I posted this yesterday:
"Max van der Stoel, the former United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Iraq, told the United Nations that the brutality of the Iraqi regime was "of an exceptionally grave character-so grave that it has few parallels in the years that have passed since the Second World War. Indeed, it is to comparisons with the obscenity of the Holocaust and Stalin's mass murders that observers are inevitably drawn when confronted with the horrors of Saddam's Iraq. Saddamist Iraq is a state that employs arbitrary execution, imprisonment, and torture on a comprehensive and routine basis. A full catalogue of the regime's methods of torture is not available. Suffice to say that based on voluminous accounts of witnesses and victims, the list is very, very long. In some ways, to try to name all of its practices would detract from the regime's monstrosity. A few examples, however, are useful.
This is a regime that will gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents. This is a regime that will crush all of the bones in the feet of a two-year-old girl to force her mother to divulge her father's whereabouts. This is a regime that will hld a nursing baby at arm's length from its mother and allow the child to starve to death to force the mother to confess. This is a regime that will burn a person's limbs off to force him to confess or comply. This is a regime that will slowly lower its victims into huge vats of acid, either to break their will or simply as a means of execution. This is a regime that applies electric shocks to the bodies of its victims, particularly their genitals, with great creativity. This is a regime that in 2000 decreed that the crime of criticizing the regime(which can be as harmless as suggesting that Saddam's clothing does not match)would be punished by cutting out the offender's tongue. This is a regime that practices systematic rape against its female victims. This is a regime that will drag in a man's wife, daughter, or other female relative and repeatedly rape her in front of him. This is a regime that will force a white-hot metal rod into a person's anus or other orifices. This is a regime that employs thalium poisoning, widely considered one of the most excruciating ways to die. This is a regime that will behead a young mother in the street in front of her house and children because the husband was suspected of opposing the regime. This is a regime that used chemical warfare on its own Kurdish citizens-not just on the fifteen thousand killed and maimed at Halabja but on scores of other villages all across Kurdistan. This is a regime that tested chemical and biological warfare agents on Iranian prisoners of war, using the POWs in controlled experiments to determine the best ways to disperse the agents to inflict the greatest damage."--The Threatening Storm, The Case for Invading Iraq, Kenneth M. Pollack, pg 123-124.
Kenneth Pollack's is one of the world's leading experts on Iraq. He spent 15 years as an analyst on Iraq for the CIA and the National Security Council. He has studied Saddam as closely as anyone else in the US.
How can humanity sit back and allow this to continue? How can anyone turn a blind eye to what Saddam has done to his own countrymen? How can anyone measure the cost financially on human life?
What if the UN doesn't find anything in Iraq? When the inspectors left 4 years ago they had chemical and biological weapons. They had started a nuclear program. The inspectors left that country knowing then that Saddam would not stop his quest for more weapons of mass destruction. If the inspectors do not find anything, it is because Saddam has hidden them underground. He has had 4 years to do this. People slam Bush for being a war monger. I am no Bush advocate. But, whether it is Bush, Gore, or whoever is president of the most powerful country on the planet, the leader of the free world has a duty to see that his people are not held hostage by a nuclear Saddam.
I have children who would be affected by any war. I do not wish to see anyone die in any war. But, unless the Saddam's of the world are held in check, you will see the whole world held hostage by nuclear annihilation.
Mrs. Shakita