Word: tankfuls
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Colonel Hamadi (not his real name) was commander of a tank unit in Iraq's Third Army before he was arrested for links--which he denies--to an opposition party. He was held for 10 months. Saddam's military intelligence, he says, tortured him several times a week. "Sometimes they hung me from a ceiling fan to make me confess to something that was not true," says the colonel. When he was released last spring, he fled to northern Iraq, where the country's Kurdish minority functions almost autonomously from Baghdad under the protection of the U.S.-British...
...Colonel Hamadi says the army he left behind last year was in sorry shape, demoralized, underpaid and ill equipped. Of the 33 tanks in his sector, he says, 15 were out of commission. In a land of oil wells, there was even a shortage of tank lubricant. Washington officials say sanctions have worked well to undermine Saddam's 424,000-man army. Only the 100,000 or so Republican Guards are still considered serious fighters. So a cataclysmic collapse of the army under pressure from U.S. attack is possible. But experts inside and outside Iraq count...
...attack against Saddam because of the Middle East conflict simply means giving him breathing space to perfect his weapons of mass destruction. "Time is not on our side, and Saddam is running out the clock," says Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative think tank...
...house where Tawalbe died. The three-story structure shows signs of attack from two directions. One wall was charred by fire; the wall on the other side had collapsed. David Holley, a British military expert working in the camp for Amnesty International, deduces from the bomb craters and tank tracks that Tawalbe and the two fighters who accompanied him went into the house to get close enough to a tank or D-9 to plant explosives on it; the Palestinians' bombs, says Holley, were useless unless they were placed directly on the armor of a vehicle. Holley surmises that...
...never any instruction to commit them." This distinction?let's call it the "few bad apples" defense?is depressingly familiar to rights activists. "Abuses by the military are too widespread for it to be just a question of individuals," says Aris Santoso, a military analyst with a Jakarta think tank. "The institution itself must take the blame." Four middle-ranking soldiers and one police officer are currently on trial in Jakarta for a 1999 mass killing in East Timor. It is Indonesia's first human-rights court, but many doubt it will throw any light on the role senior officers...