Saddam hanged at dawn, bomb kills 34 Saturday December 30, 10:34 AM



BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein was hanged at dawn on Saturday for crimes against humanity, a dramatic, violent end for a leader who ruled Iraq by fear for three decades before he was toppled by a U.S. invasion in 2003.

In what looked like a swift response by Sunni insurgents loyal to Saddam, a car bomb killed 34 people in a Shi'ite town -- the sort of sectarian attack that has pitched Iraq towards civil war since U.S. troops broke Saddam's iron grip.
State television aired film of Saddam, looking composed and talking with the masked hangman as he placed the noose around his neck on the gallows. It did not show the death or the body.

"It was very quick. He died right away," one of the official Iraqi witnesses told Reuters, saying the ousted president, who was bound but wore no blindfold, had said a brief prayer.

"We heard his neck snap," Sami al-Askari, a political ally of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, told Reuters after the indoor execution at a Justice Ministry facility in northern Baghdad.

As Maliki's fellow Shi'ite Muslims, oppressed under Saddam, celebrated in the streets, the prime minister called on Saddam's Sunni Baathist followers to end their insurgency. U.S. President George W. Bush hailed a "milestone" for Iraqi democracy.

"Saddam's execution puts an end to all the pathetic gambles on a return to dictatorship," said Maliki, who officials said did not attend the hanging. State television showed him signing the order for a hanging whose swiftness following the rejection of an appeal has delighted Shi'ites who suffered under Saddam.

"I urge ... followers of the ousted regime to reconsider their stance as the door is still open to anyone who has no innocent blood on his hands to help in rebuilding ... Iraq."

Police in Kufa, near the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, said 30 people were killed and 58 wounded by the car bomb at a market packed with shoppers ahead of the week-long Eid al-Adha holiday. They said a mob killed a man they accused of planting the bomb.

Bush, who called Saddam a threat even though alleged nuclear and other weapons were never found, said: "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."

The deaths of four troops pushed the American death toll to just four short of the emotive 3,000 mark. Bush already faces mounting public dismay at the war as Iraq slides towards all-out civil war between Saddam's fellow Sunnis and majority Shi'ites.

MUTED REACTIONS

Popular reactions were fairly muted as Iraqis woke on the holiest day of the Muslim calendar to begin a week of religious holidays for Eid al-Adha. Unlike at previous times of tension, no curfew was imposed on Baghdad after the execution.

Jubilant Shi'ites, oppressed under Saddam, danced in the streets of Najaf and cars blared their horns in procession through Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City slum.

The main Sunni television channel in the capital gave little coverage to the news -- though it did show old footage of Saddam meeting former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a time when Washington helped Iraq against Islamist Iran in the 1980s.

State broadcaster Iraqiya on the other hand ran graphic footage of Saddam's agents beheading and beating their victims.

A man from Dujail who testified in Saddam's trial over the deaths of 148 Shi'ite men from the town said he was shown the body at Maliki's office and wept for his dead relatives:

"When I saw the body in the coffin I cried. I remembered my three brothers and my father whom he had killed. I approached the body and told him: 'This is the well-deserved punishment for every tyrant'," Jawad al-Zubaidi told Reuters. "Now for the first time my father and three brothers are happy."

Before his death, the former president recited the Muslim profession of faith "There is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet", one of a dozen or so official witnesses told Reuters.

The rapid execution was a triumph for Maliki, whose grip on his fragile national unity coalition has been questioned.

After complaints of political interference in the trial, however, the speed of the execution may fuel further unease about the fairness of the U.S.-sponsored process.

"The timing of the execution and the sudden way it has been done may irritate people," Saleem al-Jibouri, a spokesman for the main Sunni party in the national unity government, said.

Many Kurds are also disappointed that Saddam will not now be convicted of genocide against them in a trial yet to finish.

Saddam's half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and former judge Awad al-Bander are to be hanged after the week-long Eid.

