Hussein to hang within 48 hours

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In summary: However, to say that it would be far happier... I think this may be stretching a bit. Do you think all the women raped by his henchmen would agree with you? Back to the topic at hand... Unfortunately, that seems to continuing under US occupation.In summary, the British said the unit was suspected of murder and the rescued prisoners appeared to have been tortured. UK suspends co-operation with the military. UK suspends co-operation with the military.
  • #1
Ivan Seeking
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http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/12/28/hussein/index.html?eref=rss_topstories [Broken]

Some Sunnis are promising all-out civil war. One journalist noted that Hussein is not worth the havoc and suffering it will cause.

What do you think? What do you expect? Is this yet another blunder for the Bush admin, or will this help to provide closure in some sense that will be beneficial?

Although I no longer support the death penalty, when it comes to tyrants of this magnitude, its seems that a higher...or perhaps a lower standard must apply. At the same time, if I could undo what's been done in Iraq by us, I would prefer to see him as a crippled dictator who was made powerless. Now we have a martyr.
 
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  • #2
Bye bye so-damn-insane.
 
  • #3
Ivan Seeking said:
Is this yet another blunder for the Bush admin...
How could it be? The Bush admin isn't executing him.
 
  • #4
russ_watters said:
How could it be? The Bush admin isn't executing him.

Yet the ire of Sunnis will be directed at the Bush admin.
It seems to me that the allied forces ought to be a bit more machiavellian:
A "prince" who restrains a local regime backed by him may gain more sympathy in the population at large by showing "mercy" in certain instances by overriding the local regime's policy.
 
  • #5
Iraq would be a far happier place if that genocidal dictator were still in power. No kidding. :frown:
 
  • #6
Rach3 said:
Iraq would be a far happier place if that genocidal dictator were still in power. No kidding. :frown:

I can see saying it would be different, as that would be without dispute.

However, to say that it would be far happier... I think this may be stretching a bit. Do you think all the women raped by his henchmen would agree with you?
How about the kids whose fathers disappeared into the torture chambers never to return?

Certainly, Iraq is a mess. Without a doubt, innocent people die there everyday. Is it better than when Saddam was in power? To be honest, I don't know - I'm not an iraqi. In my opinion, anyone who tries to pretend to know the state of affairs in that country without actually living there is deluding his or herself.


Back to the topic at hand...

I don't think the death of Saddam will have much of an effect on the day to day operations of the country. Insurgents are still going to wire up car bombs as they have done before. I seriously doubt that they (the insurgents) have held a certain amount of their power in reserve in the event that saddam is executed.
 
  • #7
russ_watters said:
How could it be? The Bush admin isn't executing him.
This is quite true. However, the US occupation makes the US responsible for what the Iraqi government does, and the US became responsible under international law by virtue of a military occupation of a sovreign state. Even if that were not the case, the US, by force, depose the Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein and allowed the Shii to assume control of the Iraqi government. For the moment the Kurds are on the sidelines, but they aren't sorry to see Saddam gone.

It is a matter of perception on the part of some Sunnis. If all they perceive is that the US invaded and occupied Iraq, captured Saddam, and delivered him to the Shii - well then that pretty much means that the US is responsible for what ultimately happens.

In many ways, the US military has behaved as Saddam's military behaved, except that the US did give warning and allowed most civilians (non-combatants) to leave places like Fallujah when they attacked.


ptabor said:
I think this may be stretching a bit. Do you think all the women raped by his henchmen would agree with you? How about the kids whose fathers disappeared into the torture chambers never to return?
Unfortunately, that seems to continuing under US occupation.

The British said the unit was suspected of murder and the rescued prisoners appeared to have been tortured.

However, Basra council described the raid as illegal and has suspended co-operation with the military.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6208535.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6083200.stm
 
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  • #8
ptabor said:
How about the kids whose fathers disappeared into the torture chambers never to return?

Is it any different now? Torture by militas and "police" keep on going, even more prevalent than under Hussein.

