Interview with a woman from Iraq that was tortured at Abu Graib.
In the middle of the night, American soldiers broke into the home of Mithal al Hassan and arrested both her and her soon. The soldiers later ransacked the apartment. Denounced as part of a vendetta, Mithal was condemned without trial to eighty days of horror in the company of other women prisoners who, like her, were subjected to abuse and torture. She has since spotted her tormentors on the internet.

Giuliana Sgrena, our correspondent in Baghdad
Mithal got divorced eight years ago now. Her husband remarried and moved to Lybia. She has had to bring up their seven children single-handed, working first in a bakery and then as a taxi-driver. ‘All Saddam taught us was how to work hard’, she says. Her strength and her pride both emerge clearly when we come to speak of Abu Graib and the painful events that have been tormenting her these last few months. It’s a long story and the details are harrowing. For Mithal, it was eighty days of hell.

At dead of night they broke down the door

‘It was 2.30 a.m. on the night of 28 February 2004, when the American soldiers broke down our door. When Saddam was in power, every now and then the local mukhtar [formally a ‘people’s representative’] would turn up with his men to check on what we were doing, but at least they would ring the bell. Once the Americans were in the apartment, they began to ransack the place, and then they arrested me. They also took all our papers and keys, and the seven million dinars [about four thousand US dollars], that I had scraped together by selling our two cars. I had been going to use the money to pay off my debts.’ At this point Mithal showed us the report of the police raid that appeared in the newspaper Zaman. ‘They asked me,’ Mithal resumed, ‘if I knew Hassib. It so happens that our neighbour’s name is Hassib, though everyone calls him Abu Aya. Anyway, the Americans were searching for a certain Hassib, an arms dealer. I eventually discovered that the man they were looking for was a Syrian official, nothing to do with my neighbour.’It turned out that what had triggered the raid was a vendetta. It’s quite a complex story. The ‘information’ that had led the Americans to Mithal al Hassan’s door had been supplied by the occupants of premises that had once been home to the Ministry of Information. The said occupants had stolen some generators and the people living nearby, including Mithal, had denounced them for the theft. As a result, Mithal and her thirty-eight year old son were arrested. ‘They dragged me down five flights of stairs, still in my nightdress. I only just managed to grab hold of my baya on my way out the door,’ Mithal related. ‘They took me to Sujud Palace, which had been named after Saddam’s wife, Sajida. On the way there they pointed out to me a man in a jellaba with a bag over his head, tied to a tree. It was my son. I recognised him by his trousers. They dragged him over to where I was and took the bag off his head. He had been horribly tortured, with deep cuts to his head. Then they said to him, ‘Say goodbye to your mother.’ After that, they put the bag back on his head and tied to him to a post again. Then a soldier dragged me off again.

He was in a real hurry. My head was covered and my hands were bound behind my back. My baya wasn’t properly buttoned up so it trailed around my feet and kept tripping me up. I couldn’t run properly, it was cold and I was shivering. Then the soldier threw me to the ground. My feet were bare and I tried to warm them up by pushing them into the sand. Eventually they took me to a room and wrapped me up in a blanket. I felt I was suffocating and kept hammering my feet on the ground to make some noise. Then they turned up with the photos of my children. When I saw them, I began to weep, but they just yelled at me, “where’s all that strength that Saddam gave you?” Then, throwing the photos on the ground, they shouted, “Say goodbye to your children. You’ll not be seeing them for thirty years.” I didn’t believe it. I’ve read about this and I know that such methods are used to scare people. Later they brought my son back and left us alone together. My son asked me if it was true that I was one of Saddam’s agents. How was it possible for my son to ask me such a question after all the sacrifices I had made to bring them up? I’m just a poor woman from Najaf, a Shiite, and Saddam certainly never loved us Shiites. How could I have been an agent of his? The soldiers had even told my son to confess that he knew Hassib and that if he did they would release him. Then they took him away again. That was the last I heard of him until I was able to return home. He had been set free the following day.’

The kind woman-soldier

Mithal rubs her hands together, recalling how they had turned black from being bound too tightly, so tightly that she had been unable to move them. But then a kind woman-soldier had untied them so Mithal could go to the toilet. ‘She was the first kind person I met. She even helped me tie my hair up. And afterwards when she bound my hands again, she left them fairly loose. So I gave her my earrings. Then they loaded me into a van, spread me out on the floor so nobody would see me, and drove me to the airport. There I was led into a big room where there was a doctor who wanted me to undress. I refused, saying that I was a Muslim and therefore couldn’t do what he asked. Then he threatened to cut the clothes off me. I asked him if I could at least keep my underwear on and he agreed to that. In the end, however, he only checked my wrists. Then they moved me to another room, a huge place, for questioning. The interrogator was a woman in civilian clothes, but there were two men sitting in a corner. They had taken all my ID papers from my apartment but the first thing they questioned me about was the number of papers I had: apart from my ID card, my food ration card and the residence certificate that had been compiled by the police and signed by a lieutenant. My interrogator insisted that I was that lieutenant. I replied that if I had worked for the police by my age I would be a colonel, at the very least. Then there was the word mutallaka [’divorced’] on my ID card. According to the interpreter, who was of Iraki origin but had been living abroad for the last forty-five years, the word was really mutlak, which means ‘absolute’. This, they maintained, signified some kind of recognition by Saddam. They were all shouting at once. Eventually they took me to a cell: one metre by a metre and a half and nothing but a bottle of water. They left me there for six nights. One day they made me lean up against the wall with my hands in the air, but I wasn’t strong enough to remain in that position. Then the black woman-soldier arrived and kept yelling in my face, but since I wasn’t getting scared she eventually apologised and said, ‘you’re brave.’

This was just the beginning of Mithal’s ordeal. ‘Sometimes they’d turn the heating right up and to get to sleep I’d have to splash myself with the little water they gave me. There were times when they didn’t give me any water or food at all. Then, from the neighbouring cells I could hear the screams of the men who were being tortured, sounds of weeping and screaming that were recorded and played back all night long full-blast, along with other sounds like approaching footsteps on gravel, but the ground there was nothing but sand. There was no way you could sleep. I hated their food. I couldn’t stand things any more. In the end I asked if I could write a note for my children, because I wanted to commit suicide.”They led me to a huge, freezing room, My teeth were chattering from the cold. There on display was an entire set of torture instruments. They blindfolded me with sticky tape and then, along with thirteen men, they put me on a helicopter. The flight didn’t take long, less than an hour.’ Mithal and the others were taken to Abu Graib. ‘On arrival, they first of all examined our bodies, hair, and teeth, recording everything on a computer. I felt ill. I was suffering from an allergy and couldn’t eat anything any longer so Um Iraq, one of the interpreters, an Iraki woman from abroad, gave me some bananas to eat. I needed medicines but they said they didn’t have any.’

I asked her if she was held on her own all the time. ‘No. It was then that they put me in a cell with other women, two women per cell. There were thirteen women, mainly wives of men belonging to the previous regime, and seven children. There was even the wife of Sabah Merza, one of Saddam’s guards in the 1970s, who kept her hands plunged in ice to soothe the pain caused by the torture that had been inflicted on her. Another woman was in really bad shape: they’d kept hurling her against the wall. Another had been locked in a tiny cage for six days and couldn’t even move. One of the prisoners had been forced to walk on all fours and her knees and elbows were in a terrible state. Another woman had been forced to separate faeces from urine, using her own hands. The soldiers frequently forced us to drink water from the toilet bowl. A woman of sixty, who had said she was a virgin, was continually threatened with rape.’

Did you know of cases of rape? ‘Yes, but I’m not going to go into that. In our society, it’s something you don’t talk about.’ How old were the women prisoners? ‘Between forty and sixty years of age.’ And what about children, how were they treated? ‘We heard them screaming. They were tortured too. Mostly dogs were set on them.’ So how did your release come about? ‘In the end, in part I think because of the pressure maintained by the resistance, they decided to release me. They even gave me back my earrings. They wanted to drive me to my apartment but I refused. After everything I had been through, I didn’t want to be mistaken for a collaborator. And because I refused to leave on the 21 May, I was held until the 23dx, two more days under a filthy tent, where I collapsed.’ Have you seen the pictures of the torture at Abu Graib? Did you recognise anyone? ‘Yes, I saw them on the internet. I recognised several detainees, for example Abdul Mudud, the brother-in-law of Al Duri, who had had his jaws broken and an eye put out. I also recognised some of the soldiers. Sometimes they made a hundred or more prisoners lie on the ground and then trampled them underfoot.’ What do you think of the resistance? ‘The United States have occupied our country, we have the right to defend ourselves. Resistance is self-defence. But killing Irakis is not resistance.’ Aren’t you afraid of speaking about what you saw? ‘I’ve done nothing wrong. Why should I be afraid?’

