Iraq Torture Chamber Is Reported in Kuwait : Occupation: Witnesses tell of mutilated bodies. Systematic executions and disappearances are alleged.

For years, the Bibi Saleh Center in downtown Kuwait city has been a haven for wealthy foreigners and Kuwaiti playboys and their girlfriends, a symbol of the oil-rich emirate’s penchant for the pleasures of life.

But in the two months since Iraq seized Kuwait, the four-towered condominium complex has become a cornerstone of Kuwait’s brutal subjugation, according to reliable sources fleeing the country.

Now, these sources say, the Bibi Saleh Center is the site of the torture chamber of Iraq’s secret police, or Mukhabarat--one of two tactical interrogation facilities widely known to be run by the feared agency.

According to dozens of senior diplomats, businessmen and workers who have left Kuwait in recent weeks, the Iraqi occupiers have set out on a course of systematic execution, torture, disappearances and looting on a grand scale--”the transplantation of an entire nation,” one diplomat called it.

Eyewitnesses said that at one Kuwait city hospital alone, the mutilated bodies of about 230 victims have been delivered from the complex since Iraq invaded Aug. 2.

In a report issued earlier this week, Amnesty International, the London-based group that monitors human rights worldwide, condemned what it called summary executions and torture by Iraqi authorities in a campaign to crush the Kuwaiti resistance movement.

When asked about allegations of torture on Thursday, Iraq’s first deputy prime minister, Taha Yassin Ramadan, did not deny them at first.

“Should the claims be correct in this regard, why did (other countries) not express such interest in the tens of thousands of women and children who have been tortured and killed in Israeli-occupied Arab lands for the past 43 years?” Ramadan said at a news conference in Amman, Jordan.

“But do you deny it?” several reporters pressed Ramadan.

“Yes, of course,” he then replied.

But when asked whether Western journalists could travel to Kuwait to confirm his denial, Ramadan evoked a common Arabic expression for stopping someone by force.

“Kuwait is none of your affair,” he answered curtly. “And we will cut off the leg of anybody who should enter Kuwait illegally.”

But the Amnesty International report only scratched the surface, according to what eyewitnesses and reliable sources told The Times.

On at least one occasion, two weeks after the invasion, the Iraqi authorities themselves put several of their victims on display for the benefit of foreign diplomats.

At 11 a.m. on Aug. 16, as members of the diplomatic corps arrived at what had been the Iraqi Embassy in Kuwait to hear President Saddam Hussein’s order to shut their missions, plainclothes Iraqi police paraded at least five bleeding, blindfolded men past them in what some diplomats said they viewed as a tacit threat.

In the weeks since, according to sources from Kuwait’s medical community, a number of Kuwaiti public figures have disappeared, among them Abdul Rahman Smaith, head of the Kuwaiti Red Crescent Society, and the assistant director of the cancer center in Kuwait city. The mutilated corpses of both men were found a few days after the disappearances.

The 230 bodies that have been received at Amiri Hospital from the Bibi Saleh Center all bore evidence of torture--”missing fingers and noses, lacerated ears and scorched eyeballs,” as one source put it.

All of the victims were Kuwaitis, both men and women, most of them activists believed to have collaborated with the Kuwaiti resistance. The resistance, sources say, has now been effectively neutralized.

The torture and executions are but a small part of Iraq’s overall submission and “requisition” campaign in Kuwait, which has now been stripped so bare that the entire medical system has ground to a halt and such huge items as newspaper printing presses, power-plant generators, brick-factory machinery, traffic lights, telephone poles and even computer complexes have been dismantled and transported to Iraq.

The large-scale operation to transplant virtually all of Kuwait’s vast resources, which the Iraqis justify by citing their official annexation of the emirate, is being conducted at the highest levels of the Iraqi government, with Cabinet ministers from Baghdad personally directing it from guest suites at Kuwait’s Hilton Hotel, directly opposite the U.S. Embassy.

Referring specifically to the accounts of torture and abuse, one diplomat in Baghdad who has debriefed several witnesses said, “Over a period of weeks, we’ve had a large number of anecdotal cases of arson, house destruction, summary execution and casual torture by Iraqi forces in Kuwait.”

He added, “But these are the first confident references to the establishment by the Iraqi secret police of an interrogation and torture facility, which, in our heart of hearts, we were hoping was not there. And obviously it has been working for some time.”

