even more quotes
"An intensive search for Kuwaiti soldiers and civilians missing since the first Persian Gulf war may have ended at this remote site, where skulls, brown pants and bones sticking up eerily from the sand were unearthed in the first day of digging at the site.
"When Saddam Hussein fell, there were grim hopes that the missing might still be alive but starving in one of the regime's prisons. Coalition searches found the prisons empty. Instead, it now appears the Kuwaitis were already dead.
"Ten buses carrying the 'disappeared' had been driven northwest of Baghdad past the relatively prosperous city of Fallujah, according to the driver of one of the buses. The prisoners were unloaded, shot, then buried in deep pits."
-- The Washington Times, May 17, 2003
------
"Desperate relatives and friends were digging to find remains of their loved ones yesterday at what US soldiers said was the largest mass grave of Saddam Hussein's victims discovered in Iraq. ... Seven days into the dig, the scene resembles a battlefield of the dead: the loose sandy soil carved into trenches, ditches and foxholes by a bulldozer. All around lie piles of remains: pelvic bones, ribs, femurs and skulls -- one still wearing its weave-pattern prayer cap, another the blindfold affixed by his killers shortly before death. From many protrude the identity cards, amber necklaces, front-door keys and watches used by relatives to identify their brothers, cousins and sons. A plastic artificial leg sticks out of one pile, two crutches from another."
-- The Australian, May 15, 2003
------
"On an exhumed mound beside the most westerly row of corpses, Ali Abdul Hassan Mekki, 50, sat with a plastic bag between his feet. Thirteen years ago his brother, Jaffar, disappeared during Hussein's post-rebellion slaughter. It was, for him, the worst possible outcome -- misery without certainty. 'I think this is my brother,' he said. 'This is my pullover, which he always borrowed from me to wear, but it is not enough to identify him. The problem is that I don't recognise this wallet and the identity card does not have any writing on it.'"
-- The Australian, May 15, 2003
------
"The executions took place two or three times on most days, Arjawi said. Each time, between 100 and 150 blindfolded people, their hands and sometimes feet bound, were led into pits about 10 feet deep. Gunmen then fired into the pit, often for several minutes, Arjawi said. A bulldozer then pushed dirt onto the bodies, sometimes burying or crushing people who had survived the volley and were trying to climb out."
-- Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2003
------
"[J]ust to see the landscape of bones mixed with clothing, skulls strewn in the splay of human detritus and other remains is chilling. At first, it just seems like hundreds of bundles of clothes have been laid out on the dikes and roads that cut through the marshes here.
"Then the traces of human anatomy appear. A femur from a leg, a humerus from an arm, a shard of pelvis, and skull peeking out from a gray blanket that someone assembling remains laid down. The bundles reveal themselves as the former repositories of living human flesh, before the gunfire sent them on their journey into the marsh.
"'It's a kind of hell out there,' said Mr. Nasir, who no longer plants onions where so many bodies have been desecrated. 'We have always known that there were people here, but we couldn't take them,' he said. 'We knew our Muslim brothers were not buried properly, but we couldn't say a word.'"
-- The New York Times, May 14, 2003
------
"Hundreds of Iraqis whose loved ones vanished during the 1991 Shiite Muslim uprising watched Tuesday as workers dug into a mass grave, a backhoe pulling up eight or nine bodies at a time, and perhaps as many as 3,000 over the past four days. Villagers clutched the remains to their chests, trying to keep them intact as they fell from the machine's big shovel. They laid the bodies in the dirt nearby, next to hundreds of others waiting to be claimed. Then they searched for personal papers, the remnants of a wristwatch or other items that might reveal the identities of the dead."
-- Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2003
------
"Seven days into the dig, the scene resembles a battlefield of the dead, the loose sandy soil carved into trenches, ditches and foxholes by a bulldozer. All around lie piles of remains: pelvic bones, ribs, femurs and skulls--one still wearing its weave-pattern prayer cap, another the blindfold affixed by his killers shortly before death. From many protrude the identity cards, amber necklaces, front-door keys and watches used by relatives to identify their brothers, cousins and sons. A plastic artificial leg sticks out of one pile, two crutches from another."
-- The Daily Telegraph (London), May 14, 2003
------
"As clumps of hair blew across the hard, dry land, Jabar Sattar sat rocking and sobbing on a hill of dirt created by the backhoe. He cradled a clear plastic bag containing the remains of his younger brother Faris. Faris was a soldier, he said, and had just returned from Kuwait when private security men arrested him in his front yard, just two miles from the grave site. 'I looked for 12 years,' Sattar cried into the bag of remains. 'Every day I told myself, you're alive and will come back. Now what am I going to say to our father?'"
-- Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2003
------
"In two days, they've found 2,000 bodies--men, women, children, some handicapped. Many skeletons were still blindfolded. The Iraqis and the US military believe there are several thousand more. This is an archaeological site. And it's no accident the bodies were buried here. Under Saddam Hussein, it was illegal for Iraqis to dig here, or even walk on the site. Search teams look for identification inside crumbling wallets, adding each name to a ledger. If there's no ID, they hope a relative might recognize something -- a watch, a scarf."
-- ABC World News Tonight, May 13, 2003
------
"The skeletal remains on display Monday showed signs of physical trauma. Some still had faded bandages tied around the eye sockets and black cloth binding the feet. Several skulls had large holes on one side or were crushed in the back. In each open wooden coffin, the bones were carefully wrapped in white cloth, surrounded by scraps of hair, bits of teeth and bones. The visible evidence of their demise drove scores of black-clad women to wailing and men to weep."
-- Associated Press, May 12, 2003
------
"For people streaming past 32 coffins laid out in Basra's al-Jumhuriya Grand Mosque on Monday, grief competed with anger as they searched for relatives who disappeared after a Shiite Muslim uprising in 1999. Peering into a simple plywood coffin, Karima Musa Mohammed carefully looked over the remains inside--a ragged blindfold tied around the skull, feet bound by black cloth, faded gray pants, light gray shirt. 'No, not him. Not my son,' she pronounced, then burst into tears. The mass grave was one of many being unearthed around the country as Iraqis come to grips with the reality of Saddam Hussein's brutal regime."
-- Associated Press, May 12, 2003
The grave was no more than a long trench, with dirt shoveled over the men executed for their role in the uprising here in 1999 after the killing of a prominent Shiite cleric, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, said relatives who viewed the remains today.
"On March 25, 1999, a shepherd in the desert about 45 miles north of Basra saw men being brought by Baath Party trucks to an open clearing, said Ali Hassan, 20. The shepherd said he saw a backhoe dig a long trench and the men, blindfolded, were lined up in front of the ditch. Then they were shot."
-- The New York Times, May 12, 2003
------
"Two years ago, Iraqi wrestler Maitham Ali Hadi was competing in the Arab championships in Syria and defected. When the delegation returned home without him, its members were imprisoned and tortured. The punishment - which included wrestlers, coaches, journalists and referees - was a message to others who might have been considering defections. Even the chairman and the secretary of the wrestling federation were imprisoned, though they weren't in Syria during the tournament. 'At night, we used to hear the voices of our colleagues being tortured. We felt their pain alongside them,' former wrestling federation head Loai Sateh said in a recent interview."
-- Associated Press May 11, 2003
Fakher Ali al-Jamali, who headed Iraq's handicapped team, was whipped with electric cables for two days after two members of his team went missing during a 1998 tournament. He was released only after they showed up."
-- Associated Press May 11, 2003
------
"One of the tools used by Odai to torture athletes is currently on display at al-Hikma Mosque in Baghdad. It is a 2-meter (6-foot) body suit of metal bars that was used to restrain offending athletes under the scorching sun for hours. One athlete who spoke on condition of anonymity said he was placed in the suit for long hours under blistering sun. A hose dripped water into his mouth to prevent him from dying of dehydration. 'Whenever I tried to move my body, I would feel the burn of the metal rods,' said the man, displaying scarred legs and hands."
-- Associated Press, May 11, 2003
------
"At Baghdad's teeming Al-Mutanabi book market, Ali al-Saadi held up a gilded Islamist book and recalled the one he said led to his torture in one of Saddam Hussein's military prisons. 'When I was a literature student in 1982, intelligence officers found a book by Mohammed Sadeq Sadr in my house,' said Saadi of the Shiite ayatollah whose 1999 murder was widely attributed to Saddam's Sunni-majority regime. 'They accused me of organizing a political group. I spent three years in jail and suffered a lot,' he said, showing scars on his wrists from prison chains and gaps where he said three teeth had been pulled out with pliers. Saadi was just one of many writers and thinkers at the weekly market who celebrated being able to buy and sell books that were illegal under the old regime."
-- Agence France-Presse, May 9, 2003
------
"First they broke his right arm with a pipe. Then they punctured his right eardrum with a skewer. And then they tried to break his right leg with a bat. But when the X-rays that Uday Hussein demanded as proof of their efficiency showed in fact they had not broken Tariq Abdul Whab's leg, his captors took him back to prison where someone smashed his right leg with such ferocity that his toe hit his kneecap. Mr. Whab received all this treatment simply because Uday thought the sports television reporter was being disloyal to him by talking to soccer players he didn't like."
-- The Vancouver Sun, May 3, 2003
Topic: America's foreign policy