The green book of death

April 23, 2003 1:43 PM

Where Iraq's desaparecidos wound up. This is about Iraq, but it's not about the war. It's about a graveyard, its manager, and his "awful green book." The reporter is an Arab, which makes a difference, as you can see in the striking last sentence of this paragraph:

All of the dissidents buried at the Kirkh Islamic Cemetery were once held at Abu Ghreib prison, the country's largest and most notorious jail, from which Hussein released nearly 10,000 inmates last October. When word of their release came, the prisoners—from petty thieves to political dissidents, and all kept in horrendous conditions—overran the guards and stampeded the iron gates. Abu Ghreib is also the name given to Iraqi fathers who no longer have children.

posted by languagehat (9 comments total)

Where did they bury the survivors?
posted by kfury at 2:34 PM on April 23, 2003

Ha! Good luck getting attention for this story on MeFi!
All the "No War no Matter What" lefties here don't want to be embarassed by what they implicitly tolerated.
posted by reality at 5:00 PM on April 23, 2003

Troll
posted by echolalia67 at 6:47 PM on April 23, 2003

Newsflash: there's very little new under the sun (or moon). This is an interesting post.
posted by ParisParamus at 7:08 PM on April 23, 2003

echolalia67, I hope you weren't calling my post a troll. I didn't mean it as any sort of commentary on the war, just good reporting on a sad situation.
posted by languagehat at 8:33 PM on April 23, 2003

No, languagehat, I think he was calling the comment by reality, who apparently lives in a cartoon world of black and white, a troll, which it was. There was a story related to this in the New York Times today, Iraqis Tell of a Reign of Torture and Maiming which is just horrifying to read. I think of all the mothers of the disappeared in El Salvador and Guatemala in relation to your story here. These things are horrors--yet, once we were paymasters to people who did the same things.
posted by y2karl at 8:50 PM on April 23, 2003

Valid questions raised here- which deserve a response longer than a quick MeFi comment, such as this blog, on Friday, April 18.

I'm sure there are others who have written well on this topic, too. Seems we tend to voice our own opinions here on MeFi rather than linking in the commentaries of other bloggers ... howcome?
posted by sheauga at 6:57 AM on April 24, 2003

That's a good question, sheauga. It does get a little close in here, and linking to other blogs would let in some air. Of course, most people would use it just for "see, this guy says the same as me," but there's a lot of genuinely fresh commentary out there that would add value to MeFi threads.

y2karl, thanks for the link (speaking of added value).
posted by languagehat at 7:06 AM on April 24, 2003

No my comment wasn't aimed at you, languagehat, it was aimed at reality. That immflamatory type of posting, unfortunately, seems to be spreading like a virus. Read an item detailing an atrocity, post something about how hyprocritical the left/right is, and then bail. One newsgroup I'm on had to flat out ban all political postings of any kind, the flame wars were so bad.
posted by echolalia67 at 1:37 PM on April 24, 2003