Saddam's Mass Graves: How many bodies did we really find?

[socalover]

I often hear the media referring to the hundred thousand bodies found in Saddam's mass graves where he tortured people. Is that really accurate, where exactly did they find those bodies? Or are they mixing up Bush's mass graves for Saddams?

[Warpy]

1. Nowhere near 100,000

but the figure is undoubtedly in the tens of thousands.

What the MSM consistently fails to report is that those bodies were from a war against Iran plus uprisings of both Kurds and Shi'ites that were instigated by Poppy Bush, who then sold them out.

War creates a lot of bodies, there are no refrigerated morgues, and Islamic law states those bodies have to be buried by sunset of the following day.

Mass graves were the only way to accomodate them.

[soothsayer]

4. Don't forget how many iraqis schwartzkopf buried alive in that

war! Just pushed sand right on top of 'em.

http://jeff.paterson.net/aw/aw4_buried_alive.htm

[sabra]

2. Phil Donahue said it best, Saddam was an SOB, but he was our SOB...

[LynnTheDem]

3. No it is not accurate.

PM admits graves claim 'untrue'
July 18, 2004

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,1263830,00.html

And who were those "5,000 corpses"?

"Iraqi Mass Graves" In Perspective

In the past few months the graves of thousands of civilians have been unearthed in war-torn Iraq. Not surprisingly, the White House has wasted no time in declaring the dead to be prime examples of Saddam Hussein's brutality and a further justification for our invasion. But a check of the historical record on this matter reveals yet another calculated distortion by the administration and its supporters.

At the end of the 1991 Gulf War legions of Shia radicals - the kind we've seen clamoring for an Islamic state - attacked and killed anyone connected to Iraq's secular government. Urged to "take matters into their own hands" by the first Bush administration and mistakenly believing that Iraq's army had been destroyed, armed militants went from city to city in southern Iraq mercilessly butchering scores of innocents.

All told, several thousand military personnel, policemen, clerks, and employees of the government were slain, according to Omar Ali, another regional authority.

Accepting Washington's pronouncements about a vanquished Iraqi military, up to 400,000 Kurds undertook a ferocious spree of mayhem that rivaled that of the Shia. According to Mackay, in the city of Kirkuk "no one bothered to count how many servants of Baghdad were shot, beheaded, or cut to shreds with the traditional dagger stuck in the cummerbund of every Kurdish man. By the time Kurdish rage had exhausted itself, piles of corpses lay in the streets awaiting removal by bulldozers."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/09/12_graves.html

"It was a revolution," says one Basrawi rebel named Mohamad, who deserted his army unit after the intifada began and eventually made it to the United States. "It was glorious. There were demonstrations and shooting. There were bodies all over the place. The persons who got killed on the Ba'athi side deserved to be killed."
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2001/11/iraq.html

This, then is the primary source of the "mass graves" of Iraq.

What government in the world would refrain from using all necessary means to quell a violent uprising of this kind? No one denies that the regimes response was swift and merciless, or that many innocents were caught up in the retaliation and destruction. But if blame is assigned, shouldn't it start with the instigators of the carnage along with the foreign government who misled them about the forces they were going up against and yet egged them on?

Like claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or Baghdad's links to al Queda, the mass graves of Iraq are another example of history and reality being distorted to fit the ulterior motives of the White House.
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/433


Saddam's 'Mass Graves': The Third Big Bush Lie?

The mass graves announcement was made November 8, 2003 by (bush appointee) Sandra Hodgkinson, at the time director of the Provisional Authority’s Mass Graves Action Plan. Hodgkinson reported that there were “reports” from Iraqis and that they believed the estimates of sites and bodies. She said they had confirmed 40 sites and identified 2,115 bodies.

But in July of 2004 Tony Blair’s office admitted that the number of bodies that had been found in mass graves had been exaggerated by 88%. The number of bodies was put at 5,114 and the estimates of 300,000-400,000 unsubstantiated.

The British are the source of USAID’s report on the subject. Therein they also cite Human Rights Watch. But Human Rights Watch did not consider the conditions in Iraq defensible in terms of humanitarian intervention: "The lack of ongoing or imminent mass slaughter was itself sufficient to disqualify the invasion of Iraq as a humanitarian intervention.” Amnesty International is also enlisted as support.

Is this Strike Three? Has mass graves taken its place with WMD and the 9/11-Iraqi-Al Qaeda connection? Has Bush struck out in his attempt to provide any justification for the Iraq War?

To exaggerate the scale of human liquidation for geopolitical ends is the moral equivalent of a capital crime, not a successful at bat in a political game.
http://edstrong.blog-city.com/read/1040713.htm

Thousands of Iraqi troops were buried alive in their trenches, with US troops bulldozing over top of them;

"Many Iraqi soldiers were killed by the simple expedient of burying them alive: in one report, American earthmovers and ploughs mounted on tanks were used to attack more than 70 miles of trenches. Colonel Anthony Moreno commented that for all he knew, 'we could have killed thousands'.

