Saddam Hussein Hanged By the Neck Till Dead

[Luke_Wilbur]

``Criminal Saddam was hanged to death,'' state-run Iraqiya television said in an announcement. The station played patriotic music and showed images of national monuments and other landmarks.

 

Three Iraqi television channels have reported that Saddam Hussein has been executed, by hanging as requested, after a U.S. judge refused to stop the execution on late Friday. "Petitioner Hussein's application for immediate, temporary stay of execution is denied," U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has said. Saddam has been found guilty of killing more than 148 members of the Shiite population. Saddam was executed at a former military intelligence headquarters in Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah, al-Askari said.

 

Hussein's defense lawyer, Badie Aref Aref said the U.S. soldiers guarding Saddam on Tuesday took away a radio he kept in his cell so he could not hear news reports about his death sentence, which was confirmed that day.

 

Baha al-Araji, a member of the Iraqi parliament from the Muqtada al-Sadr bloc, stated that a judge, a cleric and a physician at the site. According to Iraqi law, these people have to be present at the execution. Officials said that Saddam put up no resistance on his way to the gallows, merely naming a person who was to receive his copy of the Koran.

 

Al Hurra was one station that has indicated that the execution took place, just before 6:00AM local time, which would be consistent with the execution happening before the Muslim holy day Eid al-Adha scheduled to start at Saturday morning for Sunnis and Sunday for Shiites and lasts for four days. Hussein was a Sunni Muslim.

 

Iraqi state television indicates the execution was taped and recorded.

 

Saddam insisted during his trial that he was still the president of Iraq. He said in a letter written after his conviction that he offered himself as a "sacrifice".

 

"If my soul goes down this path [of martyrdom] it will face God in serenity," he wrote in the letter.

 

The Iraqiya station broadcasted national songs and had a tag on the screen that read: ``Saddam's execution marks the end of a dark period of Iraq's history.''

 

U.S. forces overseas are on high alert for possible retaliation attacks.

 

Video of Saddam Husseins's corpse after the execution.

 

Video of Saddam before his execution and story of his life

[Luke_Wilbur]

President Bush's Statement on Execution of Saddam Hussein

 

Today, Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial -- the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime.

 

Fair trials were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule. It is a testament to the Iraqi people's resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people's determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.

 

Saddam Hussein's execution comes at the end of a difficult year for the Iraqi people and for our troops. Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq, but it is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself, and be an ally in the War on Terror.

 

We are reminded today of how far the Iraqi people have come since the end of Saddam Hussein's rule - and that the progress they have made would not have been possible without the continued service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform.

 

Many difficult choices and further sacrifices lie ahead. Yet the safety and security of the American people require that we not relent in ensuring that Iraq's young democracy continues to progress.

[Guest Robert Parry]

The NY Times published a shameless article in which it attempts to wipe the blood from Bush's hands, claiming it was the "Iraqi Government" (wink, wink) who wanted to hang Saddam, not the Foreign Occupier.

Like a blue-blood version of a Mob family with global reach, the Bushes have eliminated one more key witness to the important historical events that led the U.S. military into a bloody stalemate in Iraq and pushed the Middle East to the brink of calamity.

 

The hanging of Saddam Hussein was supposed to be – as the New York Times observed – the “triumphal bookend” to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. If all had gone as planned, Bush might have staged another celebration as he did after the end of “major combat,” posing under the “Mission Accomplished” banner on May 1, 2003.

 

But now with nearly 3,000 American soldiers killed and the Iraqi death toll exceeding 600,000 by some estimates, Bush may be forced to savor the image of Hussein dangling at the end of a rope a little more privately.

 

Still, Bush has done his family’s legacy a great service while also protecting secrets that could have embarrassed other senior U.S. government officials.

 

He has silenced a unique witness to crucial chapters of the secret history that stretched from Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 to the alleged American-Saudi “green light” for Hussein to attack Iran in 1980, through the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War during which high-ranking U.S. intermediaries, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, allegedly helped broker supplies of war materiel for Hussein.

 

Hussein now won’t be around to give troublesome testimony about how he obtained the chemical and biological agents that his scientists used to produce the unconventional weapons that were deployed against Iranian forces and Iraqi civilians. He can’t give his perspective on who got the money and who facilitated the deals.

 

Nor will Hussein be available to give his account of the mixed messages delivered by George H.W. Bush’s ambassador April Glaspie before Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Was there another American “green light” or did Hussein just hear what he wanted to hear?

 

Like the climactic scene from the Mafia movie “Casino” in which nervous Mob bosses eliminate everyone who knows too much, George W. Bush has now guaranteed that there will be no public tribunal where Hussein gives testimony on these potentially devastating historical scandals, which could threaten the Bush Family legacy.

 

That could have happened if Hussein had been turned over to an international tribunal at the Hague as was done with other tyrants, such as Yugoslavia’s late dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Instead Bush insisted that Hussein be tried in Iraq despite the obvious fact that the Iraqi dictator would receive nothing close to a fair trial before being put to death.

 

Hussein's hanging followed his trial for executing 148 men and boys from the town of Dujail in 1982 after a foiled assassination attempt on Hussein and his entourage. Hussein's death effectively moots other cases that were supposed to deal with his alleged use of chemical weapons to kill Iraqi civilians and other crimes that might have exposed the U.S. role.

 

[For details on what Hussein might have revealed, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege or Consortiumnews.com’s “Missing U.S.-Iraq History” or “The Secret World of Robert Gates.”]

 

Thrill of the Kill

 

Some observers think that Bush simply wanted the personal satisfaction of seeing Hussein hanged, which would not have happened if he had been sent to the Hague. As Texas governor, Bush sometimes took what appeared to be perverse pleasure at his power to execute prisoners.

