Wear a red ribbon to show you refuse to add to the bloodshed, you will not cause the innocent to fear. To show you won’t hate because of race or religion. To show you will not support Bush’s war on Iraq. To show that you don’t support police, or government agents terrorizing people in their homes. Let it be known to all, why you wear a red ribbon. Let a red ribbon show Muslims in our community that you do not blame all for the actions of a few. Muslim women in the community are becoming reluctant to go to the shops, or send their children to school, let a red ribbon signify that you will not attack them. Our communities are being destroyed by religionist and racist, government propaganda, and we are losing the very things that make our countries so great. Not all of us are able to attend protests, but we can all wear a red ribbon. Let our governments see a river of red ribbons and maybe prevent rivers of blood.

'Cause you really couldn't care less if this kind of savagery continues unabated. . .

From the Boston Globe. . .

Saddam's shop of horrors



By Jeff Jacoby, 10/31/2002

S A BOY, writes Kenneth Pollack in his masterful new book on Iraq, ''The Threatening Storm,'' Saddam Hussein would heat an iron poker until it was white-hot, then use it to impale cats and dogs. Years later, when he had boys of his own, he would take them into prisons so they could watch - and get used to - torture and executions. The Arab world is replete with dictators, many of them ruthless. But for sheer unbridled cruelty, none of them can touch Saddam. And for hellish and sadistic brutality, no other Arab state - perhaps no other state in the world - can compare with what Saddam has created in Iraq.



Writing in The New Republic recently, foreign correspondent Robert Kaplan recalled the treatment meted out some years back to Robert Spurling, an American technician working in Baghdad. Spurling ''had been taken away from his wife and daughters at Saddam International Airport and tortured for four months with electric shock, brass knuckles, and wooden bludgeons. His toes were crushed and his toenails ripped out. He was kept in solitary confinement on a starvation diet. Finally, American diplomats won his release. Multiply his story by thousands, and you will have an idea what Iraq is like to this day.''

Spurling was one of Saddam's luckier victims; he survived. Many thousands of others have been executed outright or tortured to death - or forced to witness the torture or murder of their loved ones.

In June, the BBC interviewed ''Kamal,'' a former Iraqi torturer now confined in a Kurdish prison. ''If someone didn't break, they'd bring in the family,'' Kamal said. ''They'd bring the son in front of his parents, who were handcuffed or tied, and they'd start with simple tortures such as cigarette burns, and then if his father didn't confess, they'd start using more serious methods,'' such as slicing off one of the child's ears or amputating a limb. ''They'd tell the father that they'd slaughter his son. They'd bring a bayonet out. And if he didn't confess, they'd kill the child.''

Horror in Saddam's Iraq takes endless forms. In 1987-88, Air Force helicopters sprayed scores of Kurdish villages with a combination of chemical weapons, including mustard gas, Sarin, and VX, a deadly nerve agent. Scores of thousands of Kurds died horrible deaths. Of those who survived, many were left blind or sterile or crippled with agonizing lung damage.

But most of the Kurds slaughtered in that season of mass murder were not gassed but rounded up and gunned down into mass graves. Those victims were mostly men and boys, and their bodies have never been recovered.

In one village near Kirkuk, after the males were taken to be killed, the women and small children were crammed into trucks and taken to a prison. One survivor, Salma Aziz Baban, described the ordeal to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who reported on Saddam's war against the Kurds in The New Yorker in March.

More than 2,000 women and children were crammed into a room and given nothing to eat. When someone starved to death, the Iraqi guards demanded that the body be passed to them through an window in the door. Baban's 6-year-old son grew very sick. ''He knew he was dying. There was no medicine or doctor. He started to cry so much.'' He died in his mother's lap.

''I was screaming and crying,'' she told Goldberg. ''We gave them the body. It was passed outside, and the soldiers took it.''

Soon after, she pushed her way to the window to see if her child had been taken for burial. She saw 20 dogs roaming in a field where the dead bodies had been dumped. ''I looked outside and saw the legs and hands of my son in the mouths of the dogs. The dogs were eating my son.''

Horror without end. Amnesty International once listed some 30 different methods of torture used in Iraq. They ranted from burning to electric shock to rape. Some governments go to great lengths to keep evidence of torture secret. Saddam's government has often flaunted its tortures, leaving the broken bodies of its victims in the street or returning them, mangled and mutilated, to their families.

For the second time in a dozen years, the United States is preparing to go to war against Iraq, this time with ''regime change'' as an explicit goal. The case for military action is being made primarily in the name of international law and stability: Iraq under Saddam egregiously violates UN resolutions, attacks other countries without cause, aids terrorists, uses and stockpiles biological and chemical weapons, actively pursues nuclear weapons, and purposely creates environmental catastrophes.

Saddam has successfully resisted every form of outside pressure short of war. Neither sanctions nor inspections nor missile strikes have subdued his aggressiveness. His regime is profoundly dangerous and will grow even more so if it is not destroyed.

All true. But let us not forget something equally true: Saddam has been an unspeakable evil for the people of Iraq. In crushing him and his dictatorship, we will be liberating the most cruelly enslaved nation on earth and performing an act of nearly incalculable mercy.

Great Idea! The family will be red ribbon festooned from dad to daugher!

I'll wipe my butt with nothing but red ribbons from here on out.

....the SimpleOne imparting his devastating wit...

...your so fuckin' stupid you'd be lucky to find your ass no less wipe it....

Finding my ass is easy. I just follow your tongue.

...who could find the room with your head wedged up there so tight....

So you HAVE been looking at my butt. I knew it.

...yes...the universe is centered around YOUR ass....

As it should be. Thank you.

...I typed AROUND your ass, not IN your ass, so wipe your chin as stop drooling....

I've noticed a lack of spelling in a number of your latest posts, KPC. Perhaps you should settle down, focus, and type what you mean to say. You are starting to sound illiterate. That means stoopid.

It's not "stoopid", it's "STOOOPIT", as in the Shrubya is STOOOPIT.

Wear a red ribbon to signify that you plan to do nothing about saddams insane human rights abuses. Use it to show your support for uday and his little torture chamber .

Yup! One of our own (until we turned on him) little torturers.

Gotta love those CIA implants.

At least some of us would like to see this one eradicated. And some sheepdogs would rather just wag their tongues and ignore them.

Well the Mr. Simples of this world would rather ignore the cause of the problem and treat the symptoms. It’s the criminal intelligence agency that has given us these problems.

...it's Simples....if we addressed the cause of the problem, where would our future boogiemen come from?

Can't have that now, can we?

There is no question, gentlemen, that the United States employed gray and black bag tricks during the Cold War. There is no question that some of the clients of the United States were bad characters. There was a war on, and sometimes in war you don't get to choose your dance partner, you get them thrust upon you by events. Much like the Allies having to partner up with that subhuman butcher Stalin in WWII.

Now that the Cold War has been won (Thank God & Ronald Reagan) we have an opportunity to deal with these problems. And we will. And Sheepdog and KPC and the rest of the Left will squawk and bleat and piss and moan and do nothing else. Same as it ever was.

Thrust upon us? You got that backwards, Pvt. Fido, WE put these henchmen in place...

...oh, that's right...you're the APOLOGIST....apologize away, my little doggie, that is what YOU do...as the days go by....

"and KPC and the rest of the Left will squawk and bleat and piss and moan and do nothing else. Same as it ever was."

Right on time, KPC.