'The officer is usually more than happy to talk to me on the record but this time he did not want to have to explain what he had seen of torture and never revealed to his wife back home...' This filed today by Tom Newton Dunn... a writer for the Daily Mirror who's traipsing about Iraq with 40 Commando Unit..
They'd spent the day at small village ..Abu al Khasib.. searching through what used to be euphamistically called the Police Station.. abandoned by the Mukhabarat as the British forces approached..
A pile of ID cards.. several score.. found bound together in a bottom drawer of the desk in the office of the Police Chief.. It's illegal for any Iraqi to be without their card.. they'd be imprisoned were they stopped without it..
It begs the question.. why were these men not carrying these cards.. where they might be today..
It's different world there.. something enirely alien to western minds coddled and comforted with a childhood of Walt Disney and Bill Cosby..
The pictures of the reality of Iraqi daily life.. will have many who marched against this conflict thinking again..
Regretable it took a war to rid them of Saddam.. regretable it wasn't done the last time..
It's a world of sorrows.. and a sea of regrets in that desert country.. and we've yet to see the worst..