Saddam - executed !!

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Irvine511 said:
what i found most interesting were the cries of "Moktada! Moktada! Moktada!" after Saddam was hung.

one dictator for another.

no progress.

On the contrary, there is now the added bonus of the new dictator also being a hostile religious fanatic.

Heckuva job!
 
Re: Hey Irvine, Happy New Year!

deep said:
verbatim_al-sadr.jpg


there are probably a lot of people that do not realize that Moktada

is Sadr

and he considered Rumsfeld a friend
as he set his death squads free to cut heads
Given the obviously false demands for Sadr to be brought to justice this may well be true.
 
Justin24 said:


Nice attack. I do hope you have a splenddid day and please do keep safe and have a happy new year. I hope you like how I am killing you with Kindness.

attack? Lol. I was simply replying to your question:

Your question:

Originally posted by Justin24
"Is it because of my beliefs in pro-death penalty. So people who believe in that are narrow minded and sheep and people who are against it are more enlightened?"

Should I have lied to you? Or didn´t you expect any reply? Then why did you ask in the first place?

:tsk:
 
the US government has now publicly criticized the timing of the execution, and has even questioned its legality. and due to the unauthorized cell-phone video of the taunting just before sadaam's death, the Sunni-Shiite divide has worsened (if that was possible).

things are truly horrible in iraq.


:|
 
Irvine511 said:
what i found most interesting were the cries of "Moktada! Moktada! Moktada!" after Saddam was hung.

one dictator for another.

no progress.

:up: Yes, I agree, it's one group against another. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth is standard fare in a world where forgiveness is a concept that equals weakness. sad.
 
1/04/07 (HOUSTON) Police and family members said a 10-year-old boy who died by hanging himself from a bunk bed was apparently mimicking the execution of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

ergio Pelico was found dead Sunday in his apartment bedroom in the Houston-area city of Webster, said Webster police Lt. Tom Claunch. Pelico's mother told police he had previously watched a news report on Saddam's death.

"It appears to be accidental," Claunch said. "Our gut reaction is that he was experimenting."

An autopsy of the fifth-grader's body was pending.

Julio Gustavo, Sergio's uncle, said the boy was a happy and curious child.

He said Sergio had watched TV news with another uncle on Saturday and asked the uncle about Saddam's death.

"His uncle told him it was because Saddam was real bad," Gustavo said. "He (Sergio) said, 'OK.' And that was it."

Sergio's mother, Sara Pelico DeLeon, was at work Sunday while Sergio and other children were under the care of an uncle, Gustavo said. One of the children found Sergio's body in his bedroom.

Police said the boy had tied a slipknot around his neck while on a bunk bed. Police investigators learned that Sergio had been upset about not getting a Christmas gift from his father, but they don't believe the boy intentionally killed himself.

Clinical psychologist Edward Bischof, of California, said children Sergio's age mimic risky behaviors they see on TV -- such as wrestling or extreme sports -- without realizing the dangers. He said TV appeared to be the stimulant in Sergio's case.

"I would think maybe this kid is trying something that he thinks fun to act out without having the emotional and psychological maturity to think the thing through before he acts on it," Bischof said.

Family members held a memorial for the boy Wednesday in the apartment complex activity center. Gustavo said the family is trying to put together enough money to send Sergio's body to Guatemala for burial.

"I don't think he thought it was real," Gustavo said of Saddam's hanging. "They showed them putting the noose around his neck and everything. Why show that on TV?"



Kolkata, India - A 15-year-old girl from eastern India hanged herself in response to the execution of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, police and family members said on Thursday.

"She said they had hanged a patriot. We didn't take her seriously when she told us that she wanted to feel the pain Saddam did during the execution," the girl's father, Manmohan Karmakar, told AFP by phone from the town of Kharda.

He said his daughter, called Moon Moon, had become extremely depressed after watching Saddam's execution on television.

"She kept watching the scene over and again and didn't take food on Saturday and Sunday to protest the hanging," he said.

Police superintendent Pravin Kumar confirmed the suicide, saying the girl had strung herself up from a ceiling fan and was found dead early on Wednesday.

The communist-ruled state of West Bengal has condemned Saturday's execution of Saddam, with thousands of people taking to the streets.

