Trees for Our Children
Trees for Our Children is the name of a blog owned by a young university student in my home province who appears to believe without question every negative anti-American statement his commie profs pour into his head. "Billy" is anti-corporate anything, but is especially opposed to the uranium industry and has cited some far fetched nonsense about Saskatchewan's uranium mining companies being responsible for the development of leukima in Iraqi children.
For his enlightenment, I thought I would try to describe what life was like for children in Iraq prior to the American led invasion of 2003 and still is for the children of many Islamofascists, the so called "insurgents". The tiny fraction of children who may be dying from leukima in Iraq, no matter what the cause, pales in comparison to the fate of children and their families under the Ba'athist regime. The little boy who writes Trees for Our Children needs to grow up. Child-like innocents are prime targets for the brainwashing hordes who occupy so many of our universities' hallowed halls.
So, Billy, here goes:
The War Crimes of Saddam Hussein
"The Dujail Massacre of 1982: In July of 1982, several Shiite militants attempted to assassinate Saddam Hussein while he was riding through the city. Hussein responded by ordering the slaughter of some 148 residents, including dozens of children.
After Barzani cast his lot with the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War, Hussein had some 8,000 members of Barzani's clan, including hundreds of women and children, abducted.
The worst human rights abuses of Hussein's tenure took place during the genocidal al-Anfal Campaign (1986-1989), in which Hussein's administration called for the extermination of every living thing--human or animal--in certain regions of the Kurdish north. All told, some 182,000 people--men, women, and children--were slaughtered, many through use of chemical weapons.
Wartime rhetoric regarding Hussein's "rape rooms," death by torture, decisions to slaughter the children of political enemies, and the casual machine-gunning of peaceful protesters accurately reflected the day-to-day policies of Saddam Hussein's regime. Hussein was no misunderstood despotic "madman." He was a monster, a butcher, a brutal tyrant, a genocidal racist--he was all of this, and more."
“The Head of the Snake”
"Next to the anti-aircraft guns is a white sculpture made by a Suleimaniya artist who happened to be on the grounds when I showed up. It memorializes six Kurdish children who were senselessly gunned down in the streets by the Baath."
From the comments at the above link:
"Andrew: Everyone should remember that Saddam was an ally of the USA during this time and the US government knew everything Saddam was doing.
I agree.
Everyone should also remember who got rid of the bastard when most people wanted to leave him in place.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at March 3, 2006 08:41 AM
Grow Up! American troops may be guilty of 'humiliating' prisoners and, while I do not condone it, I certainly do not equate humiliation with rape, torture, beheading, or the cold blooded murder of innocent children! Maybe I'm in the minority....
Posted by: D Haynes at March 3, 2006 10:37 AM
Saddam Hussein's murderous and genocidal campaigns: Dujail and Afal
The hardest thing to see was the cell used to hold children before they were murdered. My translator Alan read some of the messages carved into the wall.
“I was ten years old. But they changed my age to 18 for execution. Dear Mom and Dad. I am going to be executed by the Baath. I will not see you again.”
Then, during the Anfal campaign from February to September 1988, Iraqi troops swept through the highlands of Iraqi Kurdistan rounding up everyone who remained in government-declared "prohibited zones." Some 100,000 Kurds, mostly men and boys, were trucked to remote sites and executed. Only seven are known to have escaped.
Knowing Saddam Hussein is one of history's most vicious and cruel dictators is one thing. Proving it in a court of law is another.
The grisly task of methodically finding, excavating, and cataloging Saddam Hussein's mass graves goes on. Great stores of horrendous evidence are increasing daily as murdered Kurds, Shiites, and other Saddam victims, continue to be pulled from shallow, bulldozer-dug trenches.
Even hardened invesigators have difficulty with this macabre task. These huge shallow graves are filled with families: fathers, mothers and children wearing all of their clothes on their backs for their "re-location" - with many of the children carrying their toys with them.
A chain of evidence that investigators believe will help convict Saddam Hussein begins at a windswept grave in the desert near Hatra, in northern Iraq.
The burial site - a series of deep trenches that held about 2,500 bodies, many of them women and children - is one of many mass graves that dot the country. But it was the first excavated by an American investigative team working with a special Iraqi tribunal to build cases against Mr. Hussein and others in his government.
According to Gregory W. Kehoe, the American who set up the investigative team, what was found at Hatra shows how the Hussein leadership made a "business of killing people" - the scrape marks from the blade of the bulldozer that shoved victims into the trench, the point-blank shots to the backs of even the babies' heads, the withered body of a 3- or 4-year-old boy, still clutching a red and white ball.
Babies found in Iraqi mass grave
Tiny bones
The victims are believed to be Kurds killed in 1987-88, their bodies bulldozed into the graves after being summarily shot dead.
One trench contains only women and children while another contains only men.
