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BLOODY PROOF: Hussein photos don't end doubt

Journalists to film bodies of Uday, Qusay today, U.S. spokesman says

July 25, 2003

BY TAMARA AUDI
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

Uday and Qusay Hussein, so well-dressed and groomed to mustachioed perfection in life, were bloody, broken and nearly unrecognizable in death.

GRAPHIC IMAGES

The U.S. government released photographs Thursday of the bodies of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's sons, Qusay and Uday, who were killed in a U.S. raid in Mosul on Tuesday. Generally, the Free Press does not print photos of individual dead bodies. We decided to do so after the government took the extraordinary step of disregarding unwritten military convention and releasing the photographs to prove Hussein's sons are dead. Click here to see photos

Even the believers had to take a second look at disturbingly raw photos released by the U.S. government Thursday and flashed around the world by the news media as proof that former President Saddam Hussein's infamous sons were indeed dead.

"Everyone here in our office, we turned the TV on and said, 'Boy it doesn't even look like them,' " said Martin Manna, an IraqiAmerican who lives in Bloomfield Hills and is director of the Detroit-area Chaldean American Chamber of Commerce.

Yet Manna is convinced (reports of affirmative dental records helped) that the brothers were killed in a gun battle with U.S. troops in Mosul, and understood why the photos were released.

"This is the proof the Arab world needed to start believing," Manna said. "By giving them this evidence, it will do many things, one of which allow Iraqis to sleep better at night. And second, it gives validity to what the U.S. is doing in restoring democracy."

The U.S. military was reluctant to release the photos, concerned about exposing American dead to the same treatment in future conflicts. "It is not a practice that the United States engages in on a normal basis," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday. "I honestly believe that these two are particularly bad characters, and that it's important for the Iraqi people to see them, to know they're gone, to know they're dead and to know they're not coming back."

In a way, it was the Hussein regime, and coups that came before it, that created the demand for photographic proof in a region where mistrust of government officials mixes easily with cynicism about oil interests, conspiracy theories and village superstitions about indestructible rulers. It is a region where no leader is considered gone until he is dead. Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, still at large, may live forever in legend.

Saad Marouf, a Christian from Iraq now living in Southfield, remembers seeing the body of former Iraqi leader Abdul Karim Kassem broadcast for days on television after he was overthrown and killed in 1963. "He was in his uniform, sitting in a chair, falling over. His mouth was open," Marouf said. Marouf was 12.

Hussein elevated that tradition to a regular practice, often televising the executions of his opponents, and leaving the bodies of murdered dissidents to rot in public places.

Critics said the United States should not follow in such footsteps.

"Is that what we're after, becoming the new big gun in town?" said Arab American Institute President James Zogby, a Washington-based political commentator criticalof the U.S. government's administration of Iraq. The photos will "convince them they're dead, but it does not necessarily change the culture of suspicion or the fear of what came before or what will come next," Zogby said.

As quickly as the photos were accepted as welcome proof in some circles, they were rejected in others.

"The Americans say they have confirmed it, but the Iraqi people don't believe it," said Hassan Khoja, 30, an electronic parts dealer who lives down the block from where the brothers were killed in Mosul. "Uday and Qusay never stayed in one place at the same time in their entire lives. They were too smart for that," he said.

Even if the deaths are real, some said, the United States is making a spectacle of them to take the eyes of the world off the ball -- the problems in Iraq.

"The fact is, we didn't find weapons of mass destruction, nuclear bombs or uranium," said Ron Amen, a Muslim American from Livonia. "So they're focusing on how bad these two were.

"They were bad guys to be sure, but they were bad guys 20 years ago. This administration is just using a different tack now to justify what they've done to Iraq."

And Amen, a local government employee himself, admits he's not immune to conspiracy theories. "Photos can be tampered with," he said.

Just hours after the photos were released, U.S. government officials were still looking for ways to prove that the brothers were dead. On Thursday afternoon, 25 members of the Governing Council, the U.S.-appointed body intended to bring a measure of self-rule, were shown the bodies Thursday afternoon. A spokesman for the U.S.-led administration in Baghdad said journalists would be allowed to film the bodies for themselves today to dispel any doubts the photographs were authentic.

The Governing Council was being consulted on what should be done to dispose of the bodies.

For all the debate, there was no mourning the brothers -- one famous for sadistic torture, the other for the regular rape of Iraqi woman.

"Can't say they're gonna be missed," said one posting on Iraqipages.com.

Contact TAMARA AUDI at 313-222-6582 or audi@freepress.com. Free Press news services contributed to this report.