Sapa-AFP
 
Interesting piece from the ever-highly-opinionated Christopher Hitchens...
Lynching the Dictator

Christopher Hitchens
slate.com, Jan. 2, 2007



The disgusting video of Saddam Hussein's last moments on the planet is more than a reminder of the inescapable barbarity of capital punishment and of the intelligible and conventional reasons why it should always be opposed. The zoolike scenes in that dank, filthy shed (it seems that those attending were not even asked to turn off their cell phones or forbidden to use them to record souvenir film) were more like a lynching than an execution. At one point, one of the attending magistrates can be heard appealing for decency and calm, but otherwise the fact must be faced: In spite of his mad invective against "the Persians" and other traitors, the only character with a rag of dignity in the whole scene is the father of all hangmen, Saddam Hussein himself.

How could it have come to this? Did U.S. officials know that the designated "executioners" would be the unwashed goons of Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Army"—the same sort of thugs who killed Abdul Majid al-Khoei in Najaf just after the liberation and who indulge in extra-judicial murder of Iraqis every night and day? Did our envoys and representatives ask for any sort of assurances before turning over a prisoner who was being held under the Geneva Conventions? According to the New York Times, there do seem to have been a few insipid misgivings about the timing and the haste, but these appear to have been dissolved soon enough and replaced by a fatalistic passivity that amounts, in theory and practice, to acquiescence in a crude Shiite coup d'état. Thus, far from bringing anything like "closure," the hanging ensures that the poison of Saddamism will stay in the Iraqi bloodstream, mingling with other related infections such as confessional fanaticism and the sort of video sadism that has until now been the prerogative of al-Qaida's dehumanized ghouls. We have helped to officiate at a human sacrifice. For shame.

In Baghdad last week, I missed the best chance I shall ever have to mention rope in the house of a hanged man. The house belonged to Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's repellent half-brother and one of the two men who are now scheduled to follow him through the trapdoor. These days, it serves as the office of President Jalal Talabani, with whom I was invited to take lunch. The television was showing the trial of Saddam and his associates for the Anfal campaign, that ruthless and mechanized devastation of Iraqi Kurdistan and the systematic slaughter and clearance of its people by conventional and chemical weaponry. Every Kurd I know was eager to see this episode properly aired in court and placed on the record for all time, with its chief perpetrator on hand to be confronted with his deeds. Instead, the said chief perpetrator was snatched from the dock—in the very middle of his trial—and thrown as a morsel to one of the militias. This sort of improvised "offing" is not even a parody of the serious tribunal that history demands.

I couldn't help but notice that President Talabani was unwilling to be drawn on the subject of the death penalty, to which he is opposed. He might have been forgiven a bit of gloating after all that his people had endured, but he denied himself the pleasure. I also couldn't help noticing that when the Iraqi "appeals court" confirmed the death sentence (after a period of time so short that it would be insulting to describe it as a judicial review), it stipulated that not even the president could commute the sentence. In other words, the need of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to ingratiate himself with Muqtada Sadr's forces has been allowed to take precedence over everything else, including the stern requirements of justice that were the supposed point of the trial to begin with. The timing—isn't anyone in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad paid to notice this kind of thing?—was explicitly designed to rub every kind of humiliation into Iraqi Sunnis. It profaned their observance of the Eid ul-Adha holiday, while gratifying the Shiite fundamentalists whose ceremonies begin one day later. To have made the butcher Saddam into a martyr, to have gratified one sect, and to have cheated millions of Iraqis and Kurds of the chance for a full accounting—what a fine day's work!

I think that there is a reason the Kurdish reaction is somewhat different from the Shiite one. Iraqi Kurdistan escaped from Saddam's rule in 1992, and its citizens have since been engaged in patiently building up their autonomy. They did not have to endure the appalling humiliation of sanctions plus Saddam, and they have not since been so much engaged in a foul civil war begun by Sunni extremists desecrating shrines and slaughtering civilians. Their attitude to their former despot and murderer is somewhat more detached and judicious. If they feel a thirst for vengeance, they do not make a tribal fiesta of it. The moral difference here is not negligible.

