"Uday Had Brain Damage..he was Insane"

[Chris Henrys Dealer]

[url="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;jsessionid=E4MWZO1A03CYJQFIQMFCM5WAVCBQYJVC?xml=/arts/2005/07/06/bosad106.xml"]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml...06/bosad106.xml[/url]

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[quote][i]An exclusive extract from Ala Bashir's revealing memoir of life under Saddam[/i]

Al-Ruwad was known for its delicious ice-cream and the many pretty girls who frequented the place. Good-looking young men from the capital's better-off homes buzzed around the ice-cream parlour like bees round a honeypot.


Saddam Hussein with his son Uday

Uday's face was well known in the neighbourhood. As a rule, the son of the President cruised around in one of his innumerable Mercedes, while he pondered whom he could lay his hands on for the evening's entertainment. When his eyes alighted upon an exciting prospect, he would dispatch a friend or a bodyguard carrying a visiting card and a phone number. If she was interested, she could phone.

Quite a few were. Perhaps they were motivated by desire for financial reward; by the hope that Uday might fix them up with a job, but few knew what awaited them. Uday exercised little if any restraint. Several times, I treated female party-goers who came to my clinic having been knifed, disfigured by burning cigarettes or otherwise ill-treated during the night's frolicking. Uday showed them no respect.

One of his women turned up at my clinic explaining that she had burnt herself on the family's paraffin stove. At least, that was her story. But having examined her, I noticed two identical round burns, each of them approximately 10 centimetres in diameter, on her buttocks. In the centre of each I could read the word ''Shame''. Uday had branded her bottom like an old cow.

Several attempts had been made on Uday's life over the years. One evening, he was accompanied by his friend, Ali al-Sahr. They circled Mansour, driving slowly, in a Porsche Carrera. Uday had just slowed down outside al-Ruwad and let al-Sahr out on to the pavement by the ice-cream parlour when two masked men rushed out from an alleyway, firing Kalashnikovs. The bullets riddled both the Porsche and the President's son.

Uday was unconscious and bleeding like a stuck pig; his left leg dangled loosely from his body.

I was at home painting in my studio when I was summoned at 7pm and asked to report to the Bin-Sina hospital without delay. When I arrived, the place was swarming with his bodyguards and agents from the special security service.

Inside the operating theatre, three surgeons were already working. Uday's blood pressure had been close to zero when al-Sahr brought him in. My colleagues had put him on a drip while preparing the blood transfusion, which was now in progress. One of the bullets had penetrated the left side of his ribcage, about 10 centimetres below the armpit. The bullet had just missed his heart, continued through one lung before cutting through the stomach on its way out. We worked for six hours before we had patched him together tolerably well and the heavy haemorrhaging had stopped.

We were scrubbing off outside the operating theatre when Saddam arrived, together with his aide Abed Hamoud and a couple of bodyguards. He asked how Uday was getting on and we answered that, considering the circumstances, it could have been worse.

Saddam then moved towards the operating theatre. I signalled to Hamoud that maybe it would not be a good idea for the President to enter the room - the scene inside was not a pleasant one - but Hamoud was too frightened to stop him. The floor was covered in blood, blood-soaked bandages and towels. Saddam looked at him and walked over to the table. "My son, men must allow for such setbacks as these." He took Uday's right hand and held it in his own, then kissed his brow.

The next morning, a CT-scan was reported to show some brain damage due to Uday's lack of blood pressure.

The diagnosis was extremely sensitive. What Uday least of all needed was brain damage added to his increasing mental instability. Bin-Sina's neurologists and neurosurgeons refused point-blank to confirm the scan report and, if they had, they would never have put it down on paper. It was safer to keep the bad news away from Uday and his family.

At the beginning of June, Uday was discharged from hospital after nearly six months. He was barely able to walk. But it was difficult to gauge the extent of any damage to the brain; he was already insane. He now appeared significantly more short-tempered and aggressive towards those around him than before the attempted assassination.

His friend and saviour, Ali al-Sahr, tried to escape to Jordan with his family in the autumn of 2002. He was stopped at the border post and returned to Baghdad. Uday got wind of the attempted escape and called him over. "You'll try again, and like other friends who've cleared off, no doubt you'll blab," he said. "I'll have to make sure that won't happen."

A few days later, Uday sent a gang of his paramilitary Fedayeen militia to Ali al-Sahr's home. There, in front of his wife, children and neighbours, they cut off his tongue.

© Ala Bashir and Lars Sigurd Sunnana, 2005[/quote]

[Chris Henrys Dealer]

Here's an earlier article detailing the dude:

[quote]'It was like walking on the edge of a sword'
(Filed: 06/07/2005)


As Saddam Hussein's personal physician, Dr Ala Bashir saw the tyrant and his family at their dysfunctional worst. Elizabeth Grice meets him

As a barometer of Saddam Hussein's declining grip on reality, we need look no further than the state of his feet. With bombs raining down on Baghdad, his people poisoned by the water supply, his enemies being routinely tortured, the dictator's main preoccupation was getting relief from the corns under his right foot. More revealing still, he would never have had corns in the first place if he had not, out of sheer vanity, worn shoes that were two sizes too small and much too narrow.


Ala Bashir: 'I wanted to show that the Husseins were divorced from reality'

Oblivious to impending disaster, his female relatives behaved with just the same petty self-obsession. In the countdown to war in 2003, three of them - including his 16-year-old granddaughter - were queuing up, like competitors in a beauty contest, to have plastic surgery to straighten or reduce their noses.

No one is better placed than a personal physician to shatter a tyrant's self-image with a few well-chosen details, and Dr Ala Bashir, former head of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Baghdad University, is able to expose the full megalomaniac absurdity of Saddam and his family because he saw them, corns and all, at their dysfunctional worst.

Dr Bashir was at the mercy of the Hussein clan's trivial summonses for 20 years, often having to abandon more serious cases to attend to them. He was forced to operate repeatedly on Saddam's psychotic aunt ("Happiness for her was a general anaesthetic''), even though her ailments were entirely imaginary - this was a woman, after all, who had executed two servants she suspected of stealing. "We quite simply dared not stop the nonsense and say enough was enough,'' he admits.

Bashir pieced together Saddam's psychopathic eldest son, Uday, after a failed assassination attempt in 1996 left him disabled and brain-damaged. "It was more difficult to gauge the extent of any damage to the brain,'' he notes dryly. "He was already insane.'' At some risk to his own life (since Saddam demanded to be informed of any medical procedure on a member of his family), he performed a secret facelift on Samira Shabandar, the mistress who was to become the president's second wife, and passed it off as the removal of a small growth from behind her ear. This must have been demeaning for a man who treated the victims of atrocity and rose to prominence as a plastic surgeon during the Iran-Iraq war, when he and his team performed more than 22,000 operations on wounded soldiers from both sides.

When Saddam was involved in a car crash in 1991, Bashir recalls that the lacerated dictator refused to have his face bandaged because it would have made him look weak on television, but for weeks afterwards he was obsessed by an injury to his little finger. The man who terrorised and tortured his subjects for decades could not bear the slightest physical discomfort or impairment. He even tried to hide the fact that he dyed his moustache.

 
With Saddam: the Husseins queued up for plastic surgery
"I am not violating the oath of my profession by telling these trivial stories,'' says Bashir. "I just wanted to show that this family was divorced from reality. These small operations are related to important events in the history of Iraq.''

The provider of so many far from trivial insights into the psyche of Saddam Hussein is a conspicuously tall, bird-like man with a beakish nose, mahogany skin and long wispy white hair floating either side of his bald head. The backs of his delicate hands bristle with black hair. His manner is courteous but also infuriatingly oblique, as if he is on a higher mission than answering questions.

Ala Bashir, formerly Iraq's most highly decorated doctor, left his country three months after the outbreak of war and, from the safe suburb of Nottingham where he now lives with his wife and daughter, he has written a book called The Insider. Based on diaries he kept clandestinely and gave to friends in plain envelopes for safe-keeping, it is a stomach-churning chronicle of brutality, corruption, casual violence and intrigue - as well as endless nose jobs.

Bashir extols his memoir as a salutary study of the corrosiveness of absolute power, rather than the story of a single despot. He must be unique among authors in actually trying to make his book sound less interesting that it is. In fact, Bashir is a unique witness from Saddam's inner sanctum, and the devil is in the detail.

He recalls Uday's hundreds of expensive cars being torched by his father as a punishment for killing his valet, and Saddam puffing on a Havana cigar while watching them burn. The women who came to his clinic for treatment after being knifed or disfigured by cigarette burns in Uday's vodka-fuelled bedtime frolics. Saddam's superstition about black cats and plastic bags - encountered on the road, either would cause him to divert his motorcade. The municipal redirection of sewage from one neighbourhood to another, according to who was paying for a less foetid life.

Bashir, who first came to Saddam's notice as an eminent painter and sculptor, says he had no choice but to accept the dictator's invitation to join his team of personal doctors. "I was really sad. I knew I would lose my freedom - and I did. I knew I would be followed day and night. I was. I knew I would not be able to travel. I knew my telephone would be bugged. All this happened. I was afraid for my life. It was like walking on the edge of a knife or a sword.''

What he didn't anticipate was Saddam Hussein's method of testing his professional probity by sending him a stream of beautiful women, allegedly to have their hymen repaired. Restoring hymens is big business in a Muslim country where female "virtue'' commands a high price. "You can lie and cheat, steal and kill - and keep your honour intact,'' says Bashir, "but you must never give away a daughter who is without virtue.''

