[Vision2020] More on Hussein

[J Ford]

Apparently, there is a video of the hanging - not something I care to watch 
(seen a couple in my day - not a pleasant sight.) but I offer this article 
in it's stead.


BAGHDAD, Iraq (Dec. 30) - Saddam Hussein struggled briefly after American 
military guards handed him over to Iraqi executioners before dawn Saturday. 
But as his final moments approached and masked executioners slipped a black 
cloth and noose around his neck, he grew calm.

In a final moment of defiance, he refused a hood to cover his eyes.

Hours after Saddam faced the same fate he was accused of inflicting on 
countless thousands during a quarter-century of ruthless power, Iraqi state 
television showed grainy video of what it said was his body, the head 
uncovered and the neck twisted at a sharp angle.

A man whose testimony helped lead to Saddam's conviction and execution 
before sunrise said he was shown the body because "everybody wanted to make 
sure that he was really executed."

"Now, he is in the garbage of history," said Jawad Abdul-Aziz, who lost his 
father, three brothers and 22 cousins in the reprisal killings that followed 
a botched 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in the Shiite town of 
Dujail.

The post-execution footage showed the man identified as Saddam lying on a 
stretcher, covered in a white shroud. His neck and part of the shroud have 
what appear to be bloodstains. His eyes are closed.

Al-Arabiya satellite television reported Saturday night that a delegation 
including the governor of Salahuddin Province and the head of Saddam's clan 
retrieved his body from Baghdad and took it for burial near the executed 
dictator's hometown of Tikrit. The broadcaster reported the burial would 
take place Sunday. The report could not immediately be verified.

Earlier, in Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City, hundreds of people danced 
in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate. Some hanged 
an effigy of Saddam. The government did not impose a round-the-clock curfew 
as it did last month when Saddam was convicted to thwart any surge in 
retaliatory violence.

It was a grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three U.S. 
presidents. Despite his ouster, Washington, its allies and the new Iraqi 
leaders remain mired in a fight to quell a stubborn insurgency by Saddam 
loyalists and a vicious sectarian conflict.

The execution took place during the year's deadliest month for U.S. troops, 
with the toll reaching 109. At least 2,998 members of the U.S. military have 
been killed since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to an 
Associated Press count.

President Bush said in a statement issued from his ranch in Texas that 
bringing Saddam to justice "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."

He said that the execution marks the "end of a difficult year for the Iraqi 
people and for our troops" and cautioned that Saddam's death will not halt 
the violence in Iraq.

Within hours of his death, bombings killed at least 68 people in Iraq, 
including one planted on a minibus that exploded in a fish market in a 
mostly Shiite town south of Baghdad.

Ali Hamza, a 30-year-old university professor, said he went outside to shoot 
his gun into the air after he learned of Saddam's death.

"Now all the victims' families will be happy because Saddam got his just 
sentence," said Hamza, who lives in Diwaniyah, a Shiite town 80 miles south 
of Baghdad.

But people in the Sunni-dominated city of Tikrit, once a power base of 
Saddam, lamented his death.

"The president, the leader Saddam Hussein is a martyr and God will put him 
along with other martyrs. Do not be sad nor complain because he has died the 
death of a holy warrior," said Sheik Yahya al-Attawi, a cleric at the Saddam 
Big Mosque.

Police blocked the entrances to Tikrit and said nobody was allowed to leave 
or enter the city for four days. Despite the security precaution, gunmen 
took to the streets of Tikrit, carrying pictures of Saddam, shooting into 
the air, and calling for vengeance.

Security forces also set up roadblocks at the entrance to another Sunni 
stronghold, Samarra, and a curfew was imposed after about 500 people took to 
the streets protesting the execution of Saddam.

A couple hundred people also protested the execution just outside the Anbar 
capital of Ramadi, and more than 2,000 people demonstrated in Adwar, the 
village south of Tikrit where Saddam was captured by U.S. troops hiding in 
an underground bunker.

In a statement, Saddam's lawyers said that in the aftermath of his death, 
"the world will know that Saddam Hussein lived honestly, died honestly, and 
maintained his principles."

"He did not lie when he declared his trial null," they said.

Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former 
chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, were not hanged along with their 
former leader as originally planned. Officials wanted to reserve the 
occasion for Saddam alone.

"We wanted him to be executed on a special day," National Security adviser 
Mouwafak al-Rubaie told state-run al-Iraqiya television.

Sami al-Askari, the political adviser of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, 
told the AP that Saddam initially resisted when he was taken by Iraqi guards 
but was composed in his final moments.

He said Saddam was clad in a black suit, hat and shoes, rather than prison 
garb. His hat was removed and his hands tied shortly before the noose was 
slipped around his neck.

Saddam repeated a prayer after a Sunni Muslim cleric who was present.

"Saddam later was taken to the gallows and refused to have his head covered 
with a hood," al-Askari said. "Before the rope was put around his neck, 
Saddam shouted: 'God is great. The nation will be victorious and Palestine 
is Arab.'"

Iraqi state television showed footage of guards in ski masks placing a noose 
around Saddam's neck. Saddam appeared calm as he stood on the metal 
framework of the gallows. The footage cuts off just before the execution.

Saddam was executed at a former military intelligence headquarters in 
Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah, al-Askari said. During his 
regime, Saddam had numerous dissidents executed in the facility, located in 
a neighborhood that is home to the Iraqi capital's most important Shiite 
shrine - the Imam Kazim shrine.

The Iraqi prime minister's office released a statement that said Saddam's 
execution was a "strong lesson" to ruthless leaders who commit crimes 
against their own people.

"We strongly reject considering Saddam as a representative of any sect in 
Iraq because the tyrant only represented his evil soul," the statement said. 
"The door is still open for those whose hands are not tainted with the blood 
of innocent people to take part in the political process and work on 
rebuilding Iraq."

The execution came 56 days after a court convicted Saddam and sentenced him 
to death for his role in the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims from Dujail. 
Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam's appeal Monday and ordered him 
executed within 30 days.

A U.S. judge on Friday refused to stop Saddam's execution, rejecting a 
last-minute court challenge.

U.S. troops cheered as news of Saddam's execution appeared on television at 
the mess hall at Forward Operating Base Loyalty in eastern Baghdad. But some 
soldiers expressed doubt that Saddam's death would be a significant turning 
point for Iraq.

"First it was weapons of mass destruction. Then when there were none, it was 
that we had to find Saddam. We did that, but then it was that we had to put 
him on trial," said Spc. Thomas Sheck, 25, who is on his second tour in 
Iraq. "So now, what will be the next story they tell us to keep us over 
here?"

At his death, he was in the midst of a second trial, charged with genocide 
and other crimes for a 1987-88 military crackdown that killed an estimated 
180,000 Kurds in northern Iraq. Experts said the trial of his co-defendants 
was likely to continue despite his execution.

Many people in Iraq's Shiite majority were eager to see the execution of a 
man whose Sunni Arab-dominated regime oppressed them and Kurds. Before the 
hanging, a mosque preacher in the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Friday called 
Saddam's execution "God's gift to Iraqis."

In a farewell message to Iraqis posted Wednesday on the Internet, Saddam 
said he was giving his life for his country as part of the struggle against 
the U.S. "Here, I offer my soul to God as a sacrifice, and if he wants, he 
will send it to heaven with the martyrs," he said.

One of Saddam's lawyers, Issam Ghazzawi, said the letter was written by 
Saddam on Nov. 5, the day he was convicted by an Iraqi tribunal in the 
Dujail killings.

Najeeb al-Nauimi, a member of Saddam's legal team, said U.S. authorities 
maintained physical custody of Saddam until the execution to prevent him 
being humiliated publicly or his corpse being mutilated, as has happened to 
previous Iraqi leaders deposed by force. He said they didn't want anything 
to happen to further inflame Sunni Arabs.

"This is the end of an era in Iraq," al-Nauimi said from Doha, Qatar. "The 
Baath regime ruled for 35 years. Saddam was vice president or president of 
Iraq during those years. For Iraqis, he will be very well remembered. Like a 
martyr, he died for the sake of his country."

Iraq's death penalty was suspended by the U.S. military after it toppled 
Saddam in 2003, but the new Iraqi government reinstated it two years later, 
saying executions would deter criminals.

Saddam's own regime used executions and extrajudicial killings as a tool of 
political repression, both to eliminate real or suspected political 
opponents and to maintain a reign of terror.

In the months after he seized power on July 16, 1979, he had hundreds of 
members of his own party and army officers slain. In 1996, he ordered the 
slaying of two sons-in-law who had defected to Jordan but returned to 
Baghdad after receiving guarantees of safety.

Saddam built Iraq into a one of the Arab world's most modern societies, but 
then plunged the country into an eight-year war with neighboring Iran that 
killed hundreds of thousands of people on both sides and wrecked Iraq's 
economy.

When the U.S. invaded in 2003, Iraqis had been transformed from among the 
region's most prosperous people to some of its most impoverished.

Associated Press Writer Will Weissert contributed to this report.


J  :]

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>From photos to predictions, The MSN Entertainment Guide to Golden Globes has 
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