Focus shifts to jail violence against Iraqi women, page 1

For Huda Shaker, the humiliation began at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Baghdad. The American soldiers demanded to search her handbag. When she refused one of the soldiers pointed his gun towards her chest. "He pointed the laser sight directly in the middle of my chest," said Professor Shaker, a political scientist at Baghdad University. "Then he pointed to his penis. He told me, 'Come here, bitch, I'm going to # you.'"

This was taken from a 20/20 interview of four Iraqi women:

Routine Rapes, Human Meat Grinders, Chemical Baths

Al-Suwaij knows firsthand how even young girls were imprisoned for what seem to be trivial offenses. Al-Suwaij says she had a 16-year-old cousin who was beaten and tortured with electrical shocks for having written something against the government in her school notebook.

And if a man is a dissident or if a man writes a letter or makes a joke about Saddam, these women said, authorities would rape his wife or female relatives in front of him.

"Rape is used as a tool to humiliate the woman, but to also bring men into submission," Hussain said. To compound the humiliation, authorities would videotape the torture and rape and send the tape to family members.

Saddam's contempt for human rights extended to his well-documented use of poison gas against his own people. The horror of one of those chemical attacks still haunts Michael 16 years later.

"Children, women, men � vomiting, screaming, crying with swollen eyes. Everybody was � screaming, 'We are blind. We cannot see,' " Michael said. She said she still has difficulty breathing, because of her exposure to the gas.

Al-Suwaij has seen the inside of an Iraqi prison, and she describes horrific scenes. She said she was shown "human meat grinders" in which people were shredded and disposed of in a septic tank, and chemical baths in which people were literally dissolved.

"You cannot exaggerate about these things. People were slaughtered," she said.

All four women met earlier this month with members of the Bush administration.

They raised the issues they feel need to be addressed in Iraq. They say there needs to be a clear commitment to democracy in Iraq, and that the United States and its allies will need to chaperon the transition.

I'm gonna have to agree with KrazyJethro here.....everyone has a price and I just can't believe that any woman in Iraq right now would be happier living under Saddam again.