April 12, 2003
THE ABC's John Highfield declined
THE ABC's John Highfield declined this week to revel in the liberation of Baghdad (scroll down for an earlier post), preferring instead to focus on wild dogs eating dead bodies.
Highfield might be interested to learn that the banished regime of Saddam Hussein had its own interest in wild dogs. Joanne Jacobs forwards this Stephen F. Hayes interview with Riadh Abdallah, a former general in Saddam's Republican Guard, published in the Weekly Standard:
Posted by Tim Blair at April 12, 2003 10:06 PMABDALLAH: I was in jail for eleven months. There was no judge. They just put you in. If one was to be executed or put in jail, no judge. They put us in the same room as those five generals who were executed. And they were killed with big knives. Those people were killed with big knives hitting them on the neck. And the room had blood everywhere.
SH: Did you think you might be next?
ABDALLAH: Yes. I thought that they would do the same thing to me. Every day they told me that I will be executed.
SH: How long?
ABDALLAH: Eleven months. Intimidation every day. At that time they found out about a conspiracy by another person who was a big general, a doctor actually, from the same town as Saddam. His name was Raji al-Tikriti. It's a very famous story in Iraq. And they made him a food for dogs.
SH: You were in prison when this happened? You heard about this?
ABDALLAH: They showed me these prisoners that were eaten by wild dogs. They made us--that was one kind of intimidation--they brought all of the generals and officers in the prison to watch it, to intimidate us. . . . They took us from jail and they put some blindfolds on our eyes and they took them off and we saw him. Before the dogs ate him we saw them read the judgment and they said why they were going to kill him. He was the head doctor for all the military, and he was the personal doctor for Saddam Hussein and for former Iraqi president Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr.