Putting alleged Koran flushing and cross-dressing in perspective

While the MSM is hyperventilating about potentially imaginery Koran flushing and definitely real coercive acts, the Kurds are giving thanks that the real deal, real torture, is a thing of the past. Indeed, they are so thankful, they've turned one of Saddam's former chambers into a museum so that they won't forget their liberation (courtesy of the US):

It is a most startling image: a life-sized figure of a Kurdish rebel hanging by his wrists from a metal hook, his arms bound behind his back -- a position intended to use the prisoner's weight to dislocate his shoulders. photo essay linkHe is dressed in the traditional Kurdish "sharwal" baggy pants and his shirt is partly untucked. Two electric alligator clips are attached to his earlobes from where wires run to a green hand-cranked electrical generator on a metal desk. His face is frozen in a moment of agony. The room is paneled in wood to muffle his screams. It is only a museum display. But before 1991, what happened in this room was all too real for the Kurds who dared to oppose the regime of Saddam Hussein. This compound of cinderblock buildings in the northern Iraq city of Sulaymaniyah was once one of the most feared places in the region. Known as Red Security, it was the northern headquarters for Saddam's military intelligence. "There were many kinds of torture," says Nabaz Mamhoud, a translator at the museum. "Some of them were executed or slaughtered by Saddam Hussein; some of them were imprisoned for the rest of their lives. The other people were kept in jails while security forces of Saddam Hussein tortured them in the most severe way."

As the MSM obsesses about numbers, here's a number to remember -- and keep in mind that it comes from just one region and one point in time in that vast country:

The Halabja attack was the single deadliest incident in Saddam's 1988 Anfal campaign, named after a verse in the Koran that urges believers to attack the infidels. The Anfal had three phases, each lasting from several weeks to a month, each focusing on a different Kurdish region. Kurds say it was simply genocide; people were rounded up into concentration camps or simply marched into the desert and shot. The Anfal saw the disappearance of 182,000 Kurds, most presumed to be dead. Hardly a person in the entire Iraqi Kurdish population did not lose a family member in that violent rampage.

The article details more of the tortures Saddam used, as well as giving more details about the museum's set up. Each reporter in Iraq ought to be forced out of the Green Zone about which each of them so regularly complains, and sent to Sulaymaniyah to see this museum