SADDAM GOES TO THE GALLOWS

It was an Alice in Wonderland trial, a victor’s justice, “First the Verdict and then the Trial.” In a sense it was the importation of American-made War on Terror “justice” to Iraq.

Saddam was hung at dawn, according to one report , on a US base. Another report put the dirty deed in an Iraqi justice ministry facility in northern Baghdad, a facility no doubt paid for the US, Bush now has Saddam’s head on a plate. Will it be transferred to a stick and paraded around the world in the medieval display this represents? Another madman is about to become a martyr. The madness of war goes on.

AlJazeera reports:

“As guards took him to the scaffold, according to witnesses, Saddam said: “There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet.”

Saddam was convicted of crimes against humanity of the killings of 148 Shia villagers after a failed assassination attempt in 1982.

The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, later urged Saddam’s fellow Baathists to reconsider their tactics and join the political process.

In Sadr City, a Shia area of Baghdad, people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate the former leader’s death.

Violence in Iraq continued on Saturday after Saddam’s death and at least 30 people were killed when a bomb exploded in a fish market south of Baghdad in the first.

Bush was triumphant, AJ reports. He 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 US president said in a statement.

An appeals court had upheld the death penalty on Tuesday and the Iraqi government rushed through the procedures to hang Saddam by the end of the year and before the Eid al-Adha holiday that starts on Saturday.

IT WAS QUICK

“It was very quick. He died right away,” an official Iraqi witnesses told the Reuters news agency.

“We heard his neck snap,” said Sami al-Askari, a political ally of al-Maliki.

Another witness said: “He seemed very calm. He did not tremble.”

State television said that it would air footage of the hanging.”

I am sure Fox News can’t wait to get it first. It will go down big in a culture conditioned by years of lynchings and built around spectacles. Already: Dramatic footage of a noose being placed around the neck of Saddam Hussein has been released. The men placing the noose on his head wore black masks

The Turkish agency Zaman added:

“The execution was recorded and is to be partially broadcast on the state TV. The 69-year-old leader was reported to have said a short prayer prior to the hanging, and to have been very calm. According to some reports, Saddam was holding a Quran and requested the book be delivered to a friend of his.

Criticism

AJ: “Najeeb Al-Nuaimi, one of the defence lawyers, told Al Jazeera: “There was bias, the prosecution sided with their politicians, it was an ethnically established court with three Shia and one Sunni.”

The US-based rights group Human Rights Watch condemned the hanging, saying history would judge his trial and execution harshly.

Richard Dicker, a Human Rights Watch director, said: “Saddam Hussein was responsible for horrific, widespread human rights violations, but those acts, however brutal, cannot justify his execution, a cruel and inhumane punishment.

Mike Whitney: Hanging Saddam

”The execution of Saddam Hussein is another grim chapter in the catalogue of war crimes perpetrated against the Iraqi people. It is a gratuitous act of barbarism devoid of justice.

http://tinyurl.com/yym2

ALL QUIET SO FAR IN BAGHDAD

The Guardian reports:

Baghdad remains calm after hanging

Baghdad was relatively quiet after the announcement of Saddam’s hanging and the government did not impose a round-the-clock curfew.

In Baghdad’s Shiite enclave of Sadr City, some danced and fired guns in the air to celebrate the former dictator’s death.

National security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie said Saddam “totally surrendered” and did not resist when the time came. He said a judge read the sentence to Saddam, who was taken in handcuffs to the execution room just before 6am local time. When he stood in the execution room, photographs and video footage were taken.

“Saddam was treated with respect when he was alive and after his death,” al-Rubaie said. “Saddam’s execution was 100% Iraqi and the American side did not interfere.”

The Angry Arab News Service comments:

The Iraqi people of course has the right if they wish to exact a punishment on Saddam for his crimes against Iraqis (and against others). But the execution has been marred by a number of issues that will later serve to backfire against the ruling puppet government of Iraq, and its backers in the US.

1) the entire course of legal and political processes in Iraq, including the weekly or monthly elections, are not legitimate in the presence of the American occupiers. All day long, administration propagandists kept stressing that this was an Iraqi decision. Yeah. Sure. This year, Iraqi puppet officials, including the former puppet prime minister, admitted that in fact the ruling prime minister of Iraq can’t order a police officer on a mission without the authorization of US occupiers. And they now want us to believe that the Iraqis acted entirely on their own, as if they can.

And the timing itself: it was not dictated by US calculations? And Iraq is not supposed to be sovereign and independent? And the 140,000 US troops are merely there for purposes of traffic control around the country? Whether they are elections or trials, the processes under foreign occupation are not legitimate or valid, certainly not in the eyes of Arab public opinion.

2) The trial itself, like everything that the US managed in Iraq, were bungled. If the US occupiers wanted to show Arabs a legal system or a court proceeding unlike what they have in their own countries, the US failed miserably, just as it failed miserably in translating any of its empty rhetorical promises.

The trial was in fact as cartoonish and as politically managed as trials in neighboring Arab countries. From the changes of the judge (and whatever happened to that judge who went missing as soon as he said in “court” that he does not consider Saddam to be a tyrant?), to the selection of the crimes–clearly intending to spare Gulf countries, Europe, and US embarrassment from their association with the crimes of Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war years. That was why Dujayl–of all his crimes–was chosen.

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/

Da’ud X Mohammen’s comment:

Logic told us from Day One what was going to happen, and it did and is. Killing Saddam now doesn’t alter the obvious and predictable end-of-line. Having studied the matter for more than 20 years hasn’t hurt, but all one need know now and over the years is that Saddam was an Iraqi.

And so the war goes on, this time to the soundtrack of Billie Holliday singing Strange Fruit. Saddam may be dead but his ghost is still at war. And so are we.

Do you feel better? Happy New Year everyone.

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