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Torture, many times ends in execution… but, what is execution ends in torture?

Yep, these are the stories of the should have been dead but still in misery. Executions gone sideways, backwards and in all directions other than instant death… they just plain screwed em up

Here is an example

The picture is one of a botched execution where things did not go as planned and here is another

I am sure they planned this out well, however on May 4, 1990 inFlorida Mr.Jesse Joseph Tafero got death byElectrocution.

But someone…hmm, wonder who, screwed it up.

During the execution, six-inch flames erupted from Tafero’s head, and three jolts of power were required to stop his breathing. State officials claimed that the botched execution was caused by “inadvertent human error” — the inappropriate substitution of a synthetic sponge for a natural sponge that had been used in previous executions. They attempted to support this theory by sticking a part of a synthetic sponge into a “common household toaster” and observing that it smoldered and caught fire. Sadly, now most agree that he was actually innocent

Check the rest out HERE at Screwed up and way messed up and sick torturous modern executions

Well, since we never get tired of hearing about the goings on in the middle east…. here is a lovely photo gallery of al-qaeda artwork.

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“If you love your son, you don’t go easy on his studies. If you love your daughter, you don’t go easy on her footbinding.”

We have all heard our parents tell us they are doing something for “our own good”, but this is ridiculous. A practice started hundreds of years ago and was popular ’till the 1930’s was chinese foot binding.

Basically, it was a procedure started on a small female child to keep her feet from growing. The feet did grow, but became deformed as a result. The would bind the feet for years to make them as close to 3″ as possible. What caused the deformation was that the foot ended up curved with the toes curled under.

It is a practice that weakened the women, made it difficult for them to walk, thus keeping the men in the position of power over them. You can’t run away from the fool on 3″ feet no can ya?

A pair of small feet three inch golden lilies were once the male designated yardstick for feminine beauty in China. A young girl’s feet were broken and bound inwards along the instep, a process that caused excruciating pain. Systematically bound, day after day, the stunted feet began to take on the coveted look of that profoundly sensuous image, the lotus bulb.

Foot Binding started in the Tang Dynasty (618-906), under the emperor Li Yu. He had ordered one of his slave girls to bind her feet and then dance for him. From that day on, foot binding began to become a regular tradition. It became increasingly popular to the upper class in the Song Dynasty (960-1297). Having tiny feet was a sign of beauty and wealth and men were attracted to women with small feet.

another quote

“that the connection between beauty rituals and pain is not accidental: The pain, of course, teaches an important lesson: no price is too great, no process too repulsive, no operation too painful for the woman who would be beautiful. The tolerance of pain and the romanticization of that tolerance begins . . . in preadolescence, in socialization, and serves to prepare women for lives of childbearing, self-abnegation, and husband-pleasing.”

The physical process which created this foot is described by Howard S. Levy in Chinese Footibinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom:
“The success or failure of footbinding depended on the skillful application of a bandage around each foot. The bandage, about two inches wide and ten feet long, was wrapped in the following way. One end was placed on the inside of the instep, and from there it was carried over the small toes so as to force the toes in and towards the sole. The large toe was left unbound. The bandage was then wrapped around the heel so forcefully that the heel and toes were drawn closer together. The process was then repeated from the beginning until the entire bandage had been applied. The foot of the young child was subjected to a coercive and unremitting pressure, for the object was not merely to confine the foot but to make the toes bend under and into the sole and bring the heel and sole as close together as physically possible.

Another observer reports:
“The flesh often became putrescent during the binding and portions sloughed off from the sole; sometimes one or more toes dropped off.”

