I'll be the first to admit this is not a set of strategic facts, but what it is seems rather undeniable from my perspective. It's not the first time I've seen something like this from Michael Totten, and I'm perfectly willing to admit confirmation bias, but damn!
MJT: Tell us about living under Saddam Hussein.
Hammer: It was crazy life, like feeling safe inside a jail. If they sent you to an actual jail nothing changed. They arrested everyone, literally everyone, for no reason and sent them to jail for two weeks just so they could see the jail.
I went there three times. The first time because I worked for a movie company. They sent all of us to jail. It had nothing to do with me.
I was given a three year sentence. My family has money, so I paid the judge 50,000 dollars. I gave it directly to the judge, plus four new tires for his car and a satellite TV. He gave me a three month sentence instead of a three year sentence. He scratched “3 years” off my sentence and wrote “3 months” in by hand.
They sent me to Abu Ghraib. I saw so many things. If you want me to talk about that I would need a whole newspaper.
MJT: Tell us a little about Abu Ghraib.
Hammer: On the bus to the jail I didn’t have handcuffs. I asked why. The guard said “Look behind you.”
The first guy behind me got a 600 year sentence.
The next guy got six hanging sentences.
The third guy was sentenced to be thrown blindfolded out of a second story window. Twice.
Another guy f*cked his mother and sisters three times. He was freed on Saddam’s birthday.
Another guy had his hand cut off.
There was this last guy. He went to the market with his wife. She waited in the car when he went to buy something. When he came back to the car his wife was screaming. Two guys were in the car with her. One held her arms and the other was raping her. He grabbed his AK-47 and chased them away. They ran to their car and he shot them. Their car blew up. They were mukhabarat [Saddam’s secret police]. He got a death sentence. On his second day in Abu Ghraib they killed him and sent the mother- and sister-f*cker free for the fourth time.
The guards who ran Abu Ghraib sold hallucinagenic drugs to prisoners for money. They forced me to take them.
You need protection in there. You find someone and give him drugs and cigarettes. You pay off the guards to just punch you in the face or move you to a different cell instead of kill you.
I was freed 26 days after I arrived, on Saddam’s birthday before I finished the three months.
I can’t live with this nightmare anymore.
This is where the locus of my moral life is and has been for the past few years. Everything else pales in significance. And guess what. that's not even the worst part of his tale.
Recent Comments