The night sky over Baghdad lit up with flares and tracer fire when the news broke that Saddam Hussein's sons, Odai and Qusai, had been killed by American troops.
"It was the capital's most raucous celebration since the government fell April 9," reported Brian MacQuarrie, writing from Baghdad for The Boston Globe. "From a high-story balcony at the Palestine Hotel downtown, blasts of machine-gun fire echoed against the tall buildings for more than 30 minutes. Flares rose from the rooftops, as people scampered up to the tops of buildings to join in the celebration."
One reason for the celebration has been on display for the past several weeks at the al-Hikma Mosque in Baghdad, a piece of equipment used by Odai to torture athletes who hadn't lived up to his expectations -- a six-foot bodysuit of metal bars that was used to restrain offending athletes under the scorching sun for hours.
Another reason for the celebration is Sharar Haydar, a longtime Iraqi soccer star. He told ESPN how Odai reacted when he told him he wanted to stop playing for the Iraq national team: "He took me right to the Olympic prison, where the guards whipped my feet -- a traditional Arab punishment called falaqa -- 20 times a day for three days. They gave me nothing to eat or drink other than a daily glass of water and slice of bread. Then they sent me to al-Radwaniya again for four more days of punishment, and this time I got the full treatment."
Haydar explains the "full treatment," the penalty for the misdeed of seeing himself as something other than a tool of the state: "I was greeted at al-Radwaniya with what is known as 'The Reception.' They took my clothes off, laid me down on my back and dragged me by my legs across hot pavement until my back was a bloody mess. Then they made me roll in the sand. And just to make sure that the wounds got infected, I had to climb a 15-foot ladder and jump repeatedly into a pit of sewage water filled with blood and who knows what else. All because I wanted to stop playing soccer."
Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. diplomat who works with Indict, a London-based human rights group that documented abuses by Iraqi officials, maintains that Odai personally directed and participated in the torture of athletes, including amputations. Last January, Issam Thamer Aldiwan, once one of Iraq's top Olympic stars, turned over a list to the International Olympic Committee of 52 names of Iraqi athletes he says have been executed.
On top of heading up Iraq's intelligence and security apparatus, Qusai Hussein oversaw the nation's detention centers, a prison system that solved its overcrowding through the arbitrary killing of inmates, some by being dropped into shredding machines. "Some prisoners went in headfirst and died quickly, while others were put in feet first," reports Sameer Yacoub at The Associated Press. "The witness said that on at least one occasion, Qusai supervised shredding-machine murders.
Odai and Qusai, of course, didn't fall far from the tree. Reporting from a community hall in Tulkarm, one of the poorest towns on the West Bank, Paul McGeough provided a firsthand account of how members of the Palestinian Legislative Council handed out $25,000 checks from Saddam Hussein to the relatives of Palestinian suicide bombers: "The men at the top table then opened Saddam's checkbook and, as the names of 47 martyrs were called, family representatives went up to sign for checks written in U.S. dollars."
The lesson for America, also known as the Great Satan⢠Imagine if we kept finding excuses not to fight back. Imagine Odai with nukes.
