Saddam's crimes, our complicity

Robert Fisk provides coverage of a report which shockingly details Saddam's torture, rape, and execution of Iraqi shia women.

The women's faces are all veiled. They are mostly young. They are all Iraqi Shia Muslims. And their terrible fate - their vicious torture and deliberately cruel executions - should place their deaths on the list of barbarities for which Saddam Hussein could be tried, although almost all were put to death when the United States was supporting Saddam's regime.

...Wives were forced to watch their husbands hanged before being placed in the electric chair, were burned with acid, tied naked to ceiling fans, sexually abused. In several cases, women were poisoned or used as guinea pigs for chemical substances at a plant near Samarra believed to be making chemical weapons.

...The 550-page report is no literary work. Some of its prose is florid and occasionally appears to describe women's martyrdom as a fate to be emulated. Nor is this a work which will make easy reading for Americans anxious to use it as evidence against Saddam. The book repeatedly states that the chemicals used on women prisoners were originally purchased from Western countries.

Jesus...