Alum was used to absorb swelling and pus, and one victim describes it this way:
“Every two weeks, I changed to new shoes. Each new pair was one to two tenths of an inch smaller than the previous one. The shoes were unyielding, and it took pressure to get into them…After changing more than ten pairs of shoes, my feet were reduced to a little over four inches. I had been in binding for a month when my younger sister started; when no one was around, we would weep together. In summer, my feet smelled of pus and blood; in winter, my feet felt cold because of lack of circulation… Four of the toes were curled in like dead caterpillars; no outsider would have believed they belonged to a human being. If you wanna read more about chinese footbinding try here

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The crazy mental doctor from “Hellraiser II” well thats kinda how I see him or them actually, below are stories of 2 quack doctors who believed it beneficial to mental health and research to torment and torture the mentally ill.

The field of mental health suffers no shortage of weird and offbeat characters, but the Washington Post recently outdid itself for its story on Walter Freeman, father of the lobotomy. Sample this lurid paragraph for starters: “Walter Freeman lifted the patient’s eyelid and inserted an ice pick-like instrument called a leucotome through a tear duct. A few taps with a surgical hammer breached the bone. Freeman took a position behind the patient’s head, pushed the leucotome about an inch and a half into the frontal lobe of the patient’s brain, and moved the sharp tip back and forth. Then he repeated the process with the other eye socket.” Freeman kept records of 3,439 lobotomies he performed over his long career, and he promoted the procedure to more than 55 hospitals in 23 states. At AMA meetings, he set up graphic exhibits and used hand-held clackers to draw audiences.Upon finding out that chimpanzees became subdued when their frontal lobes were damaged, and spurred into action by Portuguese neurologist Egas Monisz’ experiments on people, he and colleague James Watts started practicing on brains from the hospital morgue, and in 1936 they were ready for their first patient, a Mrs Hammatt, 63, who suffered from agitated depression and sleeplessness. The technique of entering the frontal lobes through the eye sockets was still far off into the future. Instead, they drilled six holes into the top of her skull. According to Freeman, Mrs Hammet emerged transformed, able to “go to the theatre and really enjoy the play … ” She lived another five years.

probably more hype than fact considering most of these procedures ended up with vegetables.. I doubt our brains are meant to be sliced and diced.

Nevertheless, hospitals were willing to put up with lobotomies and all their shortcomings for no other apparent reason than post-operation lethargic patients were easier to care for than pre-operation emotionally-charged ones.

Before Walter Freeman’s death in 1972, he’d crossed and re-crossed the nation 11 times, and had performed the “ice pick” lobotomy on no less than 2500 patients in 23 states.

Madeleine’s Story

Madeleine was a 27 year old newscaster in New York city, in the mid 1950’s. She had begun to have delusions and terrifying dreams. She thought that ‘Three Wise Men’ were constantly telling her what to do, and quit her job because they began to appear sitting on the microphone. She was referred to Dr. Cameron, who put her on Thorazine. She feared him greatly, because he was so grim and forbidding, and he asked her questions that made no sense; questions like: ‘Do you ever imagine you are being struck by molten raindrops? Fire or bullets?’. Her paranoia was made worse by her fear of Dr. Cameron. She began to believe he was working with the Three Wise men. She decided to commit suicide by taking all of the Thorazine at once, and would pace and search in her apartment endlessly trying to find where her husband had hidden the bottle. The Wise men constantly taunted and ridiculed her, telling her how worthless she was. Her husband was caring and attentive, but it had gotten so the only way she could bear to have sex with him was if she pretended he was her father.

All of her sessions with Dr. Cameron were recorded, and he always called her as he did all women, ‘Lassie’, or ‘Girlie’. His severity and disturbing questions made each ‘therapy’ session worse for Madeleine.

Madeleine finally found the bottle and took all of the Thorazine at once. Her husband, having called every two hours from work for weeks, rushed home and got her to the hospital to have her stomach pumped. On Dr. Cameron’s recommendation, she was committed to his facility at McGill University.

At the clinic, Madeleine was now subjected to more intensive ‘treatment’. She developed another hallucination she called the ‘Sloth’, and despite the countless times the electro-shock cart had been wheeled up to her rubber sheeted bed and the paddles on her temples had zapped her into oblivion, the hallucinations got worse.

Over three years she spent forty-four weeks at the clinic, consumed mountains of pills and thousands of volts. Each time she went home, she tried to kill herself.

Her final stay at the clinic was marked by a substantial increase in drugs and electroshock treatments. After each jolt of electricity, Madeleine would have convulsions. A rubber gag was inserted into her mouth to keep her from biting her tongue off. Usually every morning she recieved six separate bursts of electricity.

