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FEATURES
Not a shred of evidence
Did Saddam Hussein really use industrial shredders to kill his enemies? Brendan O’Neill is not persuaded that he did
Forget the no-show of Saddam Hussein’s WMD. Even George Bush no longer
believes that they are there. Ask instead what happened to Saddam’s
‘people shredder’, into which his son Qusay reportedly fed opponents of
the Baathist regime. Ann Clwyd, Labour MP for Cynon Valley and chair of
Indict, a group that has been campaigning since 1996 for the creation
of an international criminal tribunal to try the Baathists, wrote of
the shredder in the Times on 18 March — the day of the Iraq debate in
the House of Commons and three days before the start of the war. Clwyd
described an Iraqi’s claims that male prisoners were dropped into a
machine ‘designed for shredding plastic’, before their minced remains
were ‘placed in plastic bags’ so they could later be used as ‘fish
food’. Sometimes the victims were dropped in feet first, reported
Clwyd, so they could briefly behold their own mutilation before death.
Not surprisingly the story made a huge impact. Two days after
Clwyd’s article was published, the Australian Prime Minister John
Howard addressed his nation to explain why he was sending troops to
support the coalition in Iraq; he talked of the Baathists’ many crimes,
including the ‘human-shredding machine’ that was used ‘as a vehicle for
putting to death critics of Saddam Hussein’. Clwyd received an email
from the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, who expressed
admiration for her work and invited her to meet him at the Pentagon.
Her Times article on the shredder is still on the US State Department’s
website, under the heading ‘Issues of International Security’.
Others, too, made good use of the story. Andrew Sullivan, the
British-born journalist who writes a weekly column from Washington for
the Sunday Times, said Clwyd’s report showed ‘clearly, unforgettably,
indelibly’ that ‘the Saddam regime is evil’ and that ‘leading
theologians and moralists and politicians’ ought to back the war. The
Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips wrote of the shredder in which
‘bodies got chewed up from foot to head’, and said: ‘This is the evil
that the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican bishops
refuse to fight.’ In the Telegraph, Mark Steyn used the spectre of the
shredder to chastise the anti-war movement: ‘If it’s a choice between
letting some carbonated-beverage crony of Dick Cheney get a piece of
the Nasiriyah soft-drinks market or allowing Saddam to go on feeding
his subjects feet-first into the industrial shredder for another decade
or three, then the “peace” activists will take the lesser of two evils
— i.e., crank up the shredder.’
In his book Allies: The United States, Britain, Europe and
the War in Iraq, published in December 2003, William Shawcross wrote of
a regime that ‘fed people into huge shredders, feet first to prolong
the agony’. Earlier this month, Trevor Kavanagh, political editor of
the Sun, claimed that ‘British resistance to war changed last year when
we learned how sadist Saddam personally supervised the horrific torture
of Iraqis. Public opinion swung behind Tony Blair as voters learned how
Saddam fed dissidents feet first into industrial shredders.’
Nobody doubts that Saddam was a cruel and ruthless tyrant who
murdered many thousands of his own people (at least 17,000 according to
Amnesty; 290,000 according to Human Rights Watch) and that the vast
majority of Iraqis are glad he’s gone. But did his regime have a
human-shredding machine that made mincemeat of men? The evidence is far
from compelling
The shredding machine was first mentioned in public by James
Mahon, then head of research at Indict, at a meeting at the House of
Commons on 12 March. Mahon had just returned from northern Iraq, where
Indict researchers, along with Ann Clwyd, interviewed Iraqis who had
suffered under Saddam’s regime. 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.... On one occasion
I saw Qusay Hussein personally supervising these murders.’ In
subsequent interviews and articles, Clwyd said this shredding machine
was in Abu Ghraib prison, Saddam’s most notorious jail.
What was done to corroborate the Iraqi’s claims? Apparently
nothing. 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.’ So nothing was done to check the truth of what the
victim said, against other witness statements or other evidence for a
shredding machine? ‘Well, no,’ says Clwyd. ‘[Indict researchers] didn’t
have to do that; they were just taking witness statements.’
But surely, before going public with so shocking a story,
facts ought to have been checked and double-checked? Clwyd clearly
doesn’t think so. ‘We heard it from someone who had been released from
the Abu Ghraib prison....I heard his account of what went on in the
prison. I was there when [Indict’s] cross-examination of the witness
took place, and I am satisfied from what I heard that shredding was a
method of execution. We knew he wasn’t making it up.’
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: ‘We heard a victim say it; 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 not to accuse the witnesses involved of being liars; it is
to follow good practice in the collection of evidence, particularly
evidence with which Indict hopes to ‘seek indictments by national
prosecutors’ against former Baathists.
