Not a shred of evidence

21 February 2004

Did Saddam Hussein really use industrial shredders to kill his enemies? Brendan O’Neill is not persuaded that he did

And there you have the long and short of the available evidence for a human-shredding machine — an uncorroborated statement made by an individual in northern Iraq, hearsay comments made by someone widely suspected of being a ‘bullshitter’ (who, like the Australian Prime Minister, made his comments about the shredder shortly after Clwyd first wrote of it in the Times), and a record book, in Arabic, that mentions ‘mincing’ but whose whereabouts are presently unknown. Other groups have no recorded accounts of a human shredder. A spokesman at Amnesty International tells me that his inquiries into the shredder story ‘drew a blank’. ‘We checked it with our people here, and we have no information about a shredder.’ Widney Brown, deputy programme director of Human Rights Watch, says: ‘We don’t know anything about a shredder, and have not heard of that particular form of execution or torture.’

It remains to be seen whether this uncorroborated story turns out to be nothing more than war propaganda — like the stories on the eve of the first Gulf war of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait taking babies from incubators and leaving them to die on hospital floors. What can be said, however, is that the alleged shredder provided those in favour of the war — by no means an overwhelming majority in Britain last March — with a useful propaganda tool. The headline on Ann Clwyd’s 18 March story in the Times was: ‘See men shredded, then say you don’t back war’.