 

In a 1999 interview with conservative writer Tucker Carlson for Talk magazine, Bush ridiculed convicted murderer Karla Faye Tucker and her unsuccessful plea to Bush to spare her life.

 

Asked about Karla Faye Tucker’s clemency appeal, Bush mimicked what he claimed was the condemned woman’s message to him. “With pursed lips in mock desperation, [bush said]: ‘Please don’t kill me.’”

 

But a more powerful motive was always Hussein’s potential threat to the Bush Family legacy if he ever had a forum where he could offer detailed testimony about the historic events of the past several decades.

 

Since stepping into the White House on Jan. 20, 2001, George W. Bush has made it a top priority to conceal the history of his father’s 12 years as Vice President and President and to wrap his own presidency in a thick cloak of secrecy.

 

One of Bush’s first acts as President was to sign an executive order that blocked the scheduled release of historic records from his father’s years. After the 9/11 attacks, Bush expanded his secrecy mandate to grant his family the power to withhold those documents from the American public in perpetuity, passing down the authority to keep the secrets to future Bush generations.

 

So, even after George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush are dead, those noted historians Jenna and Barbara Bush will control key government documents covering a 20-year swath of U.S. history.

 

Already, every document at the George H.W. Bush presidential library must not only be cleared for release by specialists at the National Archives and – if classified – by the affected agencies, but also by the personal representatives of both the senior and junior George Bush.

 

With their backgrounds in secret societies like Skull and Bones – and with George H.W. Bush’s work at the CIA – the Bushes are keenly aware of the power that comes from controlling information. By keeping crucial facts from the American people, the Bushes feel they can turn the voters into easily manipulated children.

 

When there is a potential rupture of valuable information, the Bushes intervene, turning to influential friends to discredit some witness or relying on the U.S. military to make the threat go away. The Bushes have been helped immeasurably, too, by the credulity and cowardice of the modern U.S. news media and the Democratic Party.

 

What Can Be Done

 

Still, even with Hussein’s execution, there are actions that the American people can take to finally recover the lost history of the 1980s.

 

The U.S. military is now sitting on a treasure trove of documents seized during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration exploited these documents to discredit the United Nations over the “oil for food” scandal of the 1990s, ironically when Hussein wasn’t building weapons of mass destruction. But the Bush administration has withheld the records from the 1980s when Hussein was producing chemical and biological weapons.

 

In 2004, for instance the CIA released the so-called Duelfer report, which acknowledged that the administration’s pre-invasion assertions about Hussein hiding WMD stockpiles were “almost all wrong.” But a curious feature of the report was that it included a long section about Hussein’s abuse of the U.N.’s “oil for food” program, although the report acknowledged that the diverted funds had not gone to build illegal weapons.

 

Meanwhile, the report noted the existence of a robust WMD program in the 1980s but offered no documentary perspective on how that operation had occurred and who was responsible for the delivery of crucial equipment and precursor chemicals. In other words, the CIA’s WMD report didn’t identify the non-Iraqis who made Iraq’s WMD arsenal possible.

 

One source who has seen the evidence told me that it contains information about the role of Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen, who has been identified as a key link between the CIA and Iraq for the procurement of dangerous weapons in the 1980s. But that evidence has remained locked away.

 

With the Democrats taking control of Congress on Jan. 4, 2007, there could finally be an opportunity to force out more of the full story, assuming the Democrats don’t opt for their usual course of putting “bipartisanship” ahead of oversight and truth.

 

The American people also could demand that the surviving members of Hussein’s regime be fully debriefed on their historical knowledge before their voices also fall silent either from natural causes or additional executions.

 

But the singular figure who could have put the era in its fullest perspective – and provided the most damning evidence about the Bush Family’s role – has been silenced for good, dropped through a trap door of a gallows and made to twitch at the end of a noose fashioned from hemp.

 

The White House announced that George W. Bush didn’t wait up for the happy news of Hussein’s hanging. After the U.S. military turned Hussein over to his Iraqi executioners, Bush went to bed at his Crawford, Texas, ranch and slept through the night.

 

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

 

www.consortiumnews.com/2006/123006.html

[Guest John Thavis]

The Vatican newspaper criticized continuing executions in Iraq as a "cruel manipulation" of justice and said the country is veering in the wrong direction.

 

The comments on the front page of L'Osservatore Romano Jan. 15 followed the gruesome hanging of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's half-brother, who was decapitated by the hangman's noose when his body dropped through the gallows floor.

 

A video showed the body of the dead man, Barzan Ibrahim, the former head of the Iraqi secret police, lying on the floor, with his severed head several feet away, still hooded. Iraqi authorities said the decapitation was accidental.

 

Executed at the same moment was Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the head of Saddam's revolutionary court. His body swung from a rope in the video.

 

Both men were convicted of responsibility in the torture and killing of 148 Shiites in 1982.

 

"A cruel manipulation of justice once again has used the gallows as its instrument," the Vatican newspaper said.

 

"After the execution of Saddam Hussein -- which was also turned into a spectacle in a way that seriously damaged human dignity -- many people noted the urgent need to give signals in the direction of dialogue and reconciliation," the newspaper said.

 

"But at the moment, it does not seem such a change of course has occurred," it said.

 

Vatican Radio carried an interview with the head of Amnesty International in Italy, Riccardo Noury, that was sharply critical of Iraq for proceeding with executions. Noury said the hangings were done in a hasty manner following "irregular" trials, and do not serve justice.

 

"The death penalty should have been abolished in the new Iraqi Constitution. It would have been an important sign that the country was breaking with Saddam's tradition of violating human rights," Noury said.

 

He faulted the Iraqi government for threatening diplomatic repercussions against the many countries that have criticized the executions. He said the methods and actions of the current government are not very different from the previous regime.