changed my mind about the speech. not bad at all

[rainstorm]

With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff
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Tuesday, May 25, 2004 12:20 p.m. EDT
Bush Meets With Saddam's Torture Victims

In a dramatic gesture designed to counter the media's focus on U.S. abuses at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, President Bush met in the Oval Office on Tuesday with a group of Saddam Hussein's torture victims.

The six men, whose hands were surgically amputated at Saddam's direction in operations that were filmed for his viewing pleasure, picked up on Bush's promise last night that Abu Ghraib would be demolished, saying that they wanted to be among the first to "swing the hammer" against the prison's walls.

Their plight, chronicled by video producer Don North in the documentary "Remembering Saddam," has received scant attention in the U.S., with North telling the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago that American media outlets he contacted have shown no interest in broadcasting the film.

The film tells the story of how Saddam meted out the amputation punishments to the six Baghdad merchants, whom the Iraqi dictator blamed for his country's collapsing economy.

"Besides having our hands amputated, we were scarred on our foreheads, between our eyebrows," one of the men, Ala'a Abdul Hassein, told the Houston Chronicle in April. "The regime wanted us to be psychologically scarred forever."

"I was amazed and shocked by the tape," North told the paper. "It clearly showed doctors working with surgical instruments cutting through and severing these healthy hands. The victims were under anesthetic, and while they were still under, they had these black crosses tattooed to their foreheads to show they were miscreants," he said.

"Remembering Saddam" also documents how Houston surgeon Dr. Joseph Agris volunteered to perform the necessary surgery to fit the six torture victims with prosthetic devices last year with the help of Houston oil executive Roger Brown, who helped bring the them to the U.S.

In a bid to circumvent the mainstream media's embargo of the film, the Heritage Foundation has scheduled a screening of "Remembering Saddam" in Washington, D.C., Wednesday morning.

Editor's note:



this is what bush should have done last night, but better late than never