They are now revealing the results and findings of the Saddam hearings. Here is only an excerpt of the article in its entirety. I was asked once what I thought of the fact that WMD’s were never found in Iraq and didn’t it bother me that in the years we have been over there we hadn’t found any.
Here is one of the reasons why … the picture of the pacifier is astonishing, it brings one to tears. You will have to go to this site, or buy the magazine itself, it’s Archeology. These people living like this, and this is just one small boy’s story of what he went through and actually lived to tell. It also shows the amount of hatred and greed Saddam possessed and his anger at western society. My answer was quite simple and if you go to the link below and read for yourself the stories of what is now being called Genocide, maybe you would agree. Saddam was a weapon of mass destruction. Not only that they referred to there finding as prison camps just as in the Holocaust. Even today, we say we must stop the genocide from happening in Sudan, why didn’t saving the people of Iraq get the same creedance? They tried to tell all of us and thank God that we had enough in Government to say go to it. But know, you cannot possibly deny the need to us to have gone there. Hopefully, and I don’t wish us to have to be there any longer than necessary, but with God’s help we can leave not in vain.
This pacifier belonged to one of the eighty-five children exhumed from the mass grave at Muthanna. (Courtesy US Army Corps of Engineers, St. Louis District and the Regime Crimes Liaison Office)
Muthanna, had been living in the United States and returned to Iraq to tell the court how gunmen killed his mother and three sisters and how he narrowly escaped death himself. Trimble, who watched this testimony on closed-circuit television, was astonished: it was the first time he had heard Taymour’s story. The Justice Department initially discounted the young Kurd and his report. “He seemed to them to be not all there,” says Trimble. But many details of Taymour’s account fit hand-in-glove with the evidence Trimble’s team unearthed. “When I saw him testify, I thought he was completely credible,” says Trimble. “He came across as a guy who, by the hand of God, had survived.”
The defense counsel consistently argued that the architects of Anfal had drawn up plans for a strictly military campaign, one that targeted only Iranian soldiers and Kurdish saboteurs. So Trimble decided to emphasize a key point in his testimony--that the Anfal death squads systematically slaughtered Kurdish civilians, notably women and young children. To make this point forcefully, he and his team created a graphic PowerPoint presentation to ensure that the most important forensic facts would not get lost in translation. For this presentation, Trimble chose to highlight seventeen victims from Muthanna. “We selected ones that we thought would best represent the demographic profile of the Anfal cases,” says Trimble.
The archaeologist testified for four hours on behalf of the entire team. He described the methods he and his colleagues used to recover, secure, and analyze the evidence. Then he presented the seventeen selected victims from Muthanna, one by one. He showed photos of each skeleton in the grave, the individual’s gunshot wounds, and the personal effects found with the body. These ranged from a young child’s prayer beads and little red shoes to a woman’s spoon for measuring medicine or powdered milk. Finally, Trimble exhibited photos of a mannequin wearing each victim’s attire. As he spoke, he tried to maintain as much eye contact as he could with the judges. Partway through his presentation, however, he noticed one judge dabbing his eye. Two others soon followed suit. At first Trimble was puzzled, thinking something was wrong. Then he realized what was happening. “My God,” he thought, “they are all crying.”