NYT said:
BAGHDAD, Dec. 25 — Hundreds of British and Iraqi soldiers assaulted a police station in the southern city of Basra today, killing seven gunmen, rescuing 127 prisoners from what the British said was almost certain execution and ultimately reducing the facility to rubble.

...As recently as October, the Iraqi government suspended an entire police brigade in Baghdad on suspicions of participation in death squads. Today’s raid also raised echoes of the infamous Baghdad prison run by the Interior Ministry, known as Site 4, where more than 1,400 prisoners were subjected to systematic abuse and torture.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/w...&en=a4b07aea557e9659&ei=5094&partner=homepage



ptabor said:
I don't think the death of Saddam will have much of an effect on the day to day operations of the country. Insurgents are still going to wire up car bombs as they have done before. I seriously doubt that they (the insurgents) have held a certain amount of their power in reserve in the event that saddam is executed.

Insurgents? Car bombs? You seem to be a few years behind, friend. It's mass kidnappings, mass torture, mass murder, bombings of landmark buildings, and open civil war. It's no longer "insurgents" vs. "occupiers", it's now Sunni militia vs. Shia police death squads.
 
  • #9
Astronuc said:
However, the US occupation makes the US responsible for what the Iraqi government does, and the US became responsible under international law by virtue of a military occupation of a sovreign state.
AFAIK, that's only true if the occupying power is running the country. We are not. [edit: Actually, that probably means, by definition, that we are no longer an "occupying power".]

I recognize that we (Bush) will be blamed for everything, my point is simply that just because people choose to blame us (Bush) doesn't automatically make everything our (Bush's) fault.
In many ways, the US military has behaved as Saddam's military behaved, except that the US did give warning and allowed most civilians (non-combatants) to leave places like Fallujah when they attacked.
That really is an absurd thing to say, Astronuc. With the exception of the prisoner abuses, our military conducted itself in a mannar utterly unlike how Saddam's military behaved. When being tasked with things within their expertise, our military is equal to the best in the world for both skill and conduct. For Saddam's military's conduct, you can pretty much just copy down the Geneva conventions in bullet-point form - he violated pretty much every relevant section, from human shields, to cannon-fodder. About the only illegal tactic he normally uses that he didn't was chemical weapons - and if he could have, he would have.

One of the terrible ironies here is how Hussein's vast number of crimes are being conveniently forgotten, and not just by our enemies. He was only convicted of a few specific crimes, but that's only because there is no point to convicting someone for thousands of separate crimes all with the same punishment. It would be a waste of time during which he could already be dead.
 
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  • #10
There's no point in comparing Hussein's actions with the U.S. military - it's an easy strawman. The issue that is very relevant today, is comparing Hussein's crimes with those of the de facto rulers of Iraq, the vast street militas.
 
  • #11
Rach3 said:
There's no point in comparing Hussein's actions with the U.S. military - it's an easy strawman. The issue that is very relevant today, is comparing Hussein's crimes with those of the de facto rulers of Iraq, the vast street militas.
True enough. For that, though, the comparison is not an easy one. Hussein's actions were not consistent enough to simply extrapolate out to how he'd be acting now if he were still in power. A lot of what he did was simply Stalinist solutions to "problems" like the existence of the Kurds and those were individual acts, killing tens, hundreds, or thousands of civilians at a time. Whether he would have done similar things today had he been in power is something we have no way to know, though for the worst act (the Kurds), that problem was "solved" and wouldn't need to be solved again.
 
  • #12
I'm against the death penalty in all cases. The crime for which he was convicted was a relatively small one. Relative to HIS other crimes that is, not to crimes in general. I think it would be fitting if he spent the rest of his life in court defending himself against the relatives of all of his victims, one at a time.

In hindsight, we can now see that it was his brutality that kept Iraq together. If the US had not toppled him, he would eventually have died and perhaps the country would have fallen to its present condition anyway. That's what happened to Yugoslavia when Tito died.
 
