Saddam and the missing ears

Scripps Howard News Service: We have Saddam Hussein to thank for spotlighting an otherwise rather narrow medical specialty -- reconstructive ear surgery.
The sobering tales of death and torture being recounted at Saddam's trial reminds us that his regime was vicious in big ways. The missing ears remind us that his regime was also gratuitously vicious in small ways as well.
One of Saddam's nasty practices was slicing the right ear, sometimes both ears, off men who had incurred his displeasure, thus humiliating and stigmatizing the victims. A human-rights group estimates that 1,600 Iraqis were thus disfigured, but the number could be higher. In May 1994, perhaps as many as 3,500 deserters and draft dodgers had their ears sliced off, often without anesthetic.
British plastic surgeons, who have repaired several victims, are now training Iraqi surgeons and nurses in the reconstructive art of creating new ears from rib cartilage and skin grafts. With help from international organizations, they will return to Iraq to make their mutilated countrymen whole.
As Saddam's crimes go, the missing ears are a relatively small one and don't figure among the charges against him. But when Saddam is engaging in his disruptive theatrics at the trial, the Iraqis in the courtroom might want to stare pointedly and fixedly at his right ear. Bet it makes him nervous.