NYT: Rush to Hang Hussein Was Questioned

[kskiska]

BAGHDAD, Dec. 31 — With his plain pine coffin strapped into an American military helicopter for a predawn journey across the desert, Saddam Hussein, the executed dictator who built his legend with defiance of America, completed a turbulent passage into history on Sunday.

Like the helicopter trip, just about everything in the 48 hours that began with Mr. Hussein’s being taken to his execution from his cell in an American military detention center in the postmidnight chill of Saturday had a surreal and even cinematic quality. Part of it was that the Americans, who turned him into a pariah and drove him from power, proved to be his unlikely benefactors in the face of new Iraqi rulers who seemed bent on turning the execution and its aftermath into a new nightmare.

(snip)

The American role extended beyond providing the helicopter that carried Mr. Hussein home. Iraqi and American officials who have discussed the intrigue and confusion that preceded the decision late on Friday to rush Mr. Hussein to the gallows have said that it was the Americans who questioned the political wisdom — and justice — of expediting the execution, in ways that required Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to override constitutional and religious precepts that seemed to give Mr. Hussein the prospect of a more dignified passage to his end.

The Americans’ concerns seem certain to have been heightened by what happened at the hanging, as evidenced in video-recordings made in the last minutes before Mr. Hussein fell to his death through the gallows trapdoor at 6:10 a.m. on Saturday. A new video that appeared on the Internet late on Saturday, apparently made illicitly by someone attending the hanging with a camera-equipped cellphone, underscored the unruly, mocking atmosphere in the execution chamber.

This continued, on the video, through the actual hanging itself, with a shout of “The tyrant has fallen! May God curse him!” as Mr. Hussein hung lifeless, his neck snapped back and his glassy eyes open, beneath the gallows.

more…
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html?hp&ex=1167627600&en=7f4ebe62241f2712&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[Xipe Totec]

1. Benefactors?.... BENEFACTORS?!!!

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.

(Macbeth Act II, Scene II)

[5X]

2. Not to be too picky, but, what's with the WP in your headline...

the story is on the NYT.

[kskiska]

3. Sorry, thanks for pointing that out.

[5X]

4. No prob. :)

[dave_p]

5. The world Bush made

So this is what it's like representing the sole superpower in the country it "liberated". It's reassuring that intelligence and humanity haven't left Americans on the spot trying to salvage what's left of Iraq and their own country's dignity. But that counts for nothing in the quagmire manufactured by the White House. Shrub gets his necktie party, and gets to claim it was nothing to do with him.

How much lower?

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

6. was he dying?

it wouldn't be the first time there was a rush to execute someone before they died of natural causes,

[Kagemusha]

7. It took a lot to botch this, but the Bush admin was up to the task.

I am duly impressed at how low and crude this came off.

[high density]

10. The wonderful half-assed "government" the neocons created in Iraq

had a nice big hand in this as well.

One participant described the meeting this way: "The Iraqis seemed quite frustrated, saying, ‘Who is going to execute him, anyway, you or us?’ The Americans replied by saying that obviously, it was the Iraqis who would carry out the hanging. So the Iraqis said, ‘This is our problem and we will handle the consequences. If there is any damage done, it is we who will be damaged, not you.’"
...
None of the Iraqi officials were able to explain why Mr. Maliki had been unwilling to allow the execution to wait. Nor would any explain why those who conducted it had allowed it to deteriorate into a sectarian free-for-all that had the effect, on the video recordings, of making Mr. Hussein, a mass murderer, appear dignified and restrained, and his executioners, representing Shiites who were his principal victims, seem like bullying street thugs.

[stranger]

8. bush loves executions

How ridiculous.

our President thinks we should be proud that
that the "Iraqi People" now have the right to hang or behead
their politicla opponents according to the new "rule of law."

The fact that Saddam's current trial in Baghdad was
abruptly cancelled right in the middle of the proceedings
so that Hussein could be hung during Muslim "holy day" festivities,
illustrates just how knee jerk-impulsive, arbitrary and capricious
these quasi “legal" proceedings really were from day
day one. You may all recall that President Bush made it known
to the occupied Iraqis, before the "trial" even started,
that he expected Saddam to be executed.

