Hussein not long for this world

December 29, 2006

There are some competing reports that differ on details, but MSNBC reports that Saddam Hussein will be [tag]executed[/tag] sometime over the next couple of days, possibly as early as today.

Former Iraqi dictator [tag]Saddam Hussein[/tag], sentenced to death for his role in 148 killings in 1982, will have his sentence carried out by Sunday, NBC News reported Thursday. According to a U.S. military officer who spoke on condition of anonymity, Saddam will be hanged before the start of the Eid religious holiday, which begins at sundown Saturday.

The hanging could take place as early as Friday, NBC’s Richard Engel reported.

The U.S. military received a formal request from the Iraqi government to transfer Saddam to Iraqi authorities, NBC reported on Thursday, which is one of the final steps required before his execution. His sentence, handed down last month, ordered that he be hanged within 30 days.

Saddam’s chief lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, asked that the former dictator receive the protections afforded a “prisoner of war,” but the appeals appear to have been rejected. CNN noted that under Iraqi law, Saddam’s defense lawyers and family would be notified before the death sentence is carried out, and “there has apparently been no such notification.” That said, the MSNBC report added that Saddam met with two of his half-brothers on Thursday, and al-Dulaimi has apparently been notified that Saddam is not long for this world.

And then, of course, there’s the question of whether the execution will be [tag]televised[/tag].

Reuters has an interesting piece on the subject, noting that the networks are torn but will err on the side of good taste.

Television networks face a killer of a conundrum with the impending execution of Saddam Hussein, whose hanging could be videotaped and perhaps aired on Iraqi TV. […]

Several sources said Saddam’s execution would be videotaped by the Iraqi government, though it wasn’t clear whether it would be released to the public or broadcast. “We will video everything,” Iraqi National Security adviser Mouffak al Rubaie told CBS News.

Judging by the Iraqi government’s release Tuesday of videotape of the hanging of 13 convicts, it could be a gruesome affair. Meetings were held Thursday in at least two network headquarters over how to handle the potentially graphic images. ABC and CBS said they wouldn’t air the full execution if the video became available. […]

Phil Alongi, special-events executive producer at NBC News, said there are ways the network can approach the video or photographs that will get the point across without having to be graphic.

The operative word: taste.

“We have very, very strict guidelines with how to deal with that,” said Bob Murphy, senior VP at ABC News. “If there were pictures made available of the execution, they would have to be viewed by senior management before we would put them on the air, and we would make a judgment of taste and propriety of what we would show.”

CNN and Fox News Channel still were discussing what they would do if the footage were made available. It also wasn’t clear what the newly launched network Al-Jazeera International would do. An e-mail and phone call to the channel’s Qatar headquarters weren’t returned Thursday. Despite popular assumptions to the contrary, Al-Jazeera’s pan-Arab channel has never shown an execution.

According to the Reuters report, the airing of an execution is “unprecedented” in the history of U.S. television.

Whether the networks show restraint or not, one has to assume the video will appear online fairly quickly.

As much as the man is a monster, this execution is a big mistake. This will have consequences for the Iraqi people and possibly for the world for years to come. In the end the death penalty is simply state sanctioned murder.

  • Thank Zeus for the Internet. I don’t know if I’ll watch it but I’m glad the networks aren’t the arbiters for whether I CAN watch it or not. There’s a fine line between coddling, controlling and lying to the American viewer. Network paternalism needs to cease, because Big Brother TV tends to work with Big Brother Government and Big Brother Corporate. Show the damn news. Show people dying in the war because people are dying in the war.

  • Will this be just in time for Boy George II to say “We’ve won, time to go!” ?

    I’m of two minds on this. Was Saddam BG2’s whole real reason for going to Iraq, and once he’s dead there will be no reason to stay, or is BG2 now so entrenched on “suceeding” in Iraq, whatever that may mean this week, that he will never leave during his presidency, meaning, assuming he gives it up, we will be there until 2009.

