According to the BBC, Saddam Hussein, his half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti, and Former chief judge Awad Hamed al-Bandar were executed just before 6:00AM local time on Saturday [9:00PM CST Friday].
Nothing has been resolved, and no one is safer because of this rush for vengeance.
Update: Riverbend has an end-of-year post up that deals with the pending execution. Read the entire post for the local view of what the year has brought to the Iraqi people.
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6 comments
I am glad to know River is still alive. I visited her site last night while I was on the phone to Stella, intending to read her a couple of quotes from the post you linked, and ended up reading the whole thing to her. (Sigh.) What have we done… not “we” as individuals, but “we” as America, the agent of the destruction of Iraq, of Riverbend’s day-to-day world.
Now that Bush has (let’s be honest) killed Saddam, avenged his Poppy, proved whose is longer… what will Bush do for an encore?
Because I have a streak of Old Testament judgmentalism, I think that despots should be imprisoned for life in solitary. Some people are too cruel to be afforded the mercy of a quick and relatively painless death, they need time with themselves to contemplate the decisions that put them in that position.
This execution has cut off the exposition of the use of WMDs which would have been extremely revealing of the policies of the US regarding Saddam’s regime during the 1980s. A number of people want to bury the facts about the source of Iraq’s WMD programs and the personal knowledge of people like Cheney, Rumsfeld and George HW Bush.
There was no point in what was done. As Riverbend says, at every step the wrong path was followed. This war was designed to fail from the beginning, and the people who supported it are still being listened to, while the people who have been consistently correct are ignored.
Saddam Hussein (and his best-buddy-turned-nemesis The Boy Who Would Be King) tops my list of candidates most suited for damnatio memoriae. An execution, properly performed is over in a matter of moments. That’s far too quick a punishment for a man as thoroughly evil as Saddam (or Shrubya, for that matter). Lock him away in solitary confinement for the rest of his miserable life, forbid (or at least discourage) the mention of his name or the taking of any notice whatsoever of him, and leave him to stew in his own hatreds until he shuffles off this mortal coil on his own. Further refinement would include giving him access to satellite TV in his jail cell, so he could sit by himself and watch as the world ignored him and went happily about its affairs without him.
Hmm.. According to a radio newscast, last night, only Saddam was hung to death. They said the other two were going to be hung once the holiday was over.
What Michael said… as it stands. I could not say it better than that.
Shunning is an old tradition among non-violent sects and placing someone in solitary is an extension. Like you, Michael, I think some people are too evil for a quick end.
OWL, the BBC report said that all three were executed, but nothing that comes out of Iraq can be trusted to be accurate. As I just posted the choice of the execution date, on the sabbath and a major holiday was odd in the extreme.