Saddam's daughter Raghd, in exile in Jordan, wants her father buried in Yemen, a source close to the family said. The governor from Saddam's home town of Tikrit said his tribe was negotiating with the government to have the body interred in the village of Awja, where Saddam's sons were buried in 2003. The government wanted to bury him in Baghdad, the governor said.

(Additional reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi in Dubai and Mariam Karouny and Mussab Al-Khairalla in Baghdad)

Saddam Hussein executed in Iraq

In a last act of defiance Saddam Hussein refused to wear a hood


Iraqi TV images
Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been executed by hanging at a secure facility in northern Baghdad for crimes against humanity.
Iraqi TV said the execution took place just before 0600 local time (0300GMT). A representative of the prime minister and a Sunni Muslim cleric were present.

Footage of him being led to the gallows was later shown on Iraqi state TV.

Two co-defendants, Saddam Hussein's half-brother and a former chief judge, are to be executed at a later date.

All three were sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on 5 November after a year-long trial over the 1982 killings of 148 Shias in the town of Dujail.

Holding Koran

A small group of Iraqis witnessed the execution inside a building at an Iraqi compound known by the Americans as Camp Justice, a secure facility in the northern Baghdad suburb of Khadimeya.


We took him to the gallows and he was saying some few slogans. He was very, very, very, broken

Mouwafak al-Rubaie
Iraq National Security Adviser

They watched as a judge read out the sentence to Saddam Hussein. The former Iraqi leader was carrying a copy of the Koran and asked for it to be given to a friend.

Footage broadcast later on Iraqi state TV showed a subdued Saddam Hussein being led to gallows by a group of masked men.

He was dressed in a white shirt and dark overcoat, rather than prison garb.

Saddam Hussein was led up onto the gallows platform and a dark piece of cloth placed around his neck, followed by the noose.

When the hangman stepped forward to put the hood over his head, Saddam Hussein made it clear he wanted to die without it.

The hanging itself was not broadcast.


Saddam Hussein's rule


In pictures


The execution procedure took just a few minutes.

Iraqi National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie, who witnessed the execution, told the BBC that the former leader went to the gallows quietly:

"We took him to the gallows and he was saying some few slogans. He was very, very, very, broken."

In other developments:



US troops and Iraqi security forces are put on high alert and security is increased at US embassies around the world

A bomb explodes in a market place in the mainly Shia city of Kufa, in southern Iraq, killing at least 31 people and injuring 25

The US military says that a US soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on Friday and three marines died from wounds suffered in combat in Iraq's western Anbar province

'End of a dark period'

News of Saddam Hussein's execution was broadcast on state-run Iraqiya television, as patriotic music and images of national monuments were played out.

It initially said Saddam Hussein was hanged first, followed by Barzan and then Bandar. However, Mr Rubaie later said only Saddam Hussein was hanged.

"We wanted him to be executed on a special day," Mr Rubaie told Iraqiya TV.


It is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself

US President George W Bush


Reaction in quotes
Insurgency to outlive Saddam
Timeline: Saddam's Iraq

Saddam Hussein's half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and Iraq's former chief judge Awad Hamed al-Bandar are to be executed some time after the Eid festival ends next week, he said.

Other Arab TV stations aired live footage of the sunrise over Baghdad's Firdous Square, where US Marines pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein, after he was deposed in April 2003.

There were jubilant scenes in the Baghdad Shia stronghold of Sadr City, with people dancing in the streets and sounding their car horns.

The BBC's Peter Greste in Baghdad says Shias have generally welcomed Saddam Hussein's death and hailed the execution as justice for the suffering endured under his leadership.

But Saddam's own Sunni tribesman were angered by his treatment and may well protest once more, our correspondent adds.

'Held to account'

US President George W Bush hailed the execution as "an important milestone" on the road to building an Iraqi democracy, but warned it would not end the deadly violence there.

I feel saddened by the death of Saddam, not because he deserved to live but because it is taking place under US occupation of Iraq

Nafeesa Zafar, Pakistan


Saddam death: Your reaction

He said: "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.

"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."

UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett welcomed the fact that Saddam Hussein had been tried by an Iraqi court "for at least some of the appalling crimes he committed" and said "he has now been held to account".

France called on Iraqis to "look towards the future and work towards reconciliation and national unity".

There is no way he was killed. We all know during GW1 he had lots of doubles. It's a scam.

I had no time for Saddam. That said, who was responsible for his being in power?

If a man plots a murder and hires an assasin, should only the assasin swing?

This was a show trial of which the Soviets and the Nurenberg creators could be proud. Notice how attempts to bring our "leaders" to trial do not get out of the gate. This, in spite of the fact that there is absolutely no legal doubt that they have broken international law.

Consider that less Iraqis were killed under Saddam's (heinous) regime than have died since we first invaded.

NOT the one they showed on the TV - You have been warned:

http://pandachute.com/videos/leaked_saddam_being_hung_video

______________________________________________

Interviewer: "Describe yourself in 12 words or less?"

Me: "Lazy."

Lynched by the mob
Tariq Ali
December 30, 2006 05:40 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/tariq_ali/2006/12/post_852.html

It was symbolic that 2006 ended with a colonial hanging - most of it (bar the last moments) shown on state television in occupied Iraq. It has been that sort of year in the Arab world. After a trial so blatantly rigged that even Human Rights Watch - the largest single unit of the US human rights industry - had to condemn it as a total travesty. Judges were changed on Washington's orders; defence lawyers were killed and the whole procedure resembled a well-orchestrated lynch mob.

Where Nuremberg was a more dignified application of victor's justice, Saddam's trial has, till now, been the crudest and most grotesque. The Great Thinker President's reference to it "as a milestone on the road to Iraqi democracy" as clear an indication as any that Washington pressed the trigger. The contemptible leaders of the European Union, supposedly hostile to capital punishment, were silent, as usual. And while some Shia factions celebrated in Baghdad, the figures published by a fairly independent establishment outfit, the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies (its self-description: "which attempts to spread the conscious necessity of realising basic freedoms, consolidating democratic values and foundations of civil society"), reveal that just under 90% of Iraqis feel the situation in the country was better before it was occupied.

The ICRSC research is based on detailed house-to-house interviewing carried out during the third week of November 2006. Only 5% of those questioned said Iraq is better today than in 2003; 89% of the people said the political situation had deteriorated; 79% saw a decline in the economic situation; 12% felt things had improved and 9% said there was no change.

Unsurprisingly, 95% felt the security situation was worse than before. Interestingly, about 50% of those questioned identified themselves only as "Muslims"; 34% as Shiites and 14% as Sunnis. Add to this the figures supplied by the UNHCR: 1.6 million Iraqis (7% of the population) have fled the country since March 2003, and 100,000 Iraqis leave every month, Christians, doctors, engineers, women, etc. There are 1 million in Syria, 750,000 in Jordan, 150,000 in Cairo.

These are refugees that do not excite the sympathy of Western public opinion, since the US (and EU-backed) occupation is the cause. These are not compared (as was the case in Kosovo) to the atrocities of the Third Reich. Perhaps it was these statistics (and the estimates of 1 million Iraqi dead) that necessitated the execution of Saddam Hussein?

That Saddam was a tyrant is beyond dispute, but what is conveniently forgotten is that most of his crimes were committed when he was a staunch ally of those who now occupy the country. It was, as he admitted in one of his trial outbursts, the approval of Washington (and the poison gas supplied by West Germany) that gave him the confidence to douse Halabja with chemicals in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war. He deserved a proper trial and punishment in an independent Iraq. Not this.

The double standards applied by the west never cease to astonish. Indonesia's Suharto who presided over a mountain of corpses (at least 1 million, to accept the lowest figure) was protected by Washington. He never annoyed them as much as Saddam.

