Lest We Forget

The Times has an interesting piece highlighting the work of mass graves teams in Iraq. They're trying to document the horrors inflicted on the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein. The team of 120 is scouring the countryside for evidence of Saddam's genocidal campaigns against the Kurds, Shi'a, and Marsh Arabs, as well as massacres of his political opponents (again often Kurds, Shi'a, and Marsh Arabs).

Together, in the late winter of 1991, at least 28 men were executed here, crowded together in a pit their killers scraped with a backhoe from the desert floor. Rounded up along the alleyways of their native city, they were forced aboard a bus or truck and driven out along an isolated highway.

After barely half an hour's journey, the grim caravan turned down a bumpy track, halting just far enough into the desert for gunfire to be muffled from passing traffic.

The end would have come quickly, the forensic experts said, victims stumbling out of the vehicle, herded into the pit, then pushed forward into a shallow cut not much wider or longer than a stretch limousine. At the last moment, judging by the pile of bodies, the victims surged backward, perhaps in terror at the sound of rifles being readied for fire.

Among the bodies, the experts have located at least 80 spent cartridges from Kalashnikov rifles, which were the weapon of choice among the killers of Mr. Hussein's secret police.

Michael Trimble, who is called Sonny, the leader of the mass-graves team that set up camp beside an escarpment in Iraq's western desert last month, is a 53-year-old forensic archaeologist from St. Louis. He is a veteran of other sites of mass killings around the world, on assignment from a civilian post with the Army Corps of Engineers.

Standing above the pit where the desert victims died, he said the 120-member team here, now in their third week of excavation and examination of two mass-grave sites, were sustained through days of punishing 130-degree heat by an urge to bring justice for the victims.

"When you work with these people for some time," he said, referring to the remains, "you get real attached to them, you feel real bad about what happened to them, and you want to do whatever you can to bring their killers to account."

The killers were members of Saddam's ruling Ba'athist party, and took their directions from Saddam and his sons.

Lest we forget, human rights abuses were one of the reasons that the US provided for overthrowing Saddam.

UPDATE:
Others blogging this: Flopping Aces, Reliapundit, Outside the Beltway, and Random Jottings.

No More Mister Nice Blog notes that this isn't the first story by the Times highlighting the work done by the mass graves teams. No. It isn't. That said, you would think that the Times might devote more time to the crimes committed by the Ba'athists - and those crimes include the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people than just a handful of stories.