Saddam Hussein's alleged shredder

Early 2000s propaganda rumor
In the runup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, press stories appeared in the United Kingdom and United States of a plastic shredder or wood chipper into which Saddam and Qusay Hussein fed opponents of their Baathist rule. These stories attracted worldwide attention and boosted support for military action, in stories with titles such as "See men shredded, then say you don't back war". A year later, it was determined there was not enough evidence to support the existence of such a machine.

The first mention of the shredder came at a meeting on 12 March 2003, when James Mahon addressed the British House of Commons after returning from research in northern Iraq. Ann Clwyd wrote in The Times six days later, an article entitled "See men shredded, then say you don't back war," saying that an unnamed Iraqi had said the Husseins used a shredder to gruesomely kill male opponents, and used their shredded bodies as fish food. Later she would add that it was believed to be housed in Abu Ghraib prison, and spoke with an unidentified person who claimed the shredders were dismantled "just before the military got there". Two days later, Australian Prime Minister John Howard made reference to the "human shredding machine". In William Shawcross' 2003 book Allies: The United States, Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq, he claimed that Saddam Hussein "fed people into huge shredders, feet first to prolong the agony". The Suns political editor Trevor Kavanagh wrote in February 2004 that "Public opinion swung behind Tony Blair as voters learned how Saddam fed dissidents feet first into industrial shredders."

For Americans, a major domestic source for the shredder story was the (later discredited) testimony of Assyrian Christian Ken Joseph Jr., a pastor who had entered Iraq in 2003 and whose family came from Mahoudi in Northern Iraq. He reportedly found that far from trying to avoid conflict, Iraqis were in favor of an American invasion, and "would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start." He promptly reversed himself and exited the country after hearing this and first hand accounts of Saddam's shredding machine: "Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head." Johann Hari, a British supporter of the Iraq war, quoted Joseph saying the trip "shocked me back to reality" in a column in The Independent published on 26 March 2003. His piece "I Was Wrong" became a pivotal argument on the whole idea of liberating Iraq. Groups that organized the human shield action in Iraq say they have no record of Rev. Kenneth Joseph Jr., and "no one, it seems, ever met him." Human shield activists speculated that if Joseph had gone to Iraq he was likely "motivated by his campaign for 'Assyrian Independence' rather than the welfare of the Iraqi people in the face of an invasion."