    I’ve got to believe that Cheney wants us there for the oil. During his secret energy policy commission meetings he and the American Oil Mafia divided up Iraq’s future oil wealth between them. Now they realize they have to maintain a U.S. Military prescence in Iraq if they are to secure that wealth. Which is why I suppose they’ve sold BG2 on the meme that al Qaeda will be twice as dangerous if they control Iraq’s oil.

    Of course the fact that Saudi backers of al Qaeda control Saudi Arabia’s oil seems to have gone over BG2’s head.

    And no we shouldn’t show him being executed on U.S. television. YouTube will be quite enough thank you.

  • You make it sound as if not airing the execution is a good thing. If advocates of the death penalty can’t bear to watch such a sentence being carried out in all its gruesome “glory,” then they have no business imposing it in the first place. It isn’t a matter of taste, it’s a matter of having the decency to look messy consequences of one’s political decisions without sweeping them under the rug. (And let’s not pretend that the United States has no responsibility for this sentence.)

  • “And let’s not pretend that the United States has no responsibility for this sentence.” – James Dillon

    Considering we fought a war with at least one objective being to put this guy into the hands of his victums and enemies, yep, we’re responsible.

    Color me unfazed by guilt about that.

    Should we have sent this guy to the Hague to be tried and convicted? That might have been fairer to him but really he’s gotten a lot more justice than he’s ever given. If the Iraqi people get a chance to improve on his trail in the future, that’s all I ask.

    And frankly, I no more need to see Saddam hang than I needed to see Joe Thiesman’s leg break.

  • The biggest injustice resulting from the speedy execution of Saddam Hussein is that the Iraqi people will be denied to hear the evidence and details of Hussein’s crimes in other trials slated for the Iraqi courts. In the end, Iraqis (and the world) will be denied the knowledge of how this monster came to power, what role foreign and local powers had in arming him and sanctioning his atrocities, and further insight into why problems persist in Iraq today.

  • Lance,

    An interesting aspect of a truly just legal system is that it offers the protections of due process and impartial justice even to defendants who have done nothing to deserve such treatment. Saddam’s trial was nothing more than a farce to justify the bloodthirsty retribution of his political enemies, and the United States should be ashamed of its participation in it, precisely because we are, or at least aspire to be, better than Saddam. Moreover, anyone who favors the death penalty for any defendant, Saddam included, should have the courage and decency to watch that sentence carried out, rather than shielding himself or herself from the unpleasant reality of that decision in the name of “decency.” Indecency lies in sentencing a man to death, not in broadcasting the execution.

  • I have to put the tinfiol hat on one last time this year. Saddam was supported by the US for a long time during the Iran Iraq war. We have all seen pictures of Rummy and Saddam etc. If there is not very clear and verifyable evidence of his execution I will always wonder if he was really executed or if he was just removed to a lovely remote location to live out his days.

    It is hardly a stretch to imagine that the execution could be announced and most of the world would concider it done and forget about it. Once something like this leaves the public radar it is all but gone. How hard would it be to give him a compound in the Middle East as a reward for past alliances? We have a long history of shady dealings with dictators, particularly removing them in unique and intersting ways.

    I’m just saying….

    I agree with James #4. Advocates fo the death penalty should all be tuned in with champagne in hand to watch him swing. If you support the act then it should be public and not neatly hidden away.

  • There’s no question of “justice” in any of this. Saddam’s show trial was just as much a media event as pulling down his statue or outfitting him with WMDs he didn’t have in order to justify Bush’s so-called war on an utterly helpless Iraq. Think of Commander Codpiece pretending to make a “tailhook” landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln (which required a 45-minute maneuver to be turned around so the TeeVee camera could create the illusion of being out at sea instead of harbored in San Diego. One thing the Bush Crime Family has down pat: TeeVee addled America will fall for anything visual.

  • “Indecency lies in sentencing a man to death, not in broadcasting the execution.” – James Dillon

    If so, the indecency does not lie with us. The United States, in the person of L. Paul Bremer, outlawed capital punishment in Iraq. The Iraqis reversed that decision on their own when they regained their sovereignity.

    If they execute Saddam, that will have been their choice, not ours.

