Tabloid defends Saddam photos
Britain’s The Sun tabloid has published another picture of Saddam Hussein in prison and defended its decision to print such images.
The publishing of several photographs of the captive former Iraqi leader – including one showing him in his underpants –
sparked outrage from Saddam’s lawyers on Friday.
US officials promised an aggressive investigation into who was responsible for the photographs, which they think were taken more than a year ago. They said the images violated Pentagon rules and might have breached the Geneva Conventions.
But an unrepentant Sun – Britain’s best-selling daily newspaper – followed up with another picture for its Saturday edition showing Saddam in a white robe behind a coil of barbed wire.
He is seen holding his palms outstretched with his head slightly bowed, possibly in prayer.
The paper also published two more pictures of former senior Iraqi figures apparently in captivity.
‘Chemical Ali’
It identified a figure holding a walking stick as he stoops in front of a plastic chair in one grainy image as “Chemical Ali”, Ali Hassan al-Majid, the former Iraqi lieutenant blamed for chemical gas attacks on Iraqi Kurds.
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“The evil brute – and his cruel henchmen – deserve no one’s sympathy for anything” Tom Newton Dunn, |
The Sun said another picture showed Huda Salih Mehdi Ammash, dubbed “Mrs Anthrax” by foreign newspapers.
She is accused of trying to rebuild Iraq’s biological warfare capacity in the 1990s. She is shown walking in a courtyard.
“The evil brute – and his cruel henchmen – deserve no one’s sympathy for anything,” declared the newspaper’s defence editor Tom Newton Dunn in an article accompanying the pictures.
He alleged Saddam was “hardly entitled to a single human courtesy” as 300,000 people had disappeared under his government.
“Being snapped in his Y-fronts is the least of Saddam’s worries as he faces a possible death sentence for his crimes against his own people,” The Sun claimed in a leader article.