Why (continued)

http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2008/02/the-dungeon-of.php

...The jail in Fallujah is the only functioning jail I have ever visited. I did, however, go inside one of Saddam Hussein’s former jails in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The famous “Red Building” in the city of Suleimaniya is a horror show. It’s a museum of sorts now, in the way Auschwitz is a museum. Perhaps monument or memorial are better descriptions.

Before it was liberated by the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga, resistance fighters and their family members were arrested, interrogated, and sadistically tortured inside its walls. A free-standing rape room with large windows was built just outside. Bloody women’s underwear was found on the floor after the Baath regime agents were ousted. Inside some of the cells are messages carved by children into the walls. “I was ten years old. But they changed my age to 18 for execution.” “Dear Mom and Dad. I am going to be executed by the Baath. I will not see you again.”

10,725 people were murdered in the Red Building alone by the previous government of Iraq. All died during torture. Formal execution actually took place in Abu Ghraib.

I wrote about and photographed this hideous place on my first trip to the country, and Martin Kunert left the following note in my comments section:

“Two years ago, I produced the documentary film Voices of Iraq, where we sent 150 DV cameras across Iraq and allowed Iraqis to film their own lives. The cameras got into the prison you visited and others. I viewed several hours of video and testimony detailing the horrors of Saddam's torture. One woman recalled tearfully how her newborn baby was fed to dogs in front of her eyes. Another video shows floors stained with blood and fat that liquefied off torture victims and poured onto the tiles below them. What transpired in those chambers is beyond belief. It takes a strong stomach to go through the tours you're experiencing.”

An Iraqi interpreter I met in Baghdad who calls himself Hammer spent time in Abu Ghraib prison while Saddam was in charge.

“On the bus to the jail I didn’t have handcuffs,” he said. “I asked why. The guard said Look behind you. The first guy behind me got a 600 year sentence. The next guy got six hanging sentences. The third guy was sentenced to be thrown blindfolded out of a second story window. Twice. Another guy f*cked his mother and sisters three times. He was freed on Saddam’s birthday. Another guy had his hand cut off...