Saddams request to be shot – as a Head of State usually is – was rejected. Because he is no longer Head of State, he will be hanged.
Apparently, he use to have opponents shot if they showed remorse and hanged if they didn’t. The fact that he will be hanged like a common criminal will be a giant slap in the face to his Arab honour and pride.
Unfortunately, he’ll probably appeal and it could drag on for another 12 months.
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What horrible crap! I can’t believe that this process can have any value at all. It is just something that increases violence, hate and revenge and all the other possible worse human traits. How could the US be so incredibly stupid to even want it!!!
Why on earth didn’t they just shoot him when they found him , end of story. No this way some kind of “justice” can be done. After a 100,000 Iraqis dead, the US loss of ALL POSSILBLE CREDIBILITY and all, I just can’t believe it. What absolute crap!.
The ‘value’ of the process is that that it shows Iraqis (and the rest of the world) that Iraq now operates under the rule of law. The dictatorship is gone.
If you believe in the rule of law, you believe EVERYONE is subject to the same law whether you love or hate them… whether the crime is large or small.
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You are unaware of the fact that the US has a very violent culture. For example the US assumes that the death penalty is OK, acceptable worldwide. Now many other cultures don’t look at the death penalty as something to be proud of. So already right from the start this process is debatable.
The US assumes that it is OK for people to kill each other because this is what will continue to happen even more so with a process to Saddam. Then again the US culture is really one of general violence, conflict, “competition”, the survival of the fittest, winner or looser schemes etc. Other countries are far from this way of seeing the world (or at least they pretend to be…maybe by just paying lip service). In the US nothing is an entitlement, no free health, you have to deserve everything, you generally suck and are guilty until you become rich.
So hang Saddam, how cool, how sadic and violent, how exciting. And then they wonder why Chavez and other extremists become attractive to other people. The US should have gotten rid of Saddam as soon as possible and should have promoted some kind of peace etc. But they just don’t get it.
km,
Dead on. The U.S. may be screwed up, but our saving grace has always been rule of law. When things get bad enough, the people have always had rule of law to protect them. As “uncivilized” as we may be, it is undoubtably the only strong principle we have managed to preserve. The pendulum swings to and fro, and there is never perfection, but all the big talk about democracy and freedom comes down to that single thing: rule of law.
I’d say most of the Arab world is intimately familiar with the death penalty. Of course, whether or not they want it applied to Saddam depends on their politics.
Naturally, the minute he was pulled from that “spider hole” he had to know he was going to die.
at least they don’t want to drown him in pig blood…
-Imp
I recall the same happened at the Neuremburg trials. Many convicted SS officers, including Goerring, requested that they be shot, as that was considered more honorable. But the Allies wanted to demonstrate that the convicted weren’t honorable, but rather criminals. Since hanging is for criminals it sends that message to the world.
Now I see Saddam is telling “his” people not to try to get revenge on the invading troops. Is this something bordering on sincerity or one last bit of propoganda from a man with no other cards to play?
I know nobody cares, but Saddam's verdict was handed down by an [i]Iraqi [/i]court, his prosecuting attorneys were [i]Iraqi[/i], and one of his [i]defense[/i] attorneys was a former US Attorney general.
Like I said, I know nobody cares, but it just seems like someone ought to point these things out.
It’s not whether we in the west care- it’s more that those in the Arab world will probably only hear Al Jazeera’s version. To many Arabs, the ‘Iraqi’ government & judiciary are just American sock puppets, so the distinction will be lost on them.
Erg, that’s a good point. But as bais as Al Jazeera is, can even they come out as being pro-Saddam? What would their angle be in using this to come out against America? I don’t think they can get away with an anti-death penalty angle, and the “Saddam: Hero of Islam” routine would be a tough sell, too.
Just a brief aside:
Are you aware that Al-Jazeera was deemed a tool of the west by Saddam?
“I blame Al-Jazeera - they are marketing for the Americans!” Iraqi Information Minister on a report that U.S. troops were closing in.
If the americans call it propaganda and the arabs say its a tool of the west, its a likely sign that it’s doing it job extremely well.
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I shouldn’t have even said Al Jazeera- they’re irrelevant to what I was trying to get at. I more mean that the “party line” that the radical jihadists are using to sell insurrection is that the Iraqi govt is just a puppet of America. Of course, there’s enough sectarian violence that has nothing to do with the US that it’s not like they’ll ever run out of things to fight about.
fuck… this whole mid east bullshit reeks of potential problems. this verdict brings up so many god damn questions about what the fuck we should and shouldnt be doing. the overall effect it has on me… wow this is humanity. there cant be a bigger slap in your reality detached face than violently overthrowing a government and executing its leader for gasing thousands of people.
my considerations on the death penalty get thrown out the window because of the scale and weight this has. granted generally death penalty is frowned upon in most of the west and parts of america but how else do you deal justice. what prison will hold him? is keeping him alive a less problematic stance? i mean shit… that place would be under constant attack. the only thing i can think to say is just hang him. piss off the smallest minority of people and hope for the best.
what about the rest of the world though? i mean i know people dont want america playing the world police but should we? should we want to? this is a critical time in how we develop as a world. what happens to other governments next time they think they should attempt genocide?
Yes, it’s very problematic. Things are so unstable over there that I wouldn’t feel confident that any prison would hold him. Even though he was a paranoid, genocidal tyrant a pretty goodly amount of his subjects would like him back on the throne.
i know this guy killed lots of people and if i were personally familiar with them my brain would be filled with [Anger Chemicals A through F], but looking at him without those chemicals, i pity him.
i dont think he should be set free, and if his continued living really gave optimism to some strange group of people that wanted him in power so they could take advantage of the fact that he would owe them favors, ok i guess erase him from existence.
but if his death doesnt directly cause concrete benefits such as demoralizing his violent supporters, i see no reason to do it. if his death doesnt cause more happiness on earth, and we can find a way to create more happiness with him alive, then i think its very obvious that he should be kept alive.
in him i see a pathetic animal whose mind has been corrupted in some way, not some spawn of the devil who is emanating a red glowing substance that creeps into the air and makes the rest of us slightly more evil. he is just a retard, like everyone else who is capable of doing things that are too stupid for me to consider doing.
the important point here is that he has some sort of knowledge that can be used to the benefit of the world. an absolute dictator is a massive, dangerous, and extremely unpredictable thing. and now we have captured one and we can put him in the lab and study him for the rest of his life. we can subject him to the strangest, most confusing and frustrating psychological experiments or in depth interogation. maybe we will know more about kim jong and we can be more prepared for when he does some crazy thing.
nobody benefits from him dying in any rational way. the only benefit will be in the form of brain chemical spewages that ought to be controlled for the sake of the long term benefits we can get from studying him.
FTR, that’s not what he has been sentenced to death for. The first trial was about his ordering the killing of 148 Shiite Muslims from the northern Iraqi 1982 in retaliation for an assassination attempt against him.
The other trials (including the gassing of the Kurds) have only just started. Iraqi law allows him to be hanged for the first crime before the other trials end so they now expect he’ll be executed at the end of January 2007.
You want to solve the problems in Iraq, don’t hang him.
Reinstate him.
That will fix all this muslim garbage, and bring home all of our brothers and sisters who die for absolutely nothing of any value to the citizenry they serve.
There’s no way Saddam could get the toothpaste back in the tube.
LMMFAOROTFL.
Touche’, I concede to the greatness of your perspective.