Its In! Saddam to be hanged NLT 27 Jan 07

[geo]

Even money that these guys had obtained orders for the recordings - before going in for the necktie party.

 

[Yrys]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6233951.stm

Hanging 'makes martyr of Saddam'

The circumstances of the hanging of Saddam Hussein have turned the former
Iraqi leader into a martyr, Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak has said.

 

[RHFC_piper]

Not going to be a Martyr, eh?

No supporters, eh?

ok..

Libya to build statue of Saddam
Link to Article

[quote author=news.bbc.co.uk]
Libya has said it will build a statue of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, executed in Baghdad on Saturday.

It would show him standing on the gallows with a Libyan resistance leader who fought Italian occupation, executed in 1931, Libya's Jana news agency said.

Libya declared three days of mourning after Saddam Hussein's death and cancelled public celebrations around the Eid religious holiday.

more on link
[/quote]

Seems Lybia likes Saddam.

 

[KevinB]

Dude -- Libya is its own thing -- when he rolled over on Iran, Pakistan and NK right after 911 to the US about the nuclear stuff, ol Col. G lost all his street cred.  I view this as more wailing from his soap box -- more of a posturing issue than anything real

 

[Colin Parkinson]

I sure Iraq could sell them a few statues, they likely have warehouses full of them!

 

[daftandbarmy]

A slim guidebook for executing a deposed ruler - International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/07/news/execute.php

 

[muskrat89]

I hadn't given this whole issue much thought. As usual, Krauthammer makes some good points. Shared under the provisions of the Fair Dealings...etc.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/04/AR2007010401347.html

The Hanging: Beyond Travesty

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, January 5, 2007; Page A17

Of the 6 billion people on this Earth, not one killed more people than Saddam Hussein. And not just killed but tortured and mutilated -- doing so often with his own hands and for pleasure. It is quite a distinction to be the preeminent monster on the planet. If the death penalty was ever deserved, no one was more richly deserving than Saddam Hussein.

For the Iraqi government to have botched both his trial and execution, therefore, and turned monster into victim, is not just a tragedy but a crime -- against the new Iraq that Americans are dying for and against justice itself.

In late 2005, I wrote about the incompetence of the Hussein trial and how it was an opportunity missed. Instead of exposing, elucidating and irrefutably making the case for the crimes of the accused -- as was done at Nuremberg and the Eichmann trial -- the Iraqi government lost control and inadvertently turned it into a stage for Hussein. The trial managed to repair the image of the man the world had last seen as a bedraggled nobody pulled cowering from a filthy hole. Now coiffed and cleaned, he acted the imperious president of Iraq, drowning out the testimony of his victims in coverage seen around the world.

That was bad enough. Then came the execution, a rushed, botched, unholy mess that exposed the hopelessly sectarian nature of the Maliki government.

Consider the timing. It was carried out on a religious holiday. We would not ordinarily care about this, except for the fact that it was in contravention of Iraqi law. It was done on the first day of Eid al-Adha as celebrated by Sunnis. The Shiite Eid began the next day, which tells you in whose name the execution was performed.

It was also carried out extra-constitutionally. The constitution requires a death sentence to have the signature of the president and two vice presidents, each representing one of the three major ethnic groups in the country (Sunni, Shiite and Kurd). That provision is meant to prevent sectarian killings. The president did not sign. Nouri al-Maliki contrived some work-around.

True, Hussein's hanging was just and, in principle, nonsectarian. But the next hanging might not be. Breaking precedent completely undermines the death penalty provision, opening the way to future revenge and otherwise lawless hangings.

Moreover, Maliki's rush to execute short-circuited the judicial process that was at the time considering Hussein's crimes against the Kurds. He was hanged for the killing of 148 men and boys in the Shiite village of Dujail. This was a perfectly good starting point -- a specific incident as a prelude to an inquiry into the larger canvas of his crimes. The trial for his genocidal campaign against the Kurds was just beginning.

That larger canvas will never be painted. The starting point became the endpoint. The only charge for which Hussein was executed was that 1982 killing of Shiites -- interestingly, his response to a failed assassination attempt by Maliki's Dawa Party.

Maliki ultimately got his revenge, completing Dawa's mission a quarter-century later. However, Saddam Hussein will now never be tried for the Kurdish genocide, the decimation of the Marsh Arabs, the multiple war crimes and all the rest.

Finally, there was the motley crew -- handpicked by the government -- that constituted the hanging party. They turned what was an act of national justice into a scene of sectarian vengeance. The world has now seen the smuggled video of the shouting and taunting that turned Saddam Hussein into the most dignified figure in the room -- another remarkable achievement in burnishing the image of the most evil man of his time.

Worse was the content of the taunts: "Moqtada, Moqtada," the name of the radical and murderous Shiite extremist whose goons were obviously in the chamber. The world saw Hussein falling through the trapdoor, executed not in the name of a new and democratic Iraq but in the name of Moqtada al-Sadr, whose death squads have learned much from Hussein.

The whole sorry affair illustrates not just incompetence but also the ingrained intolerance and sectarianism of the Maliki government. It stands for Shiite unity and Shiite dominance above all else.

We should not be surging American troops in defense of such a government. This governing coalition -- Maliki's Dawa, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Sadr's Mahdi Army -- seems intent on crushing the Sunnis at all costs. Maliki should be made to know that if he insists on having this sectarian war, he can well have it without us.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com