The figure for Europe was similar. Tens of thousands of lobotomies were performed in the Pacific Basin and India. There, the technique was simpler- a sufficiently strong electro-shock put them to sleep and was cheaper than an anesthetic. “A ‘trocar’, a graduated instrument rather like a miniature ice pick, was driven through the bony orbit behind the eye socket and tapped gently with a surgeon’s mallet to destroy brain cells and nerve fibers. Three or four patients could be handled in an hour.” (p. 219)

Madeleine Smith’s lobotomy was slightly more sophisticated:

“A theater porter wheeled Madeleine and he and the nurse transferred her from the trolley onto the operating table. Madeleine wore only a surgical gown. She stared, fully conscious, into the powerful overhead light.

“The radical lobotomy would be performed under a local anesthetic so that the surgeon could immediately judge her disorientation, indicating how successful was his severing of her frontal lobes. Until he observed the required signs, he would continue to destroy that portion of her brain.

“Do you feel anything, lassie?” Dr. Cameron always asked. Madeleine mumbled as he peeled back the skin on her forehead, exposing the bone.

Using the surgeon’s drill, “He drilled for a few moments and a fine spray of bone shavings spumed into the air…After he finally retracted the brace, the resident collected the skull shavings from Madeleine’s head and placed them in a small gallipot. The dust would be used to fill up the burr hole at the end of the operation.”

“Madeleine’s brain was exposed, milky pink in color.”

“The surgeon asked for a long steel spatula that had replaced the wire stylet Dr. Moniz had used as a leucotome in his first operations; the stylet had proven not to be stiff enough, and the wire had a tendency to bend in a patient’s brain, traversing through blood vessels and tissue not meant to be destroyed. The journals had been filled with accounts of patients who had started to have epileptic seizures and other serious complications caused by the wire. The spatula was an altogether more sturdy weapon.”

“Lassie, count to ten.”
A series of grunts came from Madeleine.

“The surgeon inserted the spatula into the burr hole. He worked to a definite routine: down a few centimeters, then a pause to move the instrument a few centimeters laterally. Each move destroyed more of Madeleine’s brain.”

“Can you sing your favorite song?”
A strange moaning came from Madeleine.

“The surgeon drove the spatula further into her brain, extending and widening the wound, from which blood oozed.

“Lassie, count to ten.”
There was a grunt from Madeleine.

The surgeon continued to destroy her brain.
“Do you feel sleepy?”
She gave the same response.

The surgeon withdrew the spatula and asked for a cannula, a heavy-gauge hypodermic needle. He inserted it in the hole and, using steady pressure, drove it down to the spheroidal, the bony ridge at the base of the skull. The cannula was withdrawn. Once more he inserted the spatula, and swung its handle upward, so that the blade could be drawn along the base of her skull and a cut made as far to the side as possible in her brain.”

“Dr. Cameron continued to ask questions. They were part of what he termed the disorientation yardstick- his means of knowing how much brain destruction was being acheived.

“Lassie, speak to me.”
A further grunt.

The surgeon continued, and finally she made no more sounds, closed her eyes and fell into a stupor.

“Dr. Cameron bent over Madeleine. Removing the eyeshield, he lifted one and then another of her eyelids. She stared vacuously back at him.

“Lassie, its all over, no more pain.”

Later that day, Madeleine was transferred to St. Jean de Dieu hospital, to enter the custodial care of the religious sisters who maintained a number of zombies like her.”

Between 1944 and 1960, over 100,000 lobotomies had been performed in the US.

In the 1950’s and 60’s, the US government was obsessed with discovering secrets of ‘mind control’. At McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, the American Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron ran a clinic. Many of his patients were lobotomized, and sent to an oblivion some remain in today.

So let me get this straight…. stick an ice pick in my eye, cut off parts of my brain, skull shavings run a muck in the air, all to make me better, and, I will most likely end up a vegetable that is if I am not in that percentile that dies from the procedure, ahh, let me think about this one… no thanks … doctor.

That was how it was, but the propoganda made it sound like some miricle cure to those “nutty relatives” you really do not want bugging you.

The really sad thing is how many families agreed to have this done to their loved ones because of the hype and propoganda, I doubt they ever got the details of what a “good” result was.