Did Saddam shred his own people?

[Minstrel Boy]

Poll question: Did Saddam shred his own people?

Remember the plastic people shredder? Er, the plastic shredder of Abu Ghraib, that Saddam's problem child, Uday, was said to feed his enemies? (Feet first, if he was in a bad mood; head first, if merciful.) I was reminded of it today, because I saw it mentioned in another thread as - well, as though it were real.

The thing is, none was found, and witnesses say it never was.

The missing people-shredder

Brendan O'Neill
Wednesday February 25, 2004

The horror of one of Saddam's execution methods made a powerful pro-war rallying cry - but the evidence suggests it never existed

...

The shredding machine was first mentioned in public by James Mahon, then head of research at Indict, at a meeting in the House of Commons on March 12. Mahon had just returned from northern Iraq, where Indict researchers, along with Clwyd, interviewed Iraqis who had suffered under Saddam. One of them said Iraqis had been fed into a shredder. "Sometimes they were put in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 die like this ..." In subsequent interviews and articles, Clwyd said this shredding machine was in Abu Ghraib prison, Saddam's most notorious jail. Indict refuses to tell me the names of the researchers who were in Iraq with Mahon and Clwyd; and, I am told, Mahon, who no longer works at Indict, "does not want to speak to journalists about his work with us". But Clwyd tells me: "We heard it from a victim; we heard it and we believed it."

This is all that Indict had to go on - uncorroborated and quite amazing claims made by a single person from northern Iraq. When I suggest that this does not constitute proof of the existence of a human shredder, Clwyd responds: "Who are you to say that chap is a liar?" Yet to call for witness statements to be corroborated before being turned into the subject of national newspaper articles is to follow good practice in the collection of evidence, particularly evidence with which Indict hopes to "seek indictments by national prosecutors" against former Ba'athists.

An Iraqi who worked as a doctor in the hospital attached to Abu Ghraib prison tells me there was no shredding machine in the prison. The Iraqi, who wishes to remain anonymous, describes the prison as "horrific". Part of his job was to attend to those who had been executed. Did he ever attend to, or hear of, prisoners who had been shredded? "No." Did any of the other doctors at Abu Ghraib speak of a shredding machine used to execute prisoners? "No, never. As far as I know hanging was the only form of execution used there."

...

Other groups have no recorded accounts of a human shredder. An Amnesty International spokesman tells me that his inquiries into the shredder "drew a blank". Widney Brown, the deputy programme director of Human Rights Watch, says: "We have not heard of that particular form of execution or torture."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/analysis/story/0,3604,1155399,00.html

Tom Watson, Labour MP:

Now that Saddam has been overthrown, can we re-visit these allegations and find out whether there is really a scrap of truth behind them?

Where is this plastic shredder, who were the witnesses, when was all of this supposed to be going on?

We've been monstrously lied to over this war - and defectors were discovered to have cynically made up a whole pile of stuff to justify the invasion.
http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=272

Now, about those incubator babies....

[Hubert Flottz]

1. No I think he sent them to Arthur Anderson to be shredded!

Like Kenny Boy did! You've got to go with the pros!

[Dogmudgeon]

2. How about the Head Drill?

I remember listening to Shrub's infamous SotU speech where he announced that Saddam had fissile uranium. He also said that one of the tortures inflicted on Iraqi prisoners was to have their skulls drilled into without benefit of anesthetic.

Has this torture been verified? If it came from the cesspool mind of Uday Hussein, I'd tend to believe it.

--bkl

[starroute]

3. Back in the 80's, Amnesty International . . .

. . . was reporting on some sort of hand-shredding device being used in Iraq. That was when Saddam was our good ally, of course.

(I remember because it grossed me out so much. A matter of childhood fears, going back to my grandmother's dire warnings of what would happen if I got my fingers caught in the electric fan.)

Nothing full-body sized, though.