me to a man I knew, Jawad Zoubeidi, a building contractor. He had been so badly tortured, I hardly recognised him. Jawad said: ‘I know Dr Hussain. He comes to the mosque and takes part in our religious activities.’ For them, ‘religious activities’ meant anti-government activities. They said to me: ‘Better tell us all or you’ll regret it.’ Then they took me to the torture chamber in the basement. They blindfolded me and pushed me down the stairs into the chamber. It was a big room. My hands were tied behind my back and I was pulled up into the air by my hands. After five minutes, the pain was so severe in the shoulders that it was unbearable. Then they gave me shocks on sensitive parts of my body. By the end of the beating you are naked. There were shocks on my genitals and other parts of my body.
After fifteen minutes they came to me and said: ‘Sign.’ I was in a very cold sweat. They know you’ll faint. They brought me down and gave me a short rest. I fell asleep for a few minutes. But this went on day and night, day and night. It went on for twenty-two days and nights. Four of them did it, in shifts. Baraq, who had a PhD in military psychology from Moscow, was standing there. At one point, he said: ‘Look, Dr Hussain, I’ll tell you what your problem is – you think you are smart enough and we are stupid. You may be smart in your own field but we know what we are doing. Just tell us what you know and get this over.’
I knew Saddam. He knew me. But this could happen to me. I remember once, Saddam said to me: ‘You are a scientist. I am a politician. I will tell you what politics is about. I make a decision. I tell someone else the opposite. Then I do something which surprises even myself.’
The torture techniques in Baghdad were routine and varied in severity. The electric shocks could be everywhere. But sometimes they would burn people on the genitals and go on burning until they were completely burned off. They did the same with toes. They sometimes beat people with iron on the stomach or the chest. But with me, they were very careful not to leave any sign on me. I saw one man and they had used an iron on his stomach. They used drills and made holes in bones, arms and legs. I saw an officer, Naqib Hamid, and they dissolved his feet in acid. There was another torture where they would put sulphuric acid in a tub. They would take a man and start by dissolving his hands. Once, the founder of the Dawa party,* Abdul Saheb Khail, was totally dissolved. Baraq said to me: ‘Have you heard about Khail – there is where we dissolved him.’
In the final stages of torture, they have a table with an electrical saw. They can saw off a hand or a foot. The majority talk. The people who have refused to talk are exceptional. Adnan Salman, a head of the Dawa, refused to talk. He was brought in – I saw him – and by that time they had a lot of confessions by other men who had been tortured. Adnan Salman was a teacher. Adnan knew – he was prepared. He told them: ‘My name is Adnan Salman. I am in charge of the Dawa party and none of these people are responsible for our activities. These will be my last words to you. You will never extract a single word from me.’ They brought three doctors and told them that if Adnan died under torture they would be executed. He didn’t utter a single word. Sometimes you would hear the doctors, so scared because they could not bring him back from unconsciousness. I was in another torture room and could hear everything. I was in Abu Ghraib prison when I heard Adnan had been executed. He had not died under torture.
One prisoner told me he was seventeen and was the youngest prisoner and so they made him sweep the corridors of the internal security headquarters every morning at seven o’clock. He saw a peasant woman from the south with tattoos, he said, a woman from the marshes with a girl of ten and a boy of about six. She was carrying a baby in her arms. The prisoner told me that as he was sweeping, an officer came and told the woman: ‘Tell me where your husband is – very bad things can happen.’ She said: ‘Look, my husband takes great pride in the honour of his woman. If he knew I was here, he would have turned himself in.’ The officer took out his pistol and held the daughter up by the braids of her hair and put a bullet into her head. The woman didn’t know what was happening. Then he put a bullet into the boy’s head. The woman was going crazy. He took the youngest boy by the legs and smashed the baby’s brain on a wall. You can imagine the woman. The officer told the young prisoner to bring the rubbish trolley and put the three children in it, on top of the garbage, and ordered the woman to sit on the bodies. He took the trolley out and left it. The officer had got into the habit of getting rid of people who were worthless.
I was taken to the revolutionary court. Mussalam al-Jabouri was the judge and there were two generals on each side of him. They asked me my name and if I had anything to say. The charges were that I was a ‘Zionist stooge’, an ‘Israeli spy’ and ‘working with the Americans’ and ‘a collaborator with the Iranians’. They realised I wasn’t a member of the Dawa party. The court handed down a sentence they had decided before I was taken there – life imprisonment. My own defence lawyer called for my execution. He had only a written statement to make: ‘This person has closed the doors of mercy – give him the severest penalty.’ I said to the court: ‘This Iraqi state which you are governing, we established it with our blood. My father was sentenced by the British, as for me I am president of the Palestinian Association in Toronto. A person with this background cannot be an Israeli agent.’ The lawyer said: ‘So you are a Russian spy.’ I said: ‘I have a family tree – from the Prophet Mohamed’s time, peace be upon him.’
I was taken to Abu Ghraib prison and put in a small cell with forty people inside. By the time I left in May, 1980, we were sixty people to a cell. I worked out that there were three death sentences for every prison sentence. So when a thousand people went to Abu Ghraib, that meant there were three thousand executions. That May, they took me to the Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters and now the torture was much worse. In the previous torture centre, they were allowed a 10 per cent death rate. Here they were allowed 100 per cent. The head was Barzan Tikriti, the head of Saddam’s human rights delegation to Geneva. Dr Ziad Jaafar was brought there because he told Saddam that the nuclear programme couldn’t continue without me, without Dr Shahristani. He said that Iraq needed Shahristani the chemist. Saddam took this as a threat. Jaafar was never shown to me. They tortured twenty people to death in front of him. So he agreed to return to work.
Then one day they came and shaved me and showered me, brought me new pyjamas, blindfolded me, put cologne on me, put me in a car and took me to a room in what looked like a palace. There was a bedroom, sitting room, videos, a television … Then one day Barzan Tikriti came with Abdul-Razak al-Hashimi – he was to be Iraqi ambassador to France during the Kuwaiti occupation in 1990. He was a Baathist, a very silly man with a PhD in geology from the United States. He was the vice-president of the Atomic Energy Organisation and he stood by the door like a guard. I just sat there, lying down, both my hands completely paralysed. A man arrived. He said: ‘You don’t know me but we know you well. Saddam was extremely hurt when he heard you had been arrested – he was very angry with the intelligence people. He knows about your scientific achievements. He would like you to go back to your work at the Atomic Energy Organisation.’ I said: ‘I am too weak after what I have been through.’ He said: ‘We need an atomic bomb.’ Barzan Tikriti then said: ‘We need an atomic bomb because this will give us a long arm to reshape the map of the Middle East. We know you are the man to help us with this.’ I told him that all my research was published in papers, that I had done no research on military weapons. ‘I am the wrong person for the task you are looking for,’ I said. He replied: ‘I know what you can do – and any person who is not willing to serve his country is not worthy to be alive.’
I was sure I would be executed. I said: ‘I agree with you that it is a man’s duty to serve his country but what you are asking me to do is not a service to my country.’ He replied: ‘Dr Hussain, so long as we agree that a man must serve his country, the rest is detail. You should rest now because you are very tired.’ After this, I was kept in several palaces over a number of months. They brought my wife to see me, once at a palace that had been the home of Adnan Hamdan, a member of the revolutionary command council who had been executed by Saddam. But they realised I wouldn’t work for them and I was sent back to Abu Ghraib. I spent eight years there. I wasn’t allowed books, newspapers, radio or any contact with any human being.
I knew I was doing the right thing. I never regretted the stand I took. I slept on the concrete floor of my cell, under an army blanket