  • #13
RW said:
That really is an absurd thing to say, Astronuc. With the exception of the prisoner abuses, our military conducted itself in a mannar utterly unlike how Saddam's military behaved. When being tasked with things within their expertise, our military is equal to the best in the world for both skill and conduct. For Saddam's military's conduct, you can pretty much just copy down the Geneva conventions in bullet-point form - he violated pretty much every relevant section, from human shields, to cannon-fodder. About the only illegal tactic he normally uses that he didn't was chemical weapons - and if he could have, he would have.
Read Thomas Ricks's book "Fiasco". There were several cases where American soldiers murdered Iraqi civilians. Look at the sweeps that various units did - rounding up all males age 16-60 in an area and sending to Abu Ghraib and other prisons were they were detained for months. That is pretty much what Saddam's army did.

In Haditha, Memories of a Massacre
Iraqi Townspeople Describe Slaying of 24 Civilians by Marines in Nov. 19 Incident
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/26/AR2006052602069.html
BAGHDAD, May 26 -- Witnesses to the slaying of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in the western town of Haditha say the Americans shot men, women and children at close range in retaliation for the death of a Marine lance corporal in a roadside bombing.

Aws Fahmi, a Haditha resident who said he watched and listened from his home as Marines went from house to house killing members of three families, recalled hearing his neighbor across the street, Younis Salim Khafif, plead in English for his life and the lives of his family members. "I heard Younis speaking to the Americans, saying: 'I am a friend. I am good,' " Fahmi said. "But they killed him, and his wife and daughters."

The 24 Iraqi civilians killed on Nov. 19 included children and the women who were trying to shield them, witnesses told a Washington Post special correspondent in Haditha this week and U.S. investigators said in Washington. The girls killed inside Khafif's house were ages 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1, according to death certificates.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/21/umarine121.xml

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13053200/

Ricks recognizes that units like the 101st did an excellent job in working with locals. However other units like the 4th Infantry Division were brutal on occasion.

Lt. Col. David Poirier, who commanded a military police battalion attached to the 4th Infantry Division and was based in Tikrit from June 2003 to March 2004, said the division's approach was indiscriminate. "With the brigade and battalion commanders, it became a philosophy: 'Round up all the military-age males, because we don't know who's good or bad.' " Col. Alan King, a civil affairs officer working at the Coalition Provisional Authority, had a similar impression of the 4th Infantry's approach. "Every male from 16 to 60" that the 4th Infantry could catch was detained, he said. "And when they got out, they were supporters of the insurgency."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/23/AR2006072300495.html
 
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  • #14
Astronuc said:
However other units like the 4th Infantry Division were brutal on occasion.
I don't see how this supports your claim that "the US military has behaved as Saddam's military behaved." Your example of this occasional brutality is that some people were rounded up and then released. Is that how you see the behavior of Saddam's military?

Lt. Col. David Poirier, who commanded a military police battalion attached to the 4th Infantry Division and was based in Tikrit from June 2003 to March 2004, said the division's approach was indiscriminate. "With the brigade and battalion commanders, it became a philosophy: 'Round up all the military-age males, because we don't know who's good or bad.' " Col. Alan King, a civil affairs officer working at the Coalition Provisional Authority, had a similar impression of the 4th Infantry's approach. "Every male from 16 to 60" that the 4th Infantry could catch was detained, he said. "And when they got out, they were supporters of the insurgency."
 
  • #15
my halfhearted attempt at playing the devil's advocate has failed.

However, in the process I believe this thread has become derailed. It has become focused on contrasting the actions of the US occupational forces and its enemies with that of Saddam Hussein.

Rach3: In your post regarding my statement (the only one that was actually relevant, sorry) that I don't think it will have an effect - it would seem that you agree with me. ie, the situation really can't get too much worse.