 
'Swimming among sharks'
The doctor became suspicious when so many of the women stripped off for him and jumped on to the examination couch without shame or embarrassment. "It was all too clear that they had been sent to lead me into temptation.''

While many of his friends paid with their lives for their frank opinions, Bashir seems to have led a charmed but often humiliating existence as a "Saddam favourite'', whose professional decisions were given a degree of respect. On one occasion, he refused to reshape the face of a would-be assassin employed by the Iraqi secret service. And, nearing the outbreak of war, he declined to perform breast and bottom reductions on prostitutes favoured by one of Saddam's relatives.

Being an artist was another plus. He was required to celebrate the leader's heroic deeds in paint and monuments as well as operate on his feet and look after his blood pressure. Not surprisingly, Bashir's position made him unpopular with Saddam's conniving inner circle. It was like "swimming among sharks'', he says.

Bashir's account of atrocities in Baghdad and the death-throes of a disintegrating regime is almost devoid of personal commentary - although he does allow himself some spleen over Uday's grisly career. "Saddam's greatest mistake,'' says Bashir, "was to let his crazy son do what he did. He played a very bad role in the destruction of Iraqi society.''

He describes his book as "a tiny, tiny effort'' to offer the Iraqi people honest information without personal animus. "I am describing events I have seen myself which are 100 per cent true. But I try not to explain how or why they happened. I am a witness. I didn't like Saddam or the regime but I didn't write under the shadow of hate. The book contains less than 20 per cent of what I know.''

Bashir demolishes the widely held western belief that Saddam had many doubles. As a plastic surgeon, he says, he would have known. "Neither I nor any of my fellow plastic surgeons in Iraq had anything to do with altering someone's face to look like the President. I certainly saw no one like him.''

Bashir, 64, and his wife, Amel, have three grown-up sons and a daughter. The two eldest sons, Sumer, 32, and Tahsin, 30, are engineers, both born in England where their father worked as a surgeon after gaining his degree from the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. They all now live in Nottingham.

Amel left Iraq 18 months before the war but Bashir remained until after Saddam was toppled ("my love for my country was greater than my hatred of the regime''), finally leaving in July 2003 when his house was plundered, down to the last teaspoon, in the general mayhem, and his doctor friends were being killed. "There was a total loss of law and order and security. Criminals were free to move and steal and kill.''

He doesn't expect to practise as a doctor again, preferring to concentrate on his art. He still has a share in a private hospital in Baghdad and a small income from a rented house. "I taught myself to go forward. Looking back is a waste of time. You lose the future.''

As for Saddam, vain to the end, Bashir expects the prisoner to spend the rest of his days trying to "reshape himself in history'' and obliterate the image of a confused, dishevelled old man being dragged from a hole in the ground by American soldiers. "He is finished,'' he says. "What does it matter whether he is executed?''

'The Insider: Trapped in Saddam's Brutal Regime' by Ala Bashir (Abacus) is available from Telegraph Books Direct for £ 14.99 + £ 2.25 p&p. To order, call 0870 155 7222[/quote]

[Guest CTBengalsFan]

what a shame he's out of power

[|Bunghole|]

Good read, and indicitave of the regime that held such brutal power for so long...
And Uday has even MORE brain damage now...!

[Chris Henrys Dealer]

It's not all rosy reading though. He mentions how lawless it became after the fall of the regime and his doctor buddies were getting killed.

Goddamn branding ladies though.

[Guest #22]

"I don't care [i]what[/i] they are doing, as long as they aren't communist"
-Richard Nixon

edit: Seriously though. Before the Soviet Union imploded, this shit wouldn't have been that big of a deal.


was [color="orange"]wh[/color]UDAY the one with tigers and crap? I always thought those boys were a little too much like straight, tyrannical Michael Jacksons.

[img]http://www.giwersworld.org/911/uday-after.jpg[/img]
Hee Hee
[img]http://new.uyuyuy.com/images/warp/jackson_anim.gif[/img]

[Guest BlackJesus]

[i]Now to depose the other leaders with Brain Damage [/i]

[img]http://cloud23.net/blogger/bush-head.jpg[/img]

[Guest oldschooler]

[quote]"Uday Had Brain Damage..he was Insane"[/quote]


Wow...what a news flash ! :roll:

[Guest BlackJesus]

[img]http://www.bushflash.com/jpg/rp_06.jpg[/img]

[Guest Gonzoid]

[quote name='oldschooler' date='Jul 7 2005, 05:17 PM']Wow...what a news flash ! :roll:
[right][post="111732"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post][/right][/quote]
Indeed. What is the best emoticon which evokes feigned surprised?