In message , Chad Irby
writes
Hey, give it a few years. They'll be telling us that they were bath
houses and delousing chambers, and that Saddam's folks could not have
possibly killed that many people. The mass graves? Just a convenient
way of getting rid of all of the people killed by UN sanctions. Then
they'll point to Saddam's 99% wins in the "elections," and tell us how
popular he was.

We've seen *that* tactic before...

Cuts both ways. Remember all those stories about how Saddam used to feed
victims feet-first through an industrial shredder?

Funny thing, that: turns out nobody actually saw that, or knew where it
happened, though lots of folks heard from a friend that a bloke they met
down the bazaar knew all about it...

Brendan O'Neill covered it in "Not a shred of evidence", 21 Feb 2004,
"The Spectator": it made for a great tagline, but like the tales of
Iraqi troops flinging infants out of Kuwaiti incubators in 1990 it
proved to be somewhat at variance with the facts.

"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 ‘bull****ter’ (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 depresses me because there were good reasons to get Saddam out of
Baghdad: so why the need to peddle so much bull?

--
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
W S Churchill

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk