[concretejungle]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,240598,00.html

i'm wondering what's the big deal? especially for that part of the world where executions are a norm. People are beheaded on TV all the time over there. They drag bodies through the streets behind cars, ect.......but yet they are upset that the video taping of Saddam's death is "inflammatory".


Not only that, they are investigating who was taunting him. What's the big fawking deal? Do they not remember that Saddam used to give the people who he executed a red, autographed card just before he killed them? Is that not a taunt?

[78-FJ40]

I believe the concern is that Sunnis may get enraged at Shiites taunting him before the execution and drawing the conclusion that the country is now run by Shiites.

[Jan-78FJ40]

Originally Posted by concretejungle

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,240598,00.html

i'm wondering what's the big deal? especially for that part of the world where executions are a norm. People are beheaded on TV all the time over there. They drag bodies through the streets behind cars, ect.......but yet they are upset that the video taping of Saddam's death is "inflammatory".


Not only that, they are investigating who was taunting him. What's the big fawking deal? Do they not remember that Saddam used to give the people who he executed a red, autographed card just before he killed them? Is that not a taunt?

It's about the execution of the execution.
The guy was leader of that part of the world for a long time. Then he got toppled by us, was held in custody by us, had a trial supervised by us, and then was turned over to a bunch of street thugs by us, an hour before his ececution.
The trial was supposed to be a closing for the many people he suppressed, and it was supposed to be bi-partisan. Then he is executed extremely unprofessionally, while being mocked by shiites, by a street gang from Moktadr al Sadr's death squadrons.
This was not a closing, this was to inflame an ongoing civil war. Also, it was not punishment, it was revenge by a certain group. Very unprofessional, demonstrating well that this country is run to hell, and demonstrating well our complete failure to establish anything reminiscent of a functional government, or the rule of law there.
Basically another big failure. Not that the guy is finally dead, but that we failed to do it correctly.

[Trunk Monkey]

Originally Posted by concretejungle

Do they not remember that Saddam used to give the people who he executed a red, autographed card just before he killed them? Is that not a taunt?

They gave Saddam a red card too. Nice little final jab.

[concretejungle]

Originally Posted by Jan-78FJ40

IThen he is executed extremely unprofessionally, while being mocked by shiites, by a street gang from Moktadr al Sadr's death squadrons.
This was not a closing, this was to inflame an ongoing civil war. Also, it was not punishment, it was revenge by a certain group. Very unprofessional, demonstrating well that this country is run to hell, and demonstrating well our complete failure to establish anything reminiscent of a functional government, or the rule of law there.
Basically another big failure. Not that the guy is finally dead, but that we failed to do it correctly.

Right....so what's the difference. Sounds exactly like what goes on over there all the time.

[swank60]

Originally Posted by concretejungle

Right....so what's the difference. Sounds exactly like what goes on over there all the time.

Well, it could be put another way:

China is sick and tired of the US and invades. They dig GWB out of a spiderhole, put him on trial and find him guilty, punishment = death. They keep him in custody and decide to exicute him on Christmas (or Easter, if you'd rather), then turn him over to the Democrats to hang him. Ted Kennedy, George Clooney and Nancy Pelosi stand around and taunt him the whole time while Michael Moore films it on his video cell phone...

How does the 30% of people in the US who still support GWB react, and what do they do?

[Jman]

NYTimes article:

Iraq Plans Inquiry Into Hussein Execution
Bassim Daham/Associated Press
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: January 2, 2007

BAGHDAD, Jan. 2 — With angry demonstrations spreading across Iraq’s Sunni Arab heartland, the country’s Shiite-led government said today that it had ordered an investigation into the disorderly scenes at the execution of Saddam Hussein, who was mocked and taunted by Shiite witnesses and guards as he stood on the gallows.

Iraqi officials said a three-member committee of the Interior Ministry would investigate scenes that have raised outrage among Mr. Hussein’s Sunni Arab loyalists and widespread consternation elsewhere as video recordings of the execution have been broadcast around the world.

The officials said the government wanted to know how some of those present at the hanging had been allowed to use cellphone cameras to record grainy images of Mr. Hussein as he endured the mockery from a group standing in front of the gallows. But the investigation would also ask why the hanging had been allowed to descend into scenes that some Sunni critics have described as a sectarian lynching, the officials said.

Sami al-Askari, a Shiite member of the Iraqi Parliament who was among those who attended the hanging, said in a telephone interview that the investigation would be thorough and would involve questioning of all those present at the hanging. At the time, officials said the group included about 25 people, including an official party of about 14 nominated by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and others who included five executioners in black balaclavas and bomber jackets and execution block guards.

“The committee will question everyone who was present at the execution to ask what they saw there,” Mr. Askari said. He said the role of those who used their cellphones to record the event would be one focus of the inquiry and the identification of those responsible for the taunts another. He said the worst sectarian taunts appeared to have come from one of the guards, whom he described as a poorly educated man with a thick Arabic accent, and not from the officials who attended the execution.

Controversy over the execution has escalated since it was carried out at dawn on Saturday in an execution chamber in the northern Baghdad district of Khadamiya that was previously used for hundreds of hangings by Mr. Hussein’s military intelligence agency. Anger has centered on the role of Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, in short-circuiting constitutional and legal processes to hasten Mr. Hussein to the gallows on the day when Iraq’s Sunnis were beginning the annual, four-day religious festival known as Id al-Adha.

But consternation at the government’s haste to carry out the death sentence passed on Mr. Hussein in November for crimes against humanity has been compounded among critics of the execution by the manner in which it was carried out. Video images recorded by cellphones have shown Mr. Hussein, with the noose around his neck, facing shouts of “Go to hell!” and taunts of “Moktada! Moktada! Moktada!” — in reference to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has become a populist hero among many Shiites or to the death squads acting in his name that have killed thousands of Iraqi Sunnis.

Mr. Askari, the parliamentarian, said the guard he identified as the worst verbal abuser of Mr. Hussein had shouted Mr. Sadr’s name.

While there was much else on the videos that lent a degrading atmosphere to the hanging, including mocking interruptions of Mr. Hussein’s last prayers as he waited for the trapdoor to open, it was the invocation of Mr. Sadr’s name, more than anything, that caused fury among Sunnis, and among Iraqis of other faiths and sects, who saw it as emblematic of what they believe are the Maliki government’s profoundly sectarian instincts.

On the videos, which have been posted on numerous Web sites and relayed across Iraq via the country’s new cellphone network, Mr. Hussein is shown standing solemn-faced on the gallows with his hands manacled behind his back. The volley of taunts that continued right up to the moment of the hanging itself, and afterwards, as Mr. Hussein lay suspended from the rope.

Along with their fury at the treatment of Mr. Hussein, many Iraqi Sunni Arabs viewing the videos were pleased that the 69-year-old former ruler managed a sequence of terse ripostes to his tormentors. He told a senior government official who demanded that he express his remorse for the suffering he had inflicted that he had nothing to apologize for, having lived his life, as he put it, in the service of “jihad,” the Muslim tradition of struggle against evil. To the chants of “Moktada,” he replied, moments before he dropped through the trapdoor, “Is this how real men behave?”

Among those most incensed by what happened to Mr. Hussein in his final moments are American officials in Baghdad and Washington, who had hoped that the execution would bring Iraqis to a point of closure over Mr. Hussein’s role in Iraq’s turbulent history. One report circulating among senior Iraqi officials today, which no American official would confirm, was that the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, had appealed in the last hours before the execution for a delay of 14 days to provide time for all the constitutional and legal questions surrounding the hanging to be resolved, and for detailed planning of the execution to take place.

The American concerns about the hanging have a sharply political edge, since the hanging has come to be seen, among Iraqis and others, as a metaphor for all that bedevils the United States enterprise in Iraq. For the past three years, the United States has attempted to lay the foundations in Iraq for a civil society and a nation under law. American officials say privately that the Maliki government, by allowing the Hussein execution to be conducted as it did, signaled more powerfully than ever before that it was unwilling or incapable of surmounting the deep sectarian divisions here.

The Americans have said in recent days that they feared that matters might get out of hand when Mr. Maliki, at midnight on Friday, chose to rush the hanging within hours rather than wait until after the Id holiday. In the end, these Americans have said, they decided that the American role, once Mr. Maliki signed the execution order, should be limited to making sure Mr. Hussein was delivered securely to the execution site from the American detention center where he had been held since his capture in December 2003, and not to mounting a rearguard effort to halt the hanging that would have involved riding roughshod over the Iraqi leaders’ insistence on their sovereignty in the execution.

According to the account given by the United States military command, the American role ended when Mr. Hussein stepped off the Black Hawk helicopter that carried him to the Khadamiyah prison at about 5.30 a.m. local time on Saturday and was handed over, at the doors to the execution block, to Iraqi officials. There were no Americans present at the execution itself.

The Maliki government’s representatives at the hanging included a judge and a prosecutor from the special tribunal that condemned Mr. Hussein to death for his role in the killing of 148 men and boys from the Shiite town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, after Mr. Hussein survived what he said was an assassination attempt there in 1982.

Also attending was Mr. Maliki’s national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, and he was identified today by another of those who was present as one of two people — both Maliki government officials — who had held up cellphones towards the gallows to record the hanging. Munqith al-Faroun, who was the deputy prosecutor in the Dujail case, said in a telephone interview that he had recognized Mr. Rubaie, a physician who spent years in exile in London under Mr. Hussein, but that he knew the other official only by sight and could not name him.

Mr. Faroun said he was not personally affronted by the use of the cellphones, since the government was making its own official video recording of the hanging, which was released without sound shortly after the hanging. But he said he was puzzled as to how the two officials managed to get their cellphones into the execution block, since the American who flew the official party to Khadamiyah and maintained outer security at the execution block had demanded that all those attending the execution surrender their phones before entering.

Releasing the cellphone images for posting on the Internet was another matter, Mr. Faroun said, and one that should be investigated, along with the verbal abuse of Mr. Hussein. “I deeply resented that,” he said, “and I think you will have heard my voice on the cellphone recording making that clear.” Moments before the hanging, a voice on one of the recordings, responding to the cries of “Moktada!” and “Go to hell!” can be heard appealing for respect for the occasion. “Please no!” the voice says. “The man is about to be executed.”

[firetruck41]

Originally Posted by swank60

Well, it could be put another way:

China is sick and tired of the US and invades. They dig GWB out of a spiderhole, put him on trial and find him guilty, punishment = death. They keep him in custody and decide to exicute him on Christmas (or Easter, if you'd rather), then turn him over to the Democrats to hang him. Ted Kennedy, George Clooney and Nancy Pelosi stand around and taunt him the whole time while Michael Moore films it on his video cell phone...

How does the 30% of people in the US who still support GWB react, and what do they do?

There's a few minor differences, for instance, Iraqis put him on trial, Iraqis decided to execute him, and they decided when to execute him, not the US.

[JuttyShabango]

What ever credibility the Iraqi goverment had was lost by this bullshit that just happened. U.S. also.

Both goverments together can't control the procedure or the method and it makes us look no better than the mob doing the lynching.

Saddam should have been moved to the cell next to Noreiga down a mile underground and the lid sealed.

[swank60]

Originally Posted by firetruck41

There's a few minor differences, for instance, Iraqis put him on trial, Iraqis decided to execute him, and they decided when to execute him, not the US.

that's true.

I'm very drunk.

[cary]

The SOB deserved a horrible death. That said, in in the interest of trying to bring about peace in IRAQ, there should have been no taunting, name calling, or other bullshit. All it did was make the new Iraqi goverment look the same as the old one, new players, same game. IMHO, they also should have waited a few days and done it in a thorough, organized manner, taped and well documented so that it was clear how it was done. They should have also done in outside in broad daylight, they looked like a bunch of terorists the way they did it.

[Cruisin'Carolina]

Originally Posted by cary

The SOB deserved a horrible death. That said, in in the interest of trying to bring about peace in IRAQ, there should have been no taunting, name calling, or other bullshit. All it did was make the new Iraqi goverment look the same as the old one, new players, same game. IMHO, they also should have waited a few days and done it in a thorough, organized manner, taped and well documented so that it was clear how it was done. They should have also done in outside in broad daylight, they looked like a bunch of terorists the way they did it.

x2...

[cary]

I also forgot to add, the new regime looks even worse since theyu represented that Saddam was scared, then released the tape with no audio. They have already shown they are loose with the truth and can't trusted. Saddam may have been a lot of things, but fear was not something I saw in his face. Frankly, I believe he was to much of a narcissist to be afraid, I think he truly believed what he did was right and that God would see it that way. At least Hitler knew what he did was wrong.