To those that were hurt by Saddam, I don't know that it will provide much closure. Certainly it would be a relief to know the man who tortured you couldn't do it again... but this may pale in comparison to the day to day anxiety of living in a war zone...

I think closure will only come, if ever at all, when the iraqi people are able to contain the violence and govern themselves.
 
  • #16
My greatest concern is that Saddam's execution will only fan the flames of the insergencey. Admittedly he was a brutal dictator, but we can now see by looking at the the insergency and murders based on religious differences, that his actions kept total chaos in check.

We haven't been able to do that with; high explosives, phosphorus, quazi napalm, smaw ne, or street patrols. We have a lot of Iraqi blood on our own hands.

I would rather that they send the guy into a very Spartan exile rather than make a martyr out of him.

And BTW it is the American military who have held Saddam in a cell all of this time, not the Iraqi army or police.
 
  • #17
Russ, we invaded, we caught him, we held him for a trial that could only end one way, and now we have handed him over. We could just as easily have imprisoned him here as we did Noriega, or we could have killed him on sight and ended it long ago.
 
  • #18
edward said:
I would rather that they send the guy into a very Spartan exile rather than make a martyr out of him.

i'm not sure if saddam will be much of a martyr. it seems most groups supported him out of self interest or out of fear, not because of an ideology. i don't think many people who are not currently participating in this conflict will become participants because of what happens to saddam... maybe some patriotic ex-military people would, but most of those people are already tapped as it is.

i expect a lot of bombings/killings to be attributed to revenge over saddam's death, but most of those would have happened anyway. i think a lot of people will pay lip service to saddam's fate, but vary little new action.
 
  • #19
It appears he was just executed!
 
  • #20
morphism said:
It appears he was just executed!

Got any source?
 
  • #21
al-Hurra and al-Arabiya television networks, according to CNN.

Here's al-Arabiya streaming (but it's in Arabic):
http://www.alarabiya.net/aatv.aspx
 
  • #22
So far it doesn't seem to have made things any worse...
 
  • #23
There is a video of it, if you want to see it. You can find it online. I saw it.
 
  • #24
Perhaps there is a delayed response to this event.

Saddam not hanged 'for revenge'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6221481.stm
"This whole execution is about justice," Hiwa Osman, an adviser for the Iraqi president told the BBC.

Mr Osman's remarks come after new video filmed on a mobile phone showed a man taunting Saddam Hussein on the gallows.

. . . .

But the unofficial video images - posted on the internet and shown on Arab and Western channels - show he exchanged taunts with onlookers from the gallows.

One of them shouts the name of Moqtada al-Sadr, a prominent Shia cleric.

. . . .

The taunts using the cleric's name will reinforce the view among Saddam Hussein's own Sunni tribesmen that the execution was more about Shia revenge than Iraqi justice, says the BBC's Peter Biles in Baghdad.
 
  • #25
It was allot more revenge than anything else if you ask me. Having judged him on one crime among many others proves that the jurisdiction was looking for a justification, rather than trying to present allegations in a formal way.
 
  • #26
Why should it be necessary to try him for every crime when one is enough to justify death? Wouldn't that be unnecessarily redundant?
 
  • #27
russ_watters said:
Why should it be necessary to try him for every crime when one is enough to justify death? Wouldn't that be unnecessarily redundant?

It's a matter of formality.
 
  • #28
Werg22 said:
It's a matter of formality.
If it's a formality that impedes the delivery of justice, what good is that?
 
  • #29
im surprised they didn't charge him with 'all' of his crimes, if for no other reason then to be able to put in the history books he was guilty of all those things. without a trial for all his other crimes, it will be difficult to assume he was guilty of them in the future.
 
  • #30
Werg22 said:
It's a matter of formality.
Does the court exist for the purpose of formality or for the purpose of justice?
 
  • #31
Gokul43201 said:
If it's a formality that impedes the delivery of justice, what good is that?

any time a trial convicts someone of a crime, they wasted time for not considering the person guilty in the first place.
 
