Ya, that’s quite a democracy they got going on in Iraq!

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A new video of Saddam Hussein’s corpse, with a gaping neck wound, was posted on the Internet early Tuesday, the second leaked release of clandestine pictures from the former leader’s hanging.

The video appeared to have been taken with a camera phone, like the graphic video of the hanging which showed guards taunting Saddam in the final moments of his life.

The footage pans up the shrouded body of the former leader from the feet. It apparently was taken shortly after Saddam was executed and placed on a gurney. He was hanged shortly before dawn on Dec. 30.

As the panning shot reaches the head region, the white shroud is pulled back and reveals Saddam’s head and neck.

His head is unnaturally twisted at a 90 degree angle to his right. It shows a gaping bloody wound, circular in shape, about an inch below his jaw line on the left side of his neck. His left cheek is marked with red blotches, and there is blood on the shroud where it covered his head.

Read more here

Saddam Hussein
Execution
Hanging
Cartoon

We had custody of him. We agreed to relinquish custody for the hanging. We then took back custody immediately following the execution. But we had nothing to do with the way things were done.

The person believed to have recorded Saddam Hussein’s execution on a mobile phone camera was arrested today, an adviser to Iraq’s prime minister has said.

Official pictures were taken of the moments prior to Saddam Hussein’s execution but footage of the execution itself was taken on a mobile phone and posted on the internet

The adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not identify the person arrested, but said it was an official who had supervised the execution, the Associated Press reported.

The reported arrest came as the American military in Iraq sought to distance itself from the furore following Saddam Hussein’s death when it said it would have handled his execution differently to the Iraqi authorities.

Maj Gen William Caldwell said that US forces, who had custody of Saddam for three years, left all the security measures at his execution to Iraqi authorities. These included searching witnesses for mobile phones.

An unofficial video of the hanging, apparently filmed on a camera-equipped mobile phone, showed Shia officials mocking Saddam just before he was hanged on Saturday. The footage inflamed sectarian tensions and has caused embarrassment to the United States by association.

Read more at The Telegraph

Silenced forever…..objective achieved.

Saddam’s death paves the way for U.S. troop escalation and ensures there will be no exposure of U.S. complicity in Saddam’s crimes

The death of Saddam Hussein came at the right time for his once long-term ally, the United States. It will lead to an increase in U.S. troops and provides cover for past ties between Saddam and Washington.

Saddam’s allies promised retaliation and more violence for the death of Saddam. And, the morning of Saddam’s death saw an immediate surge in violence. As the NY Times reports, “Within hours of the execution, at least 75 people were killed in nine bombing attacks of the kind that Sunni insurgents commonly carry out against Shiites. In the mainly Shiite districts of Hurriyah and Sayidah in Baghdad, separate sequences in which car bombs detonated in close succession caused at least 39 deaths. . .” By the end of the day reportedly 110 Iraqis were killed and 167 were wounded. With violence already escalating it will be hard to say whether a spike is Saddam-related, but his death will further strengthen the resolve of Sunni insurgents and make reconciliation more difficult.

Saddam’s death is likely to provide President Bush with another argument for sending tens of thousands of more American soldiers in Iraq - ‘we need the troops to stem the escalating unrest in Baghdad.’ Once again, Bush policies become self-fulfilling as the age-old truth shows its reality - violence begets violence - escalation in the language of surge. There are good arguments that this is one more step on the road to an attack on Iran. See http://democracyrising.us/content/view/694/164/.

But also Saddam’s death comes just in time to avoid a trial that could have embarrassed the United States. In April 2006 “the Iraq tribunal . . . announced new criminal charges against Saddam Hussein and six others for alleged genocide and crimes against humanity in the 1980s crackdown against the Kurds, including the gassing of thousands of civilians in the village of Halabja.”

Read more at OpEd News

George W Bush quotes:

Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction.

We can’t allow the world’s worst leaders to blackmail, threaten, hold freedom-loving nations hostage with the world’s worst weapons.

And yet, as Saddam Hussein was put to his death, the President slept. Good Lord, they didn’t want to wake him just for this because he had worked nearly three hours this week!! For all the fuss he’s made about the guy over the years you’d think he’d have some profound statement, but no. Of course this guy is used to sending people to their deaths. He’s got a thing for death. Most Americans were wrapped up with mixed emotions about Saddam’s death last night. Worried for the U.S. troops. Worried for the Iraqi citizens. Praying and hoping this event wouldn’t bring with it more violence……but not the President. Nooooo, he was snug in his bed, not a worry in the world. What a dickhead!

SADDAM Hussein is likely to be hanged in the jail where prisoners were tortured and killed under his regime.

The 70-year-old former tyrant will be executed within days at Abu Ghraib, outside Baghdad.

The grey-walled complex once held 15,000 political prisoners.

Many were used as guinea pigs in chemical weapons tests.

Saddam will probably be killed in the next few days to avoid a build-up of tension in Iraq.

He will be hanged as a common criminal rather than facing a firing squad as he would have preferred.

That final indignity comes after the court that convicted him of crimes against humanity ruled that he never completed his military training.

Iraq is in the grip of near civil war and authorities are bracing themselves for a wave of violence after the hanging.

A security source in Baghdad said: “Abu Ghraib is the place where it was always planned for Saddam to be executed.

Read more here

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is expected to be executed “this weekend,” Bush administration officials told CNN on Thursday.

Hussein will be transferred from U.S. to Iraqi custody within the next day, one official said.

More than one administration source confirmed the impending transfer.

But Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend, speaking on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” cautioned that the timing of the execution is up to the Iraqi government.

Two defense attorneys Thursday told Hussein in his jail cell that his death sentence had been upheld.

“He was not surprised at this. But he believes in his fate, and his only concern is the unity of the Iraqi people,” chief defense attorney Khalil al-Dulaimi told CNN in Amman, Jordan.

Read more at CNN.com

Punishing an evil dictator for bringing death to so many over there… so that we don’t have to here.

Saddam must die in 30 days

Scores of Iraqis volunteer to be hangman as court rules

WASHINGTON - Hundreds of Iraqis vied for the hangman’s job as Iraq’s highest court set a 30-day clock ticking yesterday for Saddam Hussein to die.

Iraqi officials have already rejected demands for an outdoor public hanging of the 69-year-old toppled dictator at Baghdad’s Shaab soccer stadium, where the execution could be viewed by tens of thousands who suffered under his 30-year dictatorship.

But if the procedures for other executions under Iraq’s new government are followed, video and still photographs of Saddam’s execution would be taken and at some point excerpts would be shown on official Iraqi TV.

Bassam Ridha, an adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, has been flooded with hundreds of “letters, e-mails, telephone calls and even mobile text messages from people within Iraq and outside who want to hang him.”

The basic message is that “we want to kill him. He killed my family, so we have the right to do it,” Ridha said.
…

For security reasons, Iraqi officials would not specify where and when Saddam might be executed and who might witness the hanging. Saddam has been held under American guard at a U.S. military base south of Baghdad, and it was unclear whether the U.S. would be involved in the hanging.

The U.S. banned the death penalty after the invasion but it resumed under the interim Iraqi government in September 2005, and more than 60 executions have been carried out.

In the Iraqi method, prisoners are not told of the execution until the day of hanging. They are given a last meal and a cigarette and then are led in orange jumpsuits and a black hood, shackled hand and foot, to the gallows.

Source: Richard Sisk, New York Daily News