Reporting from defeated Germany in 1945, and noticing some brutal treatment of captured SS men, George Orwell wrote a brilliant essay called Revenge Is Sour. I hadn't thought of it for a while but pulled it down from the shelf when I returned from Iraq. Here is the key passage:

Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S.S. officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting. It is said that when Mussolini's corpse was exhibited in public, an old woman drew a revolver and fired five shots into it, exclaiming, "Those are for my five sons!" It is the kind of story that the newspapers make up, but it might be true. I wonder how much satisfaction she got out of those five shots, which, doubtless, she had dreamed years earlier of firing. The condition of her being able to get near enough to Mussolini to shoot at him was that he should be a corpse.


The shabby, tawdry scene of Muqtada Sadr's riffraff taunting their defenseless former tyrant evokes exactly this quality of hysterical falsity and bravado. While Saddam Hussein was alive, they cringed. Now, they find their lost courage, and meanwhile take the drill and the razor blade and the blowtorch to their fellow Iraqis. To watch this abysmal spectacle as a neutral would be bad enough. To know that the U. S. government had even a silent, shamefaced part in it is to feel something well beyond embarrassment.
 
At first you assume Hitchens is finally awakening from the alcoholic stupor he's been in for the last few years, but really this whole piece is more a set-up re: Sadr than anything else.
 
Yeah, I kind of had the same thought--the essay frames itself as being about the execution, but it's really more concerned with the attendees and their purported motives than anything else. Which I agree is pretty ironic given his output over the last few years. Then again, much of the discussion surrounding this issue both in here and elsewhere has been about what precisely this episode heralds for the future of Iraq, so it seemed relevant.
 
Bushra al-Khalil told the Saudi daily al-Watan that she will sue the Iraqi authorities for allowing two of Saddam's personal foes to attend the execution and over reports that executioners had abused the dead body of the former leader.

She claimed that Shiite leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim and Muqtada al-Sadr were present at the execution.

Many believe that Sadr was the hooded guard that hung Saddam.
 
Bush said on 60 Minutes that he watched some of the Saddam video on the internets, only up until before he went through the trap door.



BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraq hanged two of Saddam Hussein's aides early Monday, and one of the condemned was accidentally decapitated.

The official video of the hangings shows Hussein's half-brother lying headless below the gallows, his severed head several yards away, The Associated Press reported.

The executioner's noose severed the head of Barzan Hassan, the former chief of Hussein's secret police, according to a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's office.

"It was not like a very pretty scene," said Basam Ridha, who was one of the witnesses.

Ridha said the executions were carried out with dignity and respect, and called the accidental decapitation "an act of God."

The other man hanged was Awad Bandar, the chief judge under Hussein's Baath Party regime.

They went to the gallows for their roles in the killings of 148 men and boys from the mostly Shiite village of Dujail after a 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam Hussein, an Iraqi government official said.

The two men, dressed in orange prisoner uniforms, "looked very surprised" that they were actually going to be hanged, said Ridha.

They "were very apologetic," asking that they not be put to death, he said. "They asked God for forgiveness," he said.

Orange hoods were placed over their heads, unlike Hussein, who asked not to be given a hood when he was hanged on the same gallows on December 30, Ridha said.

Ridha said the executions were free from the shouted Shiite chants and taunting from guards, witnesses and executioners that marred the hanging of Hussein. Everyone in the room was required to sign an agreement promising not to engage in such behavior, Ridha said.

The trap doors underneath both men were dropped at the same time, he said.

Iraqi Sunnis reacted with anger to the hanging and decapitation, and some Shiites also expressed shock at the way the hanging was done, according to wire reports. (Full story)

Only a silent video of the Saddam Hussein hanging was officially released.

But cell-phone video of that hanging emerged that showed Shiite guards taunting the Sunni ex-dictator on the scaffold, outraging other Sunnis and sparking criticism of the execution as a sectarian lynching.

Plans were being made to give the bodies of Hassan and Bandar to their families for burial, something Ridha said would likely be completed by the end of the day.

Hassan and Bandar were sentenced to death in November.

Their death sentences were upheld by an Iraqi appeals court in December but delayed amid the controversy surrounding Hussein's December 30 execution.
 
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