NewsMax.com
Monday, July 7, 2003

The History Channel fulfills its mission in an eye-widening series that details the full extent of the heinous crimes committed during Saddam’s rule. Featured in “Horrors” are interviews with Abdul Rasul al-Hayder, an Iraqi who was tortured repeatedly for 6 months while imprisoned for complaining about the food in the Baghdad University Student Union. Also on screen is Hazim Oraha, who was arrested and relentlessly tortured for exhibiting art in his gallery the regime deemed threatening. His gallery, assets and home were seized.

“Horrors” also ferrets out the things that forged Saddam’s aberrant character. He was a fan of Adolf Hitler and of Joseph Stalin. He read Joseph Stalin’s works and patterned much of his regime on Stalinist Soviet Union. Every aspect of his upbringing relentlessly contributed to the makeup of a person who was and perhaps still is incapable of feeling anyone’s pain – beginning with a mother that tried to murder him while still in the womb, turning away from him forever after his dreaded birth.

One of the most starling segments is the showing of a rare piece of film where Saddam calls the roll of his cabinet and asks an informer sharing the stage with him which members were conspiring against him. As they are identified, thugs drag them from the room. At the end of the most horrible parliamentary session imaginable, Saddam calmly tells the relieved remaining members that they will have the honor of personally acting as the firing squad for the executions to be carried out the next morning.

Along the way the mesmerized viewer is introduced to acid-drip machines in torture chambers, the mass public hangings of Jews Saddam claimed were “spies,” and grisly anecdotes of torture to induce false confessions -- with husbands forced to watch the raping of their wives, parents the gouging out of their children’s eyes, or the horrific image of a baby flung into a wall to shatter its skull.

More Horrors

After surviving an hour of Hussein’s horrors, the viewer this past Sunday evening was given the coup-de-grace with a second hour featuring the equally brutal sons of the deposed dictator.

The brothers, Odai and Qusay were partial to having prisoners forced to drink gasoline and then shot with incendiary bullets that ignited their bodies. Others were stripped naked, smeared with honey and tossed to starving dogs.

Odai when he was head of the Iraq National Olympic Committee used torture of the country’s athletes as a motivational technique.

The deranged behavior by the Husseins was extended not only to enemies of the regime but against family members and friends as well. The stories of Odai’s rage include spraying bullets into a Baghdad motorist who was guilty in his opinion of driving too slowly. It’s believed that Odai was the driving force behind the murders of his in-laws - Saddam Kamel Hassan, who was married to Odai’s sister, Rana, and Hussein Kamel Hassan, who married Odai’s eldest sister, Raghad.

According to the History Channel, Saddam committed his first murder at the tender age 10. His sons’ earliest memories are of visits with their father to various bloody torture chambers often painted red -- walls, ceilings and floors. In their adult years the brothers emulated their father by using stand-ins and doubles whose features were altered by plastic surgery.

The images ding at the viewer until the awful reality settles in: Saddam Hussein’s worst weapon of mass destruction was himself.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Saddam Hussein/Iraq

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