The body of one woman was found still clutching a baby. The infant had been shot in the back of the head and the woman in the face.
"The youngest foetus we have was 18 to 20 foetal weeks," said US investigating anthropologist P Willey.
"Tiny bones, femurs - thighbones the size of a matchstick."
Mr Kehoe investigated mass graves in the Balkans for five years but those burials mainly involved men of fighting age and the Iraqi finds were quite different, he said.
"I've been doing grave sites for a long time, but I've never seen anything like this, women and children executed for no apparent reason" he said.
Mother of All Ironies.
"They half-crushed the toddler's feet. Now, she doesn't walk, she hobbles, and Ali fears that Saddam's men have crippled his daughter for life."
[snip]
"And the faking of the mass baby funerals.
You may have seen them on TV. Small white coffins parading through the streets of Baghdad on the roofs of taxis, an angry crowd of mourners, condemning western sanctions for killing the children of Iraq.
Usefully, the ages of the dead babies - "three days old", "four days old" - are written in English on the coffins. I wonder who did that?
Ali gave us the inside track on the racket. There aren't enough dead babies around. So the regime stores them for a mass funeral.
He said that he was friends with a taxi driver - he gave his name - whose son had a position in the regime.
Ali continued: "He told me he had to go to Najaf" - a town 100 miles from Baghdad - "in order to bring children's bodies from various freezers there, and that the smell was unbearable.
"They used to collect children's bodies and put them in freezers for two, three or even six or seven months - God knows - till the smell gets so unbearable. Then, they arrange the mass funerals."
The logic being, the more dead babies, the better for Saddam. That way, he can weaken public support in the west for sanctions. That means that parents who have lost a baby can't bury it until the regime says so."
"In northern Iraq - the only part of the country where people can speak freely - we met six other witnesses who had direct experience of child torture."
[snip]
"While we were in the north of Iraq, the chairman of the Great Britain Iraq Society, Labour MP George Galloway, was in Baghdad. He popped up on Iraqi TV, saying "When I hear the word Iraq, I hear someone calling my name".
I don't agree.
When I hear the word Iraq, I hear a tortured child, screaming."
Insurgents used kids as cover, then killed them. Just one example of hundreds of such reports.
And I won't even begin to detail the thousands of children killed via the UNs oil-for-food scandal. Of course, Trees for Our Children author, Billy, will understand that all of this is due to American imperialism, because, after all, his professors have helped him learn to think for himself.
For his enlightenment, I thought I would try to describe what life was like for children in Iraq prior to the American led invasion of 2003 and still is for the children of many Islamofascists, the so called "insurgents". The tiny fraction of children who may be dying from leukima in Iraq, no matter what the cause, pales in comparison to the fate of children and their families under the Ba'athist regime. The little boy who writes Trees for Our Children needs to grow up. Child-like innocents are prime targets for the brainwashing hordes who occupy so many of our universities' hallowed halls.
So, Billy, here goes:
The War Crimes of Saddam Hussein
"The Dujail Massacre of 1982: In July of 1982, several Shiite militants attempted to assassinate Saddam Hussein while he was riding through the city. Hussein responded by ordering the slaughter of some 148 residents, including dozens of children.
After Barzani cast his lot with the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War, Hussein had some 8,000 members of Barzani's clan, including hundreds of women and children, abducted.
The worst human rights abuses of Hussein's tenure took place during the genocidal al-Anfal Campaign (1986-1989), in which Hussein's administration called for the extermination of every living thing--human or animal--in certain regions of the Kurdish north. All told, some 182,000 people--men, women, and children--were slaughtered, many through use of chemical weapons.
Wartime rhetoric regarding Hussein's "rape rooms," death by torture, decisions to slaughter the children of political enemies, and the casual machine-gunning of peaceful protesters accurately reflected the day-to-day policies of Saddam Hussein's regime. Hussein was no misunderstood despotic "madman." He was a monster, a butcher, a brutal tyrant, a genocidal racist--he was all of this, and more."
“The Head of the Snake”
"Next to the anti-aircraft guns is a white sculpture made by a Suleimaniya artist who happened to be on the grounds when I showed up. It memorializes six Kurdish children who were senselessly gunned down in the streets by the Baath."
From the comments at the above link:
"Andrew: Everyone should remember that Saddam was an ally of the USA during this time and the US government knew everything Saddam was doing.
I agree.
Everyone should also remember who got rid of the bastard when most people wanted to leave him in place.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at March 3, 2006 08:41 AM
Grow Up! American troops may be guilty of 'humiliating' prisoners and, while I do not condone it, I certainly do not equate humiliation with rape, torture, beheading, or the cold blooded murder of innocent children! Maybe I'm in the minority....
Posted by: D Haynes at March 3, 2006 10:37 AM
Saddam Hussein's murderous and genocidal campaigns: Dujail and Afal
The hardest thing to see was the cell used to hold children before they were murdered. My translator Alan read some of the messages carved into the wall.
