** Forum Nasional Indonesia PPI India Mailing List ** ** Untuk bergabung dg Milis Nasional kunjungi: ** Situs Milis: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia/ ** ** Beasiswa dalam negeri dan luar negeri S1 S2 S3 dan post-doctoral scholarship, kunjungi http://informasi-beasiswa.blogspot.com ** Saddam's musings: Prison humdrum By John F. Burns The New York Times TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2005 BAGHDAD Saddam Hussein does not like the prison food served by his American captors. He has an aversion to being watched 24 hours a day. Something about his plight reminds him of Napoleon and of Mussolini. And he has been offered family visits but refused them, fearing that the women would cry to see how he lives now. These were some of the thoughts of Iraq's former dictator as he bantered with fellow defendants, members of his defense team and courtroom guards on Monday during recesses at his trial. Unknown to Saddam and the others, microphones in the courtroom were still live, and their voices audible to Arabic translators working for foreign reporters in a glassed-off gallery nearby. After nearly two years in solitary confinement, Saddam seemed buoyed by the chance to talk, especially with men who were once part of his ruling coterie. As the center of attention from the moment he entered the court he was again, if only briefly and on a confined stage, the dominant figure he was during his 24 years in power. What he talked about mostly was the humdrum of prison life. Some of it, caught only incompletely, was inconclusive but enticing enough to inspire a regiment of courtroom psychologists. One passage seemed tinged with the darker possibilities. That came when Saddam's chief lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, was talking to him about the merits of the prosecution and defense teams. "Mr. President, about what you suggested, I think that if we find a weak member in our team we take him off, but if there is a weak member in that team we leave him there," Dulaimi said, as recorded by a translator for The Chicago Tribune and passed to other news organizations. "It weakens their position and strengthens our position." The reference to "that team" was interpreted as meaning the prosecution. The Tribune's notes, referring to Dulaimi, said, "He made a little underhand cupping motion with his hand as he said the words 'Take him off."' What exactly did Dulaimi mean? Removing a weak lawyer from the defense team was understandable enough. But by what means did the chief lawyer imagine that he or anybody on the defense team could choose to leave - or not leave - a member of the prosecution team in place? The notes threw no further light on the matter. For the rest, Saddam seemed pretty much like any other prisoner. He compared notes on conditions at the U.S.-run detention centers with Awad al-Bandar, the former chief judge of the revolutionary court under Saddam. "I don't care for the food," Saddam said. "I only eat what I like." Then he added, "I walk through four iron gates to get to the area where I can take my morning walk." The walking space, he said, was "maybe 9 meters long," or about 30 feet. "There's an eye on me 24 hours a day," he said. Saddam then turned to the issue of family visits. "Do you see your relatives?" he asked Bandar. The notes added, "Saddam said he was offered family visits but he refused, saying something about how the women could be crying if they had to endure the circumstances of visiting him." Next, the notes said, "Saddam said something incomprehensible - perhaps about his own destiny? - containing the names 'Bonaparte' and 'Mussolini."' Saddam seemed, despite his feistiness in exchanges with the judge, to be in a chastened mood, about Iraq and his own state of affairs. He told Dulaimi, the lawyer, to apologize to Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general, who was at the center of a protracted shuffling of papers between the chief judge and Saddam. There had been an examination of Clark's credentials as a qualified U.S. lawyer, before Clark was formally approved to join the defense team. As overheard by an Iraqi human rights representative attending the court, Saddam, without saying why, told the lawyer: "Apologize to Mr. Clark for me. This is a third world country. What can we do? It's painful for the image of Iraq." At another point, talking to courtroom guards, he slipped momentarily into self-disparagement, saying "Saddam is not a lion anymore, so don't be afraid of him." +++++++ http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/29/news/sunnis.php Executions of Sunnis are alleged By Dexter Filkins The New York Times TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2005 BAGHDAD As the U.S. military pushes the largely Shiite Iraqi security services into a larger role in combating the insurgency, evidence has begun to mount suggesting that the Iraqi forces are carrying out executions in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods. Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged recently, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation. Some Sunni males have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies apparently made by electric drills. Many have simply vanished. Some of the young men have turned up alive in prison; in a secret bunker discovered earlier this month in an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi officials acknowledged that some of the mostly Sunni inmates appeared to have been tortured. Bayan Jabr, Iraq's interior minister, and other government officials denied any government involvement, saying the killings were carried out by men driving stolen police cars and wearing police and army uniforms purchased at local markets. "Impossible! Impossible!" Jabr said. "That is totally wrong; it's only rumors; it is nonsense." Many of the claims of murder and abduction have been substantiated by at least one human rights organization working here - it asked not to be identified because of safety concerns - and documented by Sunni leaders working in their communities. U.S. officials overseeing the training of the Iraqi Army and the police acknowledge that police officers and Iraqi soldiers, and the militias with which they are associated, may indeed be carrying out killings and abductions in Sunni communities, without direct American knowledge. But they also say it is difficult, in an already murky guerrilla war, to determine exactly who is responsible. The U.S. officials insisted on anonymity because they were working closely with the Iraqi government and did not want to criticize it publicly. The widespread conviction among Sunnis that the Shiite-led government is bent on waging a campaign of terror against them is sending waves of fear through the community, just as Iraqi and U.S. officials are trying to coax the Sunnis to take part in nationwide elections on Dec. 15. Sunnis believe that the security forces are carrying out sectarian reprisals, in part to combat the insurgency, but also in revenge for years of repression at the hands of Saddam Hussein's government. Ayad Allawi, a prominent Iraqi politician who is close to the Sunni community, charged in an interview Sunday in the British newspaper The Observer that the Iraqi government - the Interior Ministry in particular - was condoning torture and running death squads. The allegations raise the possibility of the war's being fought by a set of far messier rules, as the Americans push more responsibility for fighting it onto the Iraqis. One worry, expressed repeatedly by U.S. and Iraqi officials, is that an abrupt pullout of U.S. troops could clear the way for a full-fledged sectarian war. An investigator for the human rights organization operating in Iraq said it had not been able to determine the number of executions carried out by the Iraqi security forces. So far, the investigator said, the evidence was anecdotal, but substantial. One Sunni group taking testimony from families in Baghdad said it had documented the death or disappearance of 700 Sunni civilians in the past four months. More than 15 Sunni families interviewed for this article told similar accounts of people who identified themselves as Iraqi security forces taking their relatives away without warrants. The families said that most of those said to have abducted were later found dead. The claims of direct involvement by the Iraqi security services are extremely difficult to verify. In a land where rumor and allegation are commonly used as political weapons, the truth is difficult to distill. The chief suspects, according to Sunni leaders, human rights workers and a well-connected U.S. official in Iraq, are current and former members of the Badr Brigade. This is the Iranian-backed militia controlled by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a principal member of the current government. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, Badr gunmen are suspected of assassinating suspected insurgents and dozens of former officials in Saddam's government. Since April, when the Shiite-led government came to power, Badr fighters have joined the security services, such as the police and commando units under the control of Jabr, the interior minister, who is also a senior member of the Supreme Council. "The difference between the Ministry of the Interior and the Badr Brigade has become very blurry," the human rights investigator said. It is not clear who is directing Iraq's security services, the government officials or the heads of the militias. "You have these people in the security services, and they have different masters," the U.S. official in Baghdad said. "There isn't a clear understanding of who is in charge." John F. Burns and Mona Mahmood contributed reporting. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Give at-risk students the materials they need to succeed at DonorsChoose.org! http://us.click.yahoo.com/wlSUMA/LpQLAA/E2hLAA/BRUplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> *************************************************************************** Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. Menuju Indonesia yg Lebih Baik, in Commonality & Shared Destiny. http://www.ppi-india.org *************************************************************************** __________________________________________________________________________ Mohon Perhatian: 1. Harap tdk. memposting/reply yg menyinggung SARA (kecuali sbg otokritik) 2. Pesan yg akan direply harap dihapus, kecuali yg akan dikomentari. 3. 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