And what of those who have created the mess in Iraq today? The torturers of Abu Ghraib; the pitiless butchers of Fallujah; the ethnic cleansers of Baghdad, the Kurdish prison boss who boasts that his model is Guantánamo. Will Bush and Blair ever be tried for war crimes? Doubtful. And Aznar, currently employed as a lecturer at Georgetown University in Washington, DC , where the language of instruction is English of which he doesn't speak a word. His reward is a punishment for the students.

Saddam's lynching might send a shiver through the collective, if artificial, spine of the Arab ruling elites. If Saddam can be hanged, so can Mubarak, the Hashemite joker in Amman and the Saudi royals - as long as those who topple them are happy to play ball with Washington.

Only stupid, sadistic dictators hang… and Saddam was both

By Niall Ferguson, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 31/12/2006


Only a minority of modern dictators have been executed for their crimes. The most bloodthirsty of all, Stalin and Mao, died in full possession of their powers, if not their faculties. Franco pulled off the same trick. Hitler cheated the hangman with a bullet in the bunker. Pol Pot lost power, but was never brought to justice and died in his bed, as did Idi Amin.

Slobodan Milosevic stood trial for his crimes, but died of a heart attack in March with 50 hours of testimony still to be heard. Augusto Pinochet, too, suffered the indignity of arrest; three weeks ago he also expired naturally before prosecution could even begin. Suharto is another fallen dictator who has avoided standing trial on the grounds of ill health. And let's not forget that dwindling band of dictators who are still alive and in power: Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi.

Dictators, by definition, have absolute power. For a dictator to end his life hanging from a rope, or facing a firing squad, therefore requires a rather rare combination of wickedness and stupidity: enough of the former to incur the hatred of his countrymen, enough of the latter to take on armies mightier than his own. Both these qualities Saddam Hussein possessed in abundance. That is why, in the wake of his execution at dawn yesterday morning, he deserves to be remembered as the Mussolini of Mesopotamia — if not the Ceausescu of Baghdad.

These were not, of course, Saddam's intended role models. Even before he came to power, he boasted to KGB agents in Iraq of the admiration he felt for Stalin. And the majority of his crimes were perpetrated in an authentically Stalinist spirit of paranoia and sadism. The atrocity for which Saddam Hussein was hanged — the murder in 1982 of 148 Shias in the town of Dujail — was only one of many murderous acts directed, like so many of Stalin's crimes, against supposedly unreliable ethnic groups.

As Stalin persecuted the Poles and Ukrainians of the Soviet Union, so Saddam hounded the Shias and Kurds of Iraq. Among his worst crimes was the so-called "Anfal" ("Spoils") campaign he launched against the latter in 1988. Thousands died as poison gas and other weapons were deployed against Kurdish towns like Halabja. Even more Kurds and Shias were killed in the wake of their 1991 revolt.

Saddam shared more than a few traits with his hero Stalin. Like Stalin, his origins were humble (he was a shepherd's son from Tikrit). Like Stalin, he was attracted as much to nationalism as to socialism, which made the Ba'ath Party his natural political home. Like Stalin, he had no fear of revolutionary violence; indeed, he was wounded in the leg during an abortive Ba'athist rising in 1959. And, like Stalin, he rose through the party ranks until powerful enough to establish a ruthless dictatorship.

As Deputy President after the 1968 Ba'athist coup, Saddam brought to Iraq an authentically Stalinist combination of modernisation and repression. Under his direction, revenues from the newly nationalised oil industry were poured into education and infrastructure. At the same time, however, he tightened his grip on both party and army. Having forced his way to the presidency in July 1979, he gathered together the leading members of the Ba'ath Party and read out the names of 68 people he suspected of disloyalty. Each was immediately arrested. After being tried for treason, in true Stalinist fashion, 22 of them were executed. A pattern of exemplary terror was soon established that owed as much to The Godfather as to "Koba the Dread" (Stalin's nickname). One minister who ventured to criticise Saddam was literally diced up and presented to his own widow.

The People's Army — the military wing of the Ba'ath Party — and the Mukhabarat (Department of Intelligence) were his chosen instruments for terrorising real and imagined opponents. The facade of legitimacy was provided by a classic personality cult. The gargantuan statues, the garish murals, the bombastic propaganda: all were taken from the 1930s Soviet playbook.