  • I always figured Saddam had the goods on Reagan from the years he was “our SOB” in Iraq. Perhaps killing him is the Republicans’ way of trying to ensure that whatever he knows and can say about American culpability in his brutal crimes–an aspect of this long story that’s never gotten the attention it deserves–dies with him.

    Though this monster deserves execution if anybody does, I have to believe that any resemblence to “justice” as most of us understand the term is purely coincidental.

  • If past war crimes trials are precedents, there should be no public broadcast of his execution. The executions of Adolf Eichman and the Nurmberg defendants were not shown. Of course, that was before Fox News.

    The Nurmberg trial also made the distinction between war crimes and crimes against humanity. These show trials are tricky things, legally and morally. The comfortable crowing about removing one dictator demonstrates — in light of the ballyhooed Bush jiihad of democracy — the hypocrisy of leaving the others in power.

    Personally, as much as Saddam deserves not only to be hanged, but to be tortured to death, I think he should be jailed for the rest of his life. I don’t want him made a mideast hero and martyr, which has always been his desire.

    I also agree that the kangaroo court did not serve as Nurmberg did, to thoroughly chronicle the crimes of the Nazis. My impression of Saddam’s trial was of total confusion and foregone conviction.

    The whole thing leads me to two conclusions. First, a lot of trouble could have been avoided by dropping a grenade into Saddam’s spider hole when they found him. Second, is that Saddam’s removal from power is both the good news and bad news of the invasion of Iraq. For all the Iraqis murdered under his regime, his fall may result in many more, along with endless daily suffering that did not exist before spring of 2003.

  • Not to joke about this issue, but when the deed has been done, I’ll be tuning tinto Fox News for when they show in big bold letters:

    “SADDAM HUNG!”

    That just sounds way too funny.

  • He’s already made himself into a “martyr for Iraq” and while some here may think he’s such a monster that no one in Iraq would accept his martyrdom, I’ll just ask you how many dead Americans in the next week (we won’t even count the dead Iraqis) this atrocious comedy of bullshit is worth. Saddam was our man until he wasn’t and now we kill him. How very Republican.

    If you don’t want to turn someone into a martyr, don’t “martyr” them. Anyone want to take a bet in what year on June 18 there will be another “Oklahoma City” with a blown-up government building, memorializing the “martyrdom” of Timothy McVeigh?

  • Josh Marshall nails it with one of his best posts ever over at TPM:

    “Bush administration officials” are telling CNN that Saddam Hussein will be hanged this weekend. Convention dictates that we precede any discussion of this execution with the obligatory nod to Saddam’s treachery, bloodthirsty rule and tyranny. But enough of the cowardly chatter. This thing is a sham, of a piece with the whole corrupt, disastrous sham that the war and occupation have been. Bush administration officials are the ones who leak the news about the time of the execution. One key reason we know Saddam’s about to be executed is that he’s about to be transferred from US to Iraqi custody, which tells you a lot. And, of course, the verdict in his trial gets timed to coincide with the US elections.

    This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur — phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It’s a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

    Try to dress this up as an Iraqi trial and it doesn’t come close to cutting it — the Iraqis only take possession of him for the final act, sort of like the Church always left execution itself to the ‘secular arm’. Try pretending it’s a war crimes trial but it’s just more of the pretend mumbojumbo that makes this out to be World War IX or whatever number it is they’re up to now.

    The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren’t grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

    These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the whole thing’s a mess and that they’re going to be remembered for it — defined by it — for decades and centuries. But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of this was about the president’s issues with his dad and the hang-ups he had about finishing Saddam off — so before we go, we can hang the guy as some big cosmic ‘So There!’

    Marx might say that this was not tragedy but farce. But I think we need to get way beyond options one and two even to get close to this one — claptrap justice meted out to the former dictator in some puffed-up act of self-justification as the country itself collapses in the hands of the occupying army.

    Marty Peretz, with some sort of projection, calls any attempt to rain on this parade “prissy and finicky.” Myself, I just find it embarrassing. This is what we’re reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there’s nothing else this president can get right.