One US commander, Colonel Lon Maggart, estimated that his forces alone had buried about 650 Iraqi soldiers.

"What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with peoples arms and things sticking out of them,' observed Moreno.
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=45

The US Pentagon defended this atrocity, saying there was a "gap" in international law that allowed for burying the troops alive.
http://jeff.paterson.net/aw/aw4_buried_alive.htm

And now there are NEW mass graves in Iraq...American-made.

Mass graves to reveal Iraq war toll

The task of identifying thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians who died during this year's war has begun with the exhumation of a mass grave at one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces in Baghdad.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1021466,00.html

[socalover]

5. Thank you for those links

If we really found any mass graves in the thousands, the pictures would be all over the media justifying the war, but all I hear are these quotes in the hundreds of thousands, I don't think they have found anything near that number.

[LynnTheDem]

7. You're welcome.

And yes, had there been any such mass graves found, we'd all hear about it ad naseum.

Even HRW and AI said there was NO "humanitarian" justification for bush's illegal war of aggression because there were NO mass murdering happening or imminent in Iraq and hadn't been for decades.

But the US "media" didn't bother reporting that fact.

There certainly IS mass murdering now. THANKS to BUSH.

[Boojatta]

8. A detail

But if blame is assigned, shouldn't it start with the instigators of the carnage along with the foreign government who misled them about the forces they were going up against and yet egged them on?

Isn't the word "yet" used for contrast?

For example, "He saved her from the crash site, yet he stole her credit card."

Would you say: "He conned them into thinking that he could communicate with the dead and yet he got them to pay for his cold readings"?

[LynnTheDem]

9. Email the author and ask him.

I didn't write that, so can't answer for the author.

[Roland99]

6. Something like 4,000-5,000 and most were post Gulf War 1

[Boojatta]

10. Even if there had been 100,000 bodies in Saddam's mass graves, wouldn't

the President consider it be sufficient to train troops from some nearby country in the Middle East (such as Egypt) for such situations?

LEHRER: But the reverse side of the question, Governor, that Vice President Gore mentioned for instance, 600,000 people died in Rwanda in 1994. There was no U.S. intervention. There was no intervention from the outside world. Was that a mistake not to intervene?

BUSH: I think the administration did the right thing in that case, I do. It was a horrible situation. No one liked to see it on our, you know, on our TV screens. But it's a case where we need to make sure we've got a, you know, kind of an early warning system in place in places where there could be ethnic cleansing and genocide the way we saw it there in Rwanda.

And that's a case where we need to, you know, use our influence to have countries in Africa come together and help deal with the situation. The administration it seems like we're having a great love fest now but the administration made the right decision on training Nigerian troops for situations just such as this in Rwanda. And so I thought they made the right decision not to send U.S. troops into Rwanda.

Source:
Bush - Gore Debate Transcript

[Marie26]

11. Plenty

This isn't some Pentagon/Fox News psy-ops to make Saddam look bad. He killed many, many people during his regime.

[LynnTheDem]

12. And the hell with any facts!

:eyes:

[Marie26]

13. Do you have facts that show that

Saddam didn't kill people?

[LynnTheDem]

15. I have links to the facts as I posted above.

:)

[ret5hd]

16. that's not how it works...

you can't prove a negative...

where's the proof he did? wouldn't someone be posting pictures of all those thousands of rotting corpses...you know, like the soldiers did of torture, dead civilians, etc? you don't think pics like that would have surfaced? where are they?

[Marie26]

21. Human rights abuses during Saddam's regime

You're seriously saying Saddam didn't kill any Iraqis during his regime? That's some hoax. It was used as propaganda for the war, certainly, but Saddam was a typical brutal dictator who wasn't above killing dissenters if need be. I think we can oppose the war w/o trying to defend a war criminal.

I'm taking these figures from human rights orgs. that can't be labeled as "propaganda":

Human Rights Watch -

"Attacks against the Iraqi Kurds.- The government’s notorious attacks on the Iraqi Kurds have come in phases. Between 1977 and 1987, some 4,500-5,000 Kurdish villages were systematically destroyed and their inhabitants forcibly removed and made to live in “resettlement camps.”

Commencing in the spring of 1987, thousands of Iraqi Kurds were killed during chemical and conventional bombardments. From February to September 1988, the Iraqi government launched the official “Anfal” campaign, during which Iraqi troops swept through the highlands of Iraqi Kurdistan rounding up everyone who remained in government-declared “prohibited zones.” More than 100,000 Kurds, mostly men and boys, were trucked to remote sites and executed.3

The use of chemical weapons reached a peak in March 1988; in the town of Halabja alone, where a documented 3,200 people are believed to have died from chemical gas attacks, and the actual number may be more than 5,000.