“I was ten years old. But they changed my age to 18 for execution. Dear Mom and Dad. I am going to be executed by the Baath. I will not see you again.”
Then, during the Anfal campaign from February to September 1988, Iraqi troops swept through the highlands of Iraqi Kurdistan rounding up everyone who remained in government-declared "prohibited zones." Some 100,000 Kurds, mostly men and boys, were trucked to remote sites and executed. Only seven are known to have escaped.
Knowing Saddam Hussein is one of history's most vicious and cruel dictators is one thing. Proving it in a court of law is another.
The grisly task of methodically finding, excavating, and cataloging Saddam Hussein's mass graves goes on. Great stores of horrendous evidence are increasing daily as murdered Kurds, Shiites, and other Saddam victims, continue to be pulled from shallow, bulldozer-dug trenches.
Even hardened invesigators have difficulty with this macabre task. These huge shallow graves are filled with families: fathers, mothers and children wearing all of their clothes on their backs for their "re-location" - with many of the children carrying their toys with them.
A chain of evidence that investigators believe will help convict Saddam Hussein begins at a windswept grave in the desert near Hatra, in northern Iraq.
The burial site - a series of deep trenches that held about 2,500 bodies, many of them women and children - is one of many mass graves that dot the country. But it was the first excavated by an American investigative team working with a special Iraqi tribunal to build cases against Mr. Hussein and others in his government.
According to Gregory W. Kehoe, the American who set up the investigative team, what was found at Hatra shows how the Hussein leadership made a "business of killing people" - the scrape marks from the blade of the bulldozer that shoved victims into the trench, the point-blank shots to the backs of even the babies' heads, the withered body of a 3- or 4-year-old boy, still clutching a red and white ball.
Babies found in Iraqi mass grave
Tiny bones
The victims are believed to be Kurds killed in 1987-88, their bodies bulldozed into the graves after being summarily shot dead.
One trench contains only women and children while another contains only men.
The body of one woman was found still clutching a baby. The infant had been shot in the back of the head and the woman in the face.
"The youngest foetus we have was 18 to 20 foetal weeks," said US investigating anthropologist P Willey.
"Tiny bones, femurs - thighbones the size of a matchstick."
Mr Kehoe investigated mass graves in the Balkans for five years but those burials mainly involved men of fighting age and the Iraqi finds were quite different, he said.
"I've been doing grave sites for a long time, but I've never seen anything like this, women and children executed for no apparent reason" he said.
Mother of All Ironies.
"They half-crushed the toddler's feet. Now, she doesn't walk, she hobbles, and Ali fears that Saddam's men have crippled his daughter for life."
[snip]
"And the faking of the mass baby funerals.
You may have seen them on TV. Small white coffins parading through the streets of Baghdad on the roofs of taxis, an angry crowd of mourners, condemning western sanctions for killing the children of Iraq.
Usefully, the ages of the dead babies - "three days old", "four days old" - are written in English on the coffins. I wonder who did that?
Ali gave us the inside track on the racket. There aren't enough dead babies around. So the regime stores them for a mass funeral.
He said that he was friends with a taxi driver - he gave his name - whose son had a position in the regime.
Ali continued: "He told me he had to go to Najaf" - a town 100 miles from Baghdad - "in order to bring children's bodies from various freezers there, and that the smell was unbearable.
"They used to collect children's bodies and put them in freezers for two, three or even six or seven months - God knows - till the smell gets so unbearable. Then, they arrange the mass funerals."
The logic being, the more dead babies, the better for Saddam. That way, he can weaken public support in the west for sanctions. That means that parents who have lost a baby can't bury it until the regime says so."
"In northern Iraq - the only part of the country where people can speak freely - we met six other witnesses who had direct experience of child torture."
[snip]
"While we were in the north of Iraq, the chairman of the Great Britain Iraq Society, Labour MP George Galloway, was in Baghdad. He popped up on Iraqi TV, saying "When I hear the word Iraq, I hear someone calling my name".
I don't agree.
When I hear the word Iraq, I hear a tortured child, screaming."
Insurgents used kids as cover, then killed them. Just one example of hundreds of such reports.
And I won't even begin to detail the thousands of children killed via the UNs oil-for-food scandal. Of course, Trees for Our Children author, Billy, will understand that all of this is due to American imperialism, because, after all, his professors have helped him learn to think for himself.
posted by Louise at 12:02 pm
2 Comments:
ha
I used to see that guy comment on John Murneys blog.
He reminds me of a person that I know in my own life. always anti-corporate.
They live in a fairytale world, Huff. The really can't believe that the world has always been imperfect, which is why they are drawn to ideologies such as Marxism and have totally whitewashed views of any part of the non-Western world or any people throughout history that have been oppressed.
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