    What do you figure this farce will look like 10, 30 or 50 years down the road? A signal of American power or weakness?

  • I’m going to disagree with Josh about this, though I don’t usually.

    The Iraqi people, bad as their justice system may be right now, have every right to try, convict and hang Saddam Hussein. That the United States had custody of him until now does nothing to change the reality (or lack there of) of his verdict. We didn’t try and convict him of trying to kill Bush 41 in Kuwait or any other “crimes” against America. The Iraqis convicted him of crimes against them.

    “But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of this was about the president’s issues with his dad and the hang-ups he had about finishing Saddam off — so before we go, we can hang the guy as some big cosmic ‘So There!’” – Josh Marshal

    That, I buy.

  • Lance,

    I’m a bit confused by your responses about whether the United States is partially responsible for Hussein’s execution. First you said:
    Considering we fought a war with at least one objective being to put this guy into the hands of his victums and enemies, yep, we’re responsible.

    Color me unfazed by guilt about that.

    But then you said, in response to my comment that executing Hussein is indecent, that:
    If so, the indecency does not lie with us. The United States, in the person of L. Paul Bremer, outlawed capital punishment in Iraq. The Iraqis reversed that decision on their own when they regained their sovereignity.

    If they execute Saddam, that will have been their choice, not ours.

    And followed that up with:
    The Iraqi people, bad as their justice system may be right now, have every right to try, convict and hang Saddam Hussein. That the United States had custody of him until now does nothing to change the reality (or lack there of) of his verdict. We didn’t try and convict him of trying to kill Bush 41 in Kuwait or any other “crimes” against America. The Iraqis convicted him of crimes against them.

    So, is the U.S. responsible for Hussein’s execution, or not? Surely the fact that we captured him, held him in custody during a show trial conducted by his enemies in which the outcome was never in question, and are now turning him over to be hanged suggest that the United States’ hands are at least somewhat dirty in this affair?

  • Are we responsible for his execution? No.

    Are we responsible for handing him over to the justice of his victums? Yes.

    Are the two the one in the same? No.

    If we had a moral obligation to keep Saddam alive then letting him be tried by his enemies and victums would be immoral. But as we truely owe the man nothing just for having aided him in his war on Iran, then no.

    Saddam earned his death. To deny his victums their vengence is to deny them their sovereignity. I’m not going to bother for him. Haven’t we done enough to these people without “protecting” Saddam from them?

  • If “Convention dictates that we precede any discussion of this execution with the obligatory nod to Saddam’s treachery, bloodthirsty rule and tyranny,” then under what convention should this nation profer their “obligatory nod” to the tyranny that has come to pass under the lackluster guardianship of one George W. Bush? For the “disasterous sham that thw war and occupation have been,” as so eloquently noted by Mr. Marshall, is not the only sham that these United States have been subjected to since January of 2001.

    But, I digress. The actuality of the timing for this execution is to create a situation in Baghdad that mandates, for the world to see, the need to inject more American troops. This administration seeks nothing more than the opportunity to incite, with both malica and intent, the only prerequisite for escalation that can justify that escalation.

    And with that escalation, the United States may well find itself in the role of Pontius Pilate to the Iraqi Shi’a, in their drive to obliterate the Sunni.

    The United States risks becoming a hand-in-hand partner in a program of ethnic genocide that, in only a short time, will far outpace the carnage of Bosnia, the debacles of Africa, and the infamous “Rape of Nanking” by Imperial japanese forces. As for other, more terrible events, I can only ask a brace of questions, being (1)—what is the number of Sunni Muslims in Iraq? — and (2) Are there more than six million?

  • BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S.-backed Iraqi television station Al Hurra said Saddam Hussein had been executed by hanging shortly before 6 a.m. (0300 GMT) on Saturday.

  • That slight rustling noise you can hear is the sound of the remainder of the audience – reacting in shock to the “big” scene at the end of Act 2 – picking up their coats and leaving the now empty cinema swearing never to see another of this particular director’s films in their lives.

    The death penalty is regarded as barbaric in most countries of the world, and the US just lost the last of its vastly diminished audience.

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