Word: saddamism
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...largely declined to implement the U.S. benchmarks for national reconciliation deemed essential for ending the civil war by strengthening the Sunni political stake in Baghdad. The oil law governing distribution of revenues has not been passed, nor have restrictions been significantly eased on former members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist organization (the party remains popular among Sunnis) serving in government. Most alarming, perhaps, has been Maliki's departure from the U.S. strategy of putting former Sunni insurgents on the payroll through the "Awakening" militias that drove al-Qaeda out of many communities. (See pictures of post-surge life...
...course, sometimes the sympathy - and the concessions - never come. From 2004 to 2006, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein launched three separate hunger strikes during his war-crimes tribunal, protesting that the court lacked legitimacy and had failed to provide adequate security for his defense lawyers (three of his attorneys were killed during the proceedings). But the strikes only resulted in feeding tubes and occasional mockery; one Fox News headline proclaimed: "Saddam Ends Hunger Strike After Skipping One Meal...
...plots were more than fantasies it's as hard to prove a negative after September 11 as it was before. Just because there were no attacks after 9/11 doesn't necessarily mean that the interrogations deserve the credit. And of course the intelligence community's failure to discover that Saddam Hussein lacked any weapons of mass destruction before the Bush Administration invaded Iraq in 2003 makes their purported knowledge about thwarting attacks suspect to many observers...
...publicly known. So far, neither the U.N. nor the Iraqi government has made any verifiable statistics available. But few doubt the practice continues today among Iraqi authorities and criminal elements. Torture, of course, has had a long history in Iraq, achieving particular notoriety during the era of Saddam Hussein. Observers say the recent years of war have created a social environment in which torture can continue to flourish. "In Iraq, we can notice all these acts of torture were done by young ages, people between 20 and 30," says Nahith Noras Shaker, professor of psychology at Baghdad University...
...years of war and instability after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003 have provided unfettered opportunities for criminal elements, including traffickers, to profit. Nobody knows for certain how many Iraqi women and children have been sold into slavery since then. Some Baghdad-based activists put the figure in the tens of thousands, but there are no official numbers due to the nature of the business and the reluctance of victims or their families to come forward in a society where female virginity is prized and the stigma of compromised chastity can be a permanent social stain...