General repression, large-scale “disappearances,” and other crimes.- In addition to abuses particularly aimed at the Kurds and Shi`a Muslims, the Iraqi people under Saddam Hussein have suffered a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including political imprisonment, torture, and summary and arbitrary executions. In addition, a ubiquitous network of security services and informants has suppressed independent civilian institutions and terrorized the Iraqi population into virtual silence. Torture techniques have included hangings, beatings, rape, and burning suspects alive. Thousands of Iraqi political detainees have died under torture.

There have also been a staggering number of “disappearances”—believed to range between 250,000-290,000. In addition to the 50,000-70,000 Shi’a cases described above, and the 100,000 Kurdish victims, “disappearances” have included:

* An estimated 8,000 Barzani males removed from resettlement camps in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1983;

* 10,000 or more males said to have been separated from Feyli Kurdish families deported to Iran during the 1980s;

* Shi`a Muslim clerics and their students from al-Najaf and Karbala;

* Over 600 Kuwaitis and third country nationals who disappeared after their arrest during the occupation of Kuwait (discussed below);

* Members of other targeted groups, including communist and other leftist groups; Kurdish, Assyrian, and Turcoman opposition groups; out-of-favor Ba'athists; and the relatives of persons in these groups.

The widespread and systematic practice of “disappearance” amounts to a crime against humanity.

The use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq used chemical weapons extensively, starting in 1983-1984, during the Iran-Iraq war. It is estimated that some 20,000 Iranians were killed by mustard gas, and the nerve agents tabun and sarin.5 Both Iran (1929) and Iraq (1931) are parties to the Geneva Protocol that prohibits the use of asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials, or devices, as well as the use of bacteriological methods of warfare.6 The use of asphyxiating, poisonous, and other prohibited gases is a war crime.

http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/mena/iraq1217bg.htm

"Iraq: Witnesses Link Mass Graves to 1991 Repression - U.S. Failure to Protect Sites, Establish Exhumation Process" - http://hrw.org/press/2003/05/iraq052903.htm

"Mass Graves Hide Horror of Iraqi Past" - http://www.hrw.org/editorials/2003/iraqmassgraves.htm

Amnesty International -

Political killings
Over the years tens, or possibly hundreds, of thousands of people were killed by Iraqi security forces – lined up and shot in their villages, poisoned with chemical weapons and executed in prisons.

Many of the victims were targeted simply for belonging to a community seen as opposed to the government. The killing of an estimated 5,000 men, women and children by chemical weapons in the Kurdish town of Halabja in March 1988 was just one example of mass extermination, made notorious only because journalists could reach the border town from Iran. Other methods of political killings included mass executions by firing squads, burying people alive, drowning in rivers, bleeding prisoners to death, and targeted assassinations. Thousands more died in custody in mysterious circumstances.

‘Disappearances’
Many thousands of people “disappeared”. Most of their relatives are still waiting to find out what happened to their loved ones. Some families, however, were told the devastating news that their “disappeared” relative had been executed – and then ordered to pay a fee to cover “state expenses”, including the cost of the bullet used in the execution, in order to have the body returned for burial.


Torture
Torture was used systematically against political detainees in prisons and detention centres, and no action was ever taken to stop it. Torture methods reported included gouging out of eyes, severe beatings and electric shocks. Many victims were tortured while held at the headquarters of the General Security Directorate and the General Intelligence, both in Baghdad, or the branches of both institutions elsewhere in the country. Detainees were held incommunicado in such places for months or even years. ...

When Amnesty International delegates visited a deserted prison in Basra in April 2003, dozens of people were trying to dig up the ground with the most rudimentary tools, in the forlorn hope that someone they loved was hidden in an underground prison cell.

Grief-stricken and desperate people told the delegates the stories of those who had “disappeared”. In one family alone, seven brothers had “disappeared”, one had been executed, and two sisters had been tortured and were subsequently unable to marry because of the social stigma attached to their treatment.In early 1988, during “Operation Anfal” in Iraqi Kurdistan, entire Kurdish families “disappeared” from hundreds of villages after they were rounded up by government forces. Amnesty International collected the names of more than 17,000 people who “disappeared” in this wave, but Kurdish sources put the total at over 100,000. Immediately after the 1991 Gulf War, when Iraqi government forces crushed the uprisings led by the Shi’a in the south and the Kurds in the north, thousands more Iraqis “disappeared”.

http://web.amnesty.org/pages/irq-article_6-eng

[linazelle]

14. So has Bush--more than Saddam in fact. nt

[Marie26]

17. They're both bad. nt

[killbotfactory]

18. The fact is that we have killed more Iraqi's than Saddam has

But we're the good guys, spreading "freedom", and they were all "collateral damage" so it's okay.

[Marie26]

19. Do you see me dispute that?

I'm just saying that we can oppose the Iraqi war w/o needing to argue that Saddam was a good leader, or that people weren't oppressed during his regime. They were. What's happening now might be even worse, but that doesn't mean what Saddam did was justified.

[Hippo_Tron]

20. Saddam killed plenty of people

But not anytime near 2002 or 2003. He was too busy running for dear life.