Posted 11:24 AM by Blah blah

Baghdad Falls! Inside Saddam's Terror Regime.

Hooray!!! Freedom at last! Baghdad falls to US forces (BBC). Watch the video on this page of Rageh Omaar reporting on Iraqi citizens whooping and cheering for the fall of Saddam. Watch them topple one of his immense statues. Very emotional. "It was a moment that I'd never ever prepared myself for." This page also has a live webcam from Baghdad you may see.

The toppling of Saddam - an end to 30 years of brutal rule (The Guardian).

Today the U.S. and British soldiers deserve glory and appreciation. Saddam's regime collapses (Reuters).
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Read this disgusting article, from Jan. 2002, about some of the horrors of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. Your eyeballs will pop out: Inside Saddam's Terror Regime (Vanity Fair):

The most senior officer ever to defect from Iraq’s Mukhabarat [the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS)], brigadier general Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy, was forced into exile in the summer of 2000 when he crossed Saddam Hussein’s son Uday. After a three-day interview in Beirut, DAVID ROSE has the exclusive on al-Qurairy's brutal history of rape, torture, and mass murder, his training of a previously unknown elite force called al-Qare'a---including an untraceable 30-commando unit that left Iraq a year ago, and his strong belief that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks....

It is not until al-Qurairy begins to talk of the terrorist training camp he used to run at Salman Pak, a 45-minute drive south from Baghdad, that he speaks with real feeling---unconcealed pride. "It's got a long-established history and we're proud to be associated with it," he says, "because it's trained the elite---the people who've carried out operations abroad, who are on the Interpol wanted lists. By the time a trainee leaves our school he can protect any V.I.P. or assassinate any V.I.P. In 1979, when Saddam Hussein executed half his Cabinet, they had the honor of executing them at the camp." Alone of all Iraq's myriad security installations, Salman Pak remains directly answerable to Saddam.... As recently as the summer of 2000, al-Qurairy saw the Arab students being taught to hijack aircraft on Salman Pak's own passenger jet, an Old Russian Tupolev. They all took a special course, he says---"how to gain control of the cockpit and passengers without using firearms."...

In one training procedure, regularly repeated, students had to land three helicopters on the roof of a speeding train on Salman Pak's own railroad, and then hijack it. With sudden animation, al-Qurairy gets up from his chair and performs a series of jumps and pirouettes, demonstrating the difficulty of the necessary maneuvers. "Fifty took part; 38 passed," he says. "Twelve failed. They were used as 'passengers' in sub- sequent exercises." Part of the role envisaged for al-Qare'a is to crush future internal rebellion. But the unit's primary ethos remains aggression against enemies abroad....

In London, I met another of Iraq's Mukhabarat defectors, who like al-Qurairy, spent six months at the Mukhabarat's "April 7th" camp at Diyala, northeast of Baghdad. "The fatal-casualty rate was 5 percent," this defector says. "In my course, we lost three men." The graduation ceremony was peculiarly brutal. The new graduates were put in a yard with 200 or 300 dogs. "We had to show what we can do" the defector continues.

"So we catch them with our bare hands and kill them with our teeth, by biting the arteries in their necks. Then we had to jump off a bridge into filthy, sewage-Iaden water, holding another dog. You mustn't let the dog go. If the dog lives, you are out of the Mukhabarat."

Al-Qurairy recalls the same experience. But as far as he is concerned, "to Mukhabarat people that was just a joke. Mukhabarat training was much more serious than that."

In 1990, by now a captain, al-Qurairy joined with the Iraqi forces that invaded Kuwait, and helped administer the seven-month occupation. It was a time for frolics. One day a young Palestinian woman made the mistake of visiting the Mukhabarat office, to complain that her estranged husband was failing to pay child support. In a conversation with Iraqi National Congress officers, al-Qurairy said the woman was beautiful---and that he, along with others in the Mukhabarat, raped her and let her go. Then al-Qurairy told the husband of what they had done, reminding him to pay up.