Counting Up the Atrocities

By Michael Kramer

Was the Kuwaiti supermarket manager shot to death by Iraq's occupation forces? Or was he beheaded? Or hanged? Three supposed eyewitnesses described the murder differently to TIME, although all agree on the result: the man is definitely dead. Whatever actually happened, the fate of that particular Kuwaiti confirms a well-known reality: truth is often war's first casualty.

Among those who monitor atrocities for a living, a dispute is simmering. How many Kuwaitis have been summarily executed since Iraq's invasion on Aug. 2? How many have been tortured, how many arrested, how many raped? No one knows for sure, and few but Saddam's henchmen may ever know.

At one level, the debate concerns intellectual honesty. At least one human- rights organization believes the Kuwaiti government in exile may be orchestrating exaggerated tales of horror for political gain. "The situation is bad enough when you consider just the tragedies that can be objectively verified," says Andrew Whitley, the executive director of Middle East Watch, headquartered in New York. "There is no need to inflate the statistics."

The human-rights organizations are quarreling among themselves. Middle East Watch, for example, contends that the recent report by Amnesty International detailing human-rights abuses in Kuwait is overdrawn. But the problem is one of degree only. When Middle East Watch says Amnesty's high-range estimate of perhaps a thousand murders exaggerates the toll by about 400, that still leaves 600 victims of Iraqi brutality. And no one disputes that Iraq has regularly tortured Kuwaitis. Again, the only difference involves numbers.

The account by London-based Amnesty International is crucial because it has dramatically affected the world's most important audience. Days after reading the 82-page report at Camp David, George Bush was still talking about it. "I ask you to read half of it," said the President during an interview with TIME in the Oval Office. "If you can't stomach half of it, read a quarter of it."

Far more than the number of atrocities, the manner of Iraq's barbarism has stuck with Bush. Amnesty documents 38 methods of torture used by the Iraqis -- everything from the use of electric probes to the cutting off of ears and tongues. "Good God," says Bush, "it is so powerful, you won't be able to believe it."

Human-rights reports are political documents. They are embraced or ignored depending on the interests of nations. Amnesty, for one, has regularly detailed the torture, detention and murder of Iraqis -- by Iraqis -- but the U.S. hardly cared about such atrocities during the years when Washington's Middle East policy dictated accommodating Saddam. So when the President says Amnesty's report has "really made an impression on me," he is reacting in a new context. Had he been applying a consistent human-rights standard all along, he would have been just as exercised about last year's Amnesty report on Iraq, and perhaps the Administration would have supported the sanctions some Congressmen were urging before Saddam's brutality spilled beyond Iraq's borders.

More important, the U.S. may now move militarily -- without giving the sanctions time to work on Saddam -- because the President describes the ! Amnesty report as "one of the things that's driving me. I've heard some guy telling me . . . we've got time. Time. Read it. It's what's happening now. We don't have a lot of time."