abu Ghraib during Saddam Hussein's reign, which said that all executions were done by hanging, and denied any claim of any kind of shredder.
Has he ever attended, or heard, a torn prisoner? "No." Is there another doctor in Abu Ghraib talking about the destroyer used to execute the prisoners? "No, no, never."
Clwyd responded to O'Neill's accusation at The Guardian the same month, stating:
Brendan O'Neill was notified by my office, but chose not to include in his article the following information. In his statement, the witness who said that the people killed by the shredder was very specific: he mentioned the individuals he said were killed in the shredder and the people he said oversaw the execution with the shredder; it states where the shredder is and the month and year when the execution occurred. Witnesses were questioned by Indict researchers and described by them as "unshakeable". He said he was also ready to testify in court about the incident.
Brendan O'Neill wrote a letter in response to Clwyd's, claiming that his office actually refused to provide the information he requested:
Over the phone, a Clwyd staff member read to me, at a very high pace, a prepared statement about the witness. He said I could not ask questions about the statement, that it would not be faxed or emailed to me, and that no specific information from the witness would be available to me. When I called Clwyd to ask more questions, he hung up.
O'Neill returned to the topic in February 2010, writing "Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, in their many investigations of human rights abuses in Iraq, have heard someone talk about human destruction machines."
Investigation of Pdt. Kenneth Joseph Jr. by CounterPunch reveals a serious discrepancy in the story. The groups organizing human shields in Iraq say they have no record of him, and "no one, apparently, ever met him." Human shield activists speculate that if Joseph went to Iraq he might be "motivated by his campaign for 'Assyria Independence' rather than the welfare of the Iraqi people in the face of the invasion." In addition, Bishop Mar Bawai Soro, later of the Assyrian Church in the East, announced that Joseph was not a minister as he stated, and had no connection with their organization.
See also
- Cruel propaganda
- Conspiracy theories in the Arab world
- Sporus
References
External links
- First-hand account of Saddam's ruthless regime
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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