  • #32
devil-fire said:
im surprised they didn't charge him with 'all' of his crimes, if for no other reason then to be able to put in the history books he was guilty of all those things. without a trial for all his other crimes, it will be difficult to assume he was guilty of them in the future.
Why? Historians are not bound by court decisions and neither are you. You are quite free to decide for yourself whether you think OJ really did kill his wife.
 
  • #33
devil-fire said:
any time a trial convicts someone of a crime, they wasted time for not considering the person guilty in the first place.
True! But in this case, an extended trial has no capability of altering the outcome!

But how much longer might it have taken to go through the entire list of charges? Years? If there were some good way to get the whole thing done reasonably quickly and fairly, then I'm all for it. Do you think it unnecessary to recognize the finiteness of lives and the importance of timescales to the delivery of justice? There may also be the non-negligible risk (considering the state of turmoil) of escape that factors into the whole thing.
 
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  • #34
It is being reported that the video showing the jailers taunting Hussein - some say clearly showing that the hanging was Shia revenge, and that Saddam was effectively being told this - has caused outrage in the Sunni community. This is causing sympathetic Sunni moderates to show signs of activism.

...Many Sunnis, already outraged by Saddam's hurried execution which happened just four days after a court upheld his conviction and sentence, were angered by news of the unruly scene in the execution chamber.

Saddam's execution was captured on video, in which the former dictator was taunted with chants of " Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada" -- referring to Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric who controls one of Iraq's most violent religious militias. Al-Sadr is also a major power behind the government of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.[continued]
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070101/saddam_reax_070101/20070101?hub=World [Broken]
 
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  • #35
devil-fire said:
any time a trial convicts someone of a crime, they wasted time for not considering the person guilty in the first place.
What does that have to do with anything? No one is suggesting there should be no trial. Just no extra trials for other crimes.
 
<h2>What does "Hussein to hang within 48 hours" mean?</h2><p>"Hussein to hang within 48 hours" refers to the execution of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, which was scheduled to take place within 48 hours after his death sentence was upheld by the Iraqi High Tribunal.</p><h2>Why was Saddam Hussein sentenced to death?</h2><p>Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity, including the killing of 148 Shi'ite men and boys in the town of Dujail in 1982.</p><h2>How long has Saddam Hussein been on death row?</h2><p>Saddam Hussein was on death row for approximately 4 years before his execution in 2006. His death sentence was initially handed down in November 2006, but was delayed due to appeals and legal proceedings.</p><h2>Who will carry out the execution of Saddam Hussein?</h2><p>The execution of Saddam Hussein was carried out by the Iraqi government, specifically by members of the Iraqi High Tribunal.</p><h2>What were the reactions to Saddam Hussein's execution?</h2><p>The reactions to Saddam Hussein's execution were mixed. Some saw it as a just punishment for his crimes, while others criticized the timing and manner of his execution. There were also concerns about the impact it would have on the already fragile political situation in Iraq.</p>

What does "Hussein to hang within 48 hours" mean?

"Hussein to hang within 48 hours" refers to the execution of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, which was scheduled to take place within 48 hours after his death sentence was upheld by the Iraqi High Tribunal.

Why was Saddam Hussein sentenced to death?

Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity, including the killing of 148 Shi'ite men and boys in the town of Dujail in 1982.

How long has Saddam Hussein been on death row?

Saddam Hussein was on death row for approximately 4 years before his execution in 2006. His death sentence was initially handed down in November 2006, but was delayed due to appeals and legal proceedings.

Who will carry out the execution of Saddam Hussein?

The execution of Saddam Hussein was carried out by the Iraqi government, specifically by members of the Iraqi High Tribunal.

What were the reactions to Saddam Hussein's execution?

The reactions to Saddam Hussein's execution were mixed. Some saw it as a just punishment for his crimes, while others criticized the timing and manner of his execution. There were also concerns about the impact it would have on the already fragile political situation in Iraq.

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