The diplomat, whose nation is not directly involved in the multinational force arrayed against Hussein in the Persian Gulf, quickly added that he hoped the accounts would not add fuel to the recent news that President Bush was considering seeking permission from the U.N. Security Council to exercise a military option against Iraq.

In announcing those deliberations, Bush’s national security adviser, Brent A. Scowcroft, said they were a direct outcome of private talks last week between the President and Kuwait’s exiled emir, Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah. The sheik was widely quoted after the meeting as describing how Iraqi authorities in Kuwait have removed babies from hospital incubators and patients from life-support systems, which have then been trucked up to Iraq.

In addition, one eyewitness interviewed this week described how newly installed Iraqi authorities at Kuwait’s only home for the elderly requisitioned special jellies reserved as food for cancer patients to serve as dessert at a party for Iraq’s visiting health minister.

“These accounts, no matter how gruesome, must be viewed in their regional and historic context,” the diplomat in Baghdad said. “It’s all consistent with the historical record and culture handed down by 600 years of Turkish rule. What is more, that’s the Iraqi way of doing business, which the Western world knows all too well.

“The West clearly doesn’t seem to be too concerned when Iraqis rape, rob, pillage and execute their own people. The Americans, British, French and Germans, for example, continued to do big business with Iraq despite the fact that torture and summary executions are a way of life here.”

The U.S. State Department last year approved more than $1 billion in subsidized American wheat sales to Iraq, even though the department’s own annual report on the state of human rights worldwide gave Baghdad one of the worst possible ratings on charges of brutality, torture and execution without trial.

In the words of another diplomat who was based in Kuwait during and after the invasion, “There is no doubt there was extensive torture going on, most of it to extract information about the Kuwaiti resistance and Iraqi opposition. And apparently it has been quite effective. The resistence is all but dead.”

One foreign businessman who fled Kuwait city in recent days described what he said was the case of the assistant director of the Kuwait Cancer Center and his public relations manager, both of whom were suspected by the Mukhabarat of assisting the Kuwaiti underground.

“The Iraqis got information that they were using the assistant director’s photocopying machine to print resistance leaflets,” the businessman said. “The assistant director was not involved, but the public relations man was. A few days later, we received both of their bodies in a pretty bad state.”

Speaking of the 230 victims whose bodies were delivered to the Amiri Hospital, one source said that nearly all were “people who had something to do with the resistance.”

“And I imagine the Iraqis can easily justify this by saying these people were all potential murderers,” he added. “In fact, they were.”

This source, who is considered highly reliable by diplomats who also debriefed him, provided additional graphic accounts that illustrated the scale of the official looting that he and others say has occurred in Kuwait.

“My office had a good view of the highway north, and day after day the road has been packed with trucks heading toward Iraq and filled to the brim with generators, transformers, power poles, traffic lights, bulk salt, marble, cement, cigarettes, pig iron, steel, vehicles, rice, and, well, you name it,” he said.

Another source, a knowledgeable Iraqi businessman in Baghdad, said that one of the government’s main Arabic-language newspapers, Al Jumhuriya, is now printing Baghdad’s daily propaganda line on printing presses taken from a Kuwaiti newspaper plant.

The businessman added, however, that not all Kuwaiti assets are being looted outright. Some are being purchased by the Iraqi government or by private businessmen, he said, although he conceded that the prices were “bargain-basement.”

In analyzing the overall Iraqi occupation, the senior diplomat who was based there said the accounts of torture and death were the “ultimate illustration” of Hussein’s current strategy.

“He is keeping all of his options open all of the time,” said the diplomat, who also represents a nation that is not participating militarily in the gulf confrontation.

“True, Kuwait is finished,” he declared. “Already, the country cannot function. But that has been Saddam’s approach in Kuwait from the beginning: paralyze the capital, purge it of all opposition and take every bit of value he can find out of it.

“Now, either the Iraqis want to just depopulate the place entirely--all Saddam really needs are the rich oil fields and the harbors to the sea--and dispense with a city that once had a million inhabitants, or, if they want to keep a big city there, simply replace all of the Kuwaitis now living in exile with Iraqis or sympathetic Palestinians.

“In the latter case,” he added, “all he’d have to do is recolonize by giving away more free villas to his supporters, hold free and fair elections and then declare it the new autonomous region of Kuwait. Either way, it seems, he wins.”