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, worked at Abu Ghraib
in late 1997 and early 1998; he left Iraq in 2002 and now lives in
Britain, where he is taking further medical examinations so that he can
practise as a doctor here. He describes Saddam’s regime as ‘very, very
terrible, one of the worst regimes ever’, and Abu Ghraib prison as
‘horrific’. Part of a doctor’s job at Abu Ghraib was to attend to those
who had been executed. ‘We had to see to the dead prisoners, to make
sure that they were dead. Then we would write a death certificate for
them.’ Doctors did not witness executions; after an execution had taken
place the victim would be ‘dropped into a kind of hole, and the doctor
would go downstairs with the policemen or the security guards, into the
hole, to confirm the death’.
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, no, never.’ He says:
‘The method of execution was hanging; as far as I know that was the
only form of execution used in Abu Ghraib. Maybe sometimes there were
shootings, but I think these were rare.’ However, the doctor tells me
that he did once hear a story about a shredding machine, from a friend
who had nothing to do with Abu Ghraib — but in the version he heard,
the shredder was in ‘one of Saddam’s main palaces’. Does he think this
was a rumour, or an accurate description of a method of execution used
in Saddam’s palaces? ‘Because of what the Saddam regime was like,
anything is possible,’ he says. ‘It might be a rumour, it might be
true.’
Cryptically, Ann Clwyd tells me: ‘I heard other people talk
about a shredding machine, but I can’t tell you who they are.’ However,
one other person who talked about a shredder was Kenneth Joseph, an
American who claimed to have visited Iraq as an antiwar human shield
before concluding that he was wrong and the war was right. Joseph’s
Damascene conversion was first reported by United Press International
(UPI) on 21 March. He told Arnaud de Borchgrave, UPI’s editor-at-large,
that what he had heard in Iraq had ‘shocked me back to reality’, that
Iraqis’ tales ‘of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people
put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could
hear their screams as their bodies got chewed up’. He also claimed to
have ‘made it across the border’ with 14 hours of uncensored video
containing interviews with Iraqis.
Yet many have since questioned Joseph’s claims. When Carol
Lipton, an American journalist, investigated his story in April for
CounterPunch, she reported that ‘none of the human shield groups whom I
contacted had ever heard of Joseph’. She also noted that ‘incredibly,
nowhere has a single photo or segment from [Joseph’s] 14 hours of
interviews been published’. These discrepancies led some to speculate
whether the Reverend Sun Myung Moon played a part in ‘the Joseph
story’. Moon, head of the Unification Church (Moonies), owns UPI.
Private Eye suggested that Joseph’s story was ‘a propaganda fabrication
by right-wingers associated with the Revd Moon’s Unification Church’.
Even Johann Hari, a pro-war columnist on the Independent who wrote a
sycophantic account of Joseph’s conversion, has since declared that
Joseph ‘was probably a bullshitter’.
Clwyd insists that corroboration of the shredder story came
three months after her first Times article, when she was shown a
dossier by a reporter from Fox TV. On 18 June, Clwyd wrote a second
article for the Times, describing a ‘chillingly meticulous record book’
from Saddam’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, which described one of the
methods of execution as ‘mincing’. Can she say who compiled this book?
‘No, I can’t.’ Where is it now? ‘I don’t know.’ What was the name of
the Fox reporter who showed it to her? ‘I have no idea.’ Did Clwyd read
the entire thing? ‘No! It was in Arabic! I only saw it briefly.’
Curiously, there is no mention of the book or of ‘mincing’ as a method
of execution on the Fox News website. Robert Zimmerman, a spokesman for
Fox News in New York, tells me: ‘That story does not ring a bell with
our foreign editor here, and it is something you expect would ring a
bell. It sounds like something we would have gone to town with, in
terms of promotion and PR.’
And there you have the long and short of the available
evidence for a human-shredding machine — an uncorroborated statement
made by an individual in northern Iraq, hearsay comments made by
someone widely suspected of being a ‘bullshitter’ (who, like the
Australian Prime Minister, made his comments about the shredder shortly
after Clwyd first wrote of it in the Times), and a record book, in
Arabic, that mentions ‘mincing’ but whose whereabouts are presently
unknown. Other groups have no recorded accounts of a human shredder. A
spokesman at Amnesty International tells me that his inquiries into the
shredder story ‘drew a blank’. ‘We checked it with our people here, and
we have no information about a shredder.’ Widney Brown, deputy
programme director of Human Rights Watch, says: ‘We don’t know anything
about a shredder, and have not heard of that particular form of
execution or torture.’
It remains to be seen whether this uncorroborated story turns
out to be nothing more than war propaganda — like the stories on the
eve of the first Gulf war of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait taking babies
from incubators and leaving them to die on hospital floors. What can be
said, however, is that the alleged shredder provided those in favour of
the war — by no means an overwhelming majority in Britain last March —
with a useful propaganda tool. The headline on Ann Clwyd’s 18 March
story in the Times was: ‘See men shredded, then say you don’t back
war’.
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© 2004 The Spectator.co.uk
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