Saddam's victims hid clues in clothing
LA Times:
There is much more in this forensic search of Saddam's mass murder operation.
Perhaps they were so terrified they didn't trust the officers who demanded their identification cards and they hid the cards beneath layers of clothes.Interesting story, but the writer may have a real scoop if 180,000 kurdish villagers were killed. That is an extroidinary amount even by Saddam's saddistic standards. It is also evidence of the maral abutesness of the anti war left that they do not care about Saddam's genocide, but think hazing at Abu Ghraid was a crime against humanity.
Or maybe they sensed their horrible fate and decided against giving up the last legal proof of their lives before gunshots turned them into anonymous corpses to be devoured by the desert.
Whatever their reasons, more than 10% of the victims found thus far in Saddam Hussein-era mass graves managed to die with their Iraqi identity cards still with them. The phenomenon has dramatically altered the course of the investigation into the former regime's alleged crimes by allowing prosecutors to trace the victims back to their hometowns and construct more complete narratives of their harrowing journeys toward death.
"They had hidden them in secret pockets or sewn them in secret areas, especially the women," said Michael "Sonny" Trimble, a forensic archeologist who oversees a team exhuming and examining mass graves linked to the former regime, including from the 1988 Anfal campaign, in which Kurdish villagers were deported from their homes and later executed.
"They were coming from the north," said Trimble, who is attached to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "They were told they were being resettled. But they knew."
Trimble spoke Monday during the first media tour of the laboratories of the Mass Graves Team at the Regime Crimes Liaison Office, the law enforcement agency attached to the American Embassy that is helping an Iraqi court prosecute Hussein and his deputies on charges of human rights abuses.
The nine-tent compound on the outskirts of Baghdad includes an array of digital technology used to scan bones and map out gravesites and is staffed by international specialists in the art of resurrecting the lives and deaths of war crimes victims.
Team members say the women's successful efforts to keep their identity cards may foil the former regime's attempts to hide the killings and help Iraqi prosecutors win the upcoming Anfal trial, in which Hussein is accused of killing up to 180,000 Kurdish villagers.
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There is much more in this forensic search of Saddam's mass murder operation.
In _Cruelty and Silence_ the author interviews a child who survived mass execution in a tank pit with his family (who were all shot dead) by feigning death then escaping before the pit was bulldozed. The book is a must read for anyone interested in Saddam's actions. In the end the number I walk away with is 2 million deaths on Saddam's hands, that's including the Iranians that died in the war which he started. After reading this book it is hard to take anyone seriously who thinks the world would be better with Saddam left in power.
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