In all, 19 American servicemen and two servicewomen were taken prisoner by Iraq in the last gulf war. All of them tasted the savagery of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Yet Saddam and his lieutenants were never called to account for the last war, or for the horrors inflicted on Iraq’s own people. The United States filed no charges and brought no indictments, and no trials were held in any international tribunal. And even if there is a new war, many of the men who have masterminded the murdering and torturing may yet escape justice. Last year, 17 of the 21 American POWs finally filed suit in federal court against Saddam and his cronies, demanding $25 million each for what they went through. They’re hoping to get compensated from Iraqi funds frozen in the United States, but they realize this will not bring their tormentors to justice.
Why’s that? Indictments can interfere with diplomacy. Last October President George W. Bush vowed, “All war criminals will be pursued and punished.” But in the last few weeks the administration has opened the door to possible amnesty and exile for top officials, including Saddam. Prosecutions also raise questions of jurisdiction. The Bush administration is hostile to international courts and tribunals. Regarding the last war, one official says, “I don’t know under what authority the U.S. could have sought to bring trials.” Current thinking in Washington is that Iraqi tribunals might handle the problem when the fighting is over. (That assumes there’s a viable Iraqi government in place.) And then there are issues of pure politics. The first Bush administration “made an endless number of excuses,” says Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador. “The whole issue served to remind everyone of the job not done.” The current administration official calls that allegation “preposterous.”
What’s not in doubt is the evidence. “All of the POWs suffered physical abuse,” said a report on Iraqi war crimes prepared by the Judge Advocate General and submitted to the Pentagon brass in January 1992. (It was promptly classified secret and did not resurface until after the elections a year later.) The Americans were beaten, electrocuted, urinated and spat upon. They suffered broken bones, torn muscles, chipped teeth, perforated eardrums and massive bruising, and one of the women was sexually molested. A Marine lieutenant colonel was so hungry he ate the scabs off his wounds. Add to this well-documented accounts of the suffering endured by Kuwaitis and Iraqis: torture with electric drills, death in acid baths, summary executions, gang rapes in front of family members. The accumulated evidence of war crimes (“several linear feet of files,” as the final Pentagon report put it) was simply overwhelming.
Berryman, now a 40-year-old major in the Marine Corps, remembers it firsthand. On that afternoon of Jan. 28, 1991, one of Saddam’s men slammed a metal pipe right below his left knee, breaking his fibula. Another grabbed an ax handle and started hitting his right leg. With a cigarette, one torturer burned Berryman on his forehead, nose, ears and a bleeding neck wound. “I am realizing I am not being interrogated,” he recalls. “I am just being beaten.” And that was just the beginning. Though he says the Iraqi Army, as such, did not torture him, Saddam’s special units and secret police seemed to enjoy the cruelty. Berryman says he would like to go back to Iraq today and finish the job that was started in 1991.