Yet Stalin would never have been as stupid as Saddam was — to pit his own army not once but twice against the most powerful military in the world.

The first mistake was perhaps understandable. Between 1980 and 1988, Saddam had tried and failed to annex the Iranian province of Khuzestan. Weighed down by war debts, he turned his eye to neighbouring Kuwait. The United States was at best equivocal in its support of the Kuwaitis in the months before Saddam's invasion; indeed, President George H W Bush seemed to Margaret Thatcher to be "going wobbly" even after Iraqi troops had crossed the border. Yet Saddam had fatally miscalculated. The collapse of Soviet power after the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that he could no longer play one superpower off against the other. Facing a clear-cut ultimatum from the UN Security Council, Saddam should have backed down. Instead he fought — and was thrashed.

Saddam's second and ultimately fatal blunder was downright stupid. In George W Bush he faced an antagonist very different in temper from the elder President Bush; a leader persuaded by his advisers that Saddam's overthrow was desirable in three ways: as retaliation for the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (though Iraqi complicity was conspicuous by its absence); as pre-emption before Saddam acquired weapons of mass destruction (though the evidence for their existence was woefully thin); and as proof of the superiority of democracy over dictatorship (though history offered no evidence that democracy could be imposed at gunpoint in the Middle East). Saddam had been Bush-whacked once; to suffer the same fate twice was worse than carelessness. Rather than confess that his WMD programmes had been abandoned in the 1990s, he continued to bluff, apparently ruling out the possibility that Bush Jnr was hell-bent on invading Iraq, with or without UN backing.

Today, of course, we can look back and understand Saddam's miscalculation better. In Saddam's eyes, as in the eyes of Bush Snr, the lesson of history was that the alternative to Saddam was civil war, not democracy. The US had stopped short of regime change in 1991 and had cynically left the Shias and Kurds to face Saddam's wrath, having initially urged them to rise up in revolt. All that has happened since 2003 has vindicated those who argued that, without Saddam's iron fist, Iraq would disintegrate, not democratise. The dictator's nemesis proved to be a president so naive that he did not even know the difference between Sunni and Shia.

The decline and fall of Saddam Hussein has been too tawdry to pass muster as a Shakespearian tragedy. Its protagonist was too crass a character, more Don Corleone than Coriolanus. This play has been part Marlowe, part Brecht: a cross between The Massacre at Paris and The Threepenny Opera. Like the Duc de Guise in Marlowe's bloodthirsty drama, Saddam was responsible for more than enough mass murder to justify his own violent end. Unlike Macheath in Brecht's musical, Saddam was not pardoned in the last minute before his execution, but his death seems to pose a version of Brecht's old question: "Who is the bigger criminal: he who robs a bank, or he who founds one?"

In the same spirit, we may ask ourselves this New Year's Eve: who is the bigger criminal: he who tyrannises a people, or he who first bankrolls the tyrant — and then replaces his tyranny with anarchy?

For Saddam's career would have taken a very different course had he not, at vital times, received support as well as opposition from the United States. He was given training by the CIA in Egypt following the abortive coup of 1959. Though Iraq appeared to be drifting into the Soviet orbit in the early 1970s, Saddam won favour in Washington for purging the Iraqi Communists. After 1979, he received copious quantities of arms and aid to prosecute his war of aggression against Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran.

President Bush yesterday described Saddam's execution as "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". Another way of regarding it is as just the latest of tens of thousands of acts of vengeance perpetrated by Iraqis against other Iraqis since the American invasion.

The dictator is dead, hoist by the petard of his own Stalinist cruelty and Mussolini-like miscalculation. But Iraq's road towards democratic stability has a very long way still to run. If every milestone is an execution, it will be a hellish highway indeed.

Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University

www.niallferguson.org

______________________________________________

Interviewer: "Describe yourself in 12 words or less?"

Me: "Lazy."