Image Credit: BBSNews screen grab from internet video accessed 2007-01-06.
More hangings will make Bush's Iraq problem even more intractable
BBSNews Editorial 2007-01-06 -- President Bush has reportedly not even seen the execution of Saddam Hussein that he helped engineer by war waged for the wrong reasons, but throngs of Arabs and the world at large have, and the perception is now Saddam Hussein is become a redeemed "martyr" in many eyes.
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Image of Saddam Hussein as the noose is put around his neck.
Image Credit: BBSNews screen grab from internet video accessed 2007-01-06. |
Hassan M. Fattah in the International Herald Tribune described an impression of Hussein's hanging in this way:
"Ayman Safadi, editor in chief of the independent Jordanian daily Al Ghad, said: "The final scene for many was of Saddam taken out of a hole. That has all changed now."
"At the heart of the surprising reversal of opinion is the contrast between the official video aired on Iraqi TV last Saturday, of Saddam taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose round his neck, and the grainy, shaky recording of Shiite militiamen taunting the deposed leader with his hands tied, telling Saddam to go to hell, praising the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and opening the trapdoor before Saddam had completed his prayer."
The Arab street is awash in newly found pro-Saddam Hussein enthusiasm and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has further commented on the hanging as reported in Gulf Daily News for the Saturday edition:
"In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, Mubarak said the timing of the hanging was "unthinkable" and that experts considered Saddam's trial under occupation illegal.Mubarak said: "No one will ever forget the way in which Saddam was executed. They turned him into a martyr and the problems in Iraq remain.
"People are executed all over the world, but what happened in Baghdad on the first day of Eid was unthinkable. I didn't believe it was happening. Why did they have to hurry? Why hang him when people are reciting their holiday prayers?"
"Then the pictures of the execution were revolting and barbaric, and I am not discussing here whether he deserved it or not. As for the trial, all experts in international law said it was an illegal trial because it was under occupation.
"Also, there was a conspiracy to carry out the execution before the end of the year," he added."
Further Hangings Possibly Scheduled for Sunday
In South Africa, on another continent that is becoming more war torn as a result of the Iraq civil war and conditions that have been made possible by the unstability that has occurred because the US went after Iraq instead of Bin Laden, the South African Star reports that Moqtada al-Sadr appears to have some influence in these executions:
"Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's half brother and former intelligence chief, and Awad Ahmed al-Bandar, head of a revolutionary court, were to have been hanged yesterday.Saddam, Barzan and Bandar were found guilty on November 5 of ordering the judicial murder of 148 Shi'ite men and boys from the village of Dujail in the 1980s.
They were sentenced to death for crimes against humanity.
A senior official from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's office, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the execution had been postponed "due to international pressure".
Baha al-Araji, an influential Shi'ite lawmaker from radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's parliamentary bloc, said: "I am sure it will be done on Sunday."
It's past time for the United States administration to stop these executions now by the most severe diplomatic means possible. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the US has a limited role now in the spiraling out of control civil war in Iraq. A war that the US invasion, based upon the false pretense of weapons of mass destruction, has wrought in Iraq.
The European Union has strongly condemned the circus that surrounded the execution of Saddam Hussein, with Reuters reporting:
"The European Union presidency condemned the death penalty on Friday, as speculation mounted that the Iraqi government would soon execute Saddam Hussein's two co-defendants."
And the United Nations has also weighed in and issued a statement earlier on Wednesday that the trials of the men condemned to be hanged on Sunday were flawed with UPI reporting:
"In a statement issued Wednesday, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said the trials of Awad Hamad Al-Bandar and Barzan Ibrahim Al-Hassan had not met international standards of fairness.'International law, as it currently stands, only allows the imposition of the death penalty as an exceptional measure within rigorous legal constraints,' Arbour said."
It is unfathomable to understand why the United States did not make sure that Saddam Hussein and the other war crime defendents in this case, regardless now of how they have been rounded up, have or had not been tried in the Hague, before the International Criminal Court. And it begs the question, is Robert Scheer, who wrote about an earlier time in US history in 1983 where it was three months before Donald Rumsfeld on a mission from Ronald Reagan shook Saddam Hussein's hand in 1983 in alliance over the Iraq-Iran War and the importance of US help in doing so; was he right?
"The hanging of Saddam Hussein was an act of barbarism that makes a mockery of President Bush’s claim it was 'an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy.'"
There should be a halt to any more executions. If nothing else, there should be a proper trial that can be accepted as fair internationally as would have happened had Hussein and and other war criminals as accused in the Iraqi theatre be brought to justice for international war crimes.
The proper venue and auspices would have been the International Criminal Court.
Currently what has resulted is a rehabilitated Saddam Hussein and something that the Iranians could not have hoped for in their wildest dreams, an extremist Islamic theocracy next door to a another extremist Islamic theocracy, with Saddam dead.
And the "great Satan" was the giver of the gift.
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