. . . . The Olympic committee headquarters on the eastern side of Baghdad . . . . was equipped with torture contraptions that included a sarcophagus, with long nails pointing inward from every surface, including the lid, so victims could be punctured and suffocated. . . .
The metal framework used for administering electric shocks turned up two weeks later at Al Hekmah mosque in Saddam City, the Baghdad neighborhood now renamed Al-Sadr City, where Muslim clerics said it had been taken by looters who had removed it from the Olympic building. The framework is now a display item at the mosque, symbolizing the repression of Iraqi Shiites by Saddam Hussein.
Tramping through the ruins of the Olympic building, one finds charred letters to Uday from senior officials of the International Olympic Committee, including Juan Antonio Samaranch, the Spaniard who was long its president.
They show no trace of any effort by the international [Olympic] committee's headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, to distance itself from the Iraqi committee and its head, despite years of reports by Western human rights organizations that the Baghdad building was being used for torture and killing.
Right up to the Winter Games in Salt Lake City last year, the correspondence from Lausanne was about the need for Iraq, like other countries, to prepare for the new "disciplines," like the women's bobsled competition, being introduced at the Utah Games.
One letter, from the International Olympic Committee's Fair Play Commission, spoke of the "universal humanistic sports values" of the Olympic movement; another of the "global society" that would be represented by the Olympic Village at Salt Lake City.
As president of Iraq's Olympic committee, the president's son [Uday] was the country's sports czar. According to several accounts from players, he turned his sadistic obsessions on the national soccer team.
After drawing or losing games, players were punished. A missed penalty or other poor play entailed a ritual head shaving at the Stadium of the People, or being spat on by Uday's bodyguards.
A series of poor passes, carefully counted, could result in a player's being forced to stand before the president's son in the dressing room, hands at his side, while he was punched or slapped in the face an equal number of times.
But those were the lesser miseries. Some players endured long periods in a military prison, beaten on their backs with electric cables until blood flowed. Other punishments included "matches" kicking concrete balls around the prison yard in 130-degree heat, and 12-hour sessions of push-ups, sprints and other fitness drills, wearing heavy military fatigues and boots. . . .
http://nytimes.com/2003/05/06/intern...pagewanted=all
Why is North Korea Allowed to Participate in the Olympics?