Former U.S Attorney General, Ramsay Clark,
had it right. It was a kangaroo court followed
by a lynching-notwithstanding Saddam was not a sympathetic
figure. Indeed, he's the kind of villain who makes it easy
for demagogues like Bush to justify and then establish
dangerous precedents, such as premeptive war, etc.

I of course expect nothing other than barbarity
and stupidity from Bush; but i am disappointed in
the American press who have slowly morphed over the lsat 6 years
into obsequious sycophants for this cornpone texas bumpkin, who has
harbored a fetish for executions since his days as Guvnah
of Tex-ass. (remember how he mocked the comdemned
Carla Faye Tucker on the Tex-ass death row?)

Its an indelible stain on the American media's credibility
that they deliberately refused to report in any detail
General Clark's cogent legal objections
to this political show trial.

Is this what Americans kids are dying for in Iraq?
The right of Iraqis to vote
for their favorite Ayatollahs and the merciful
laws of Shariah?

Allahu Akbar, Mr President!

[Zorra]

9. Hey there, stranger -

Welcome to DU!
:hi:

[stranger]

12. Thanks Zorra

Any friend of Zorro's is a friend of mine.:toast:

[IndianaGreen]

11. Bush has gone to great lengths to impose shariah law in Iraq and Afghanistan

Our Afghan puppet Karzai appointed a fundamentalist to run the Ministry of Virtue and Morals, the same ministry that the Taleban had established when they were in power. Women and girls are in great danger if they attend school, if there are any left open where they live. The burqa is still women's lot.

Iraqi women, once among the most emancipated in the entire Middle East, are now being driven kicking and screaming into the 9th century.

The spectacle of Saddam being executed by the same Shia militia responsible for the deaths of so many Sunnis, and the sight of Saddam dying like a good Muslim by reciting the Shahadad and praising God, is another nail in the coffin of Bush's misguided foreign policy.

[UpInArms]

20. Welcome to DU, stranger!

nice post - glad to have you here :hi:

[Eurobabe]

13. I love how the MSM now portrays Asshat & Co. as having reservations

about how and when Saddam was hung. Trying to make them look like the good guys in all this. It's just sick.

[depakid]

18. I don't buy word one of that account, either.

More likely the NY Times is simply trying yet again to run cover for American incompetence. As far as I'm concerned the Times (and especially the Washington Post) lost all their credibility in reporting on Iraq a long time ago. They're as responsible as anyone for this debacle.

[KoKo]

26. More propaganda fed to NYT's stenographers...to stop any blowback

over the timing of Saddam's hanging as a poke in the eye to the Sunni's..

I'm so disgusted with this Media Whoring. It just gets worse and worse.
:grr:

[UpInArms]

21. how could asshat/dimson have reservations when he slept through it?

Would that not imply that he was up and consulting with people prior to the hanging - attempting to delay or stop it?

Any lie from the fallen Gray Lady.

[Thor_MN]

34. Just like the "Success that hasn't happene yet" Osama capture,

If the * admin HAD resevations (they likely had the other kind and managed not to attend) Chimpy's action would have been to sleep through it. They can't do anything right, so I'm not surprized that they claim to have screwed up yet again....

[bklyncowgirl]

22. Where did the article mention where our great Decider tried to stop it?

All of the officials expressing reservations seem to be mid-level American military and diplomatic types who were horrified and knew damn well what the repercussions would be but were hand tied by their own government.

A little call from Crawford would have put a stop to this madness immediately.

Once again bad things happen when the wee cowboy goes to the ranch--is anyone surprised.

[malaise]

35. BIngo

Don't be fooled.

[CJCRANE]

14. I don't believe this for a second.

The WH decided when to kill Saddam based on getting it done the weekend before the new Congress sits.

Of course the Shi'ites were only too pleased to wring his neck once he was released into