Guardian
November 8, 2011
The US military is vacating Saddam Hussein’s ornate palaces at its war headquarters in Baghdad and will turn the property over to Iraq next month, but Saddam’s prison toilet is leaving with the Americans.
The stainless steel commode and a reinforced steel door have been removed from the cell where the dictator spent two years before his 2006 execution, and are destined for a military police museum in the US.
“We’re not taking anything that the Iraqis had. We are only taking stuff that we put in, we utilised, and when we didn’t need it any more, we took it home,” Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Brooks, a US military historian, said.
The villa, where US troops built a maximum-security jail for Saddam and Ali Hassan Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti, otherwise known as Chemical Ali, sits on a US complex near Baghdad’s airport known as Victory Base. It is scheduled to be handed over to Iraq’s government in December as US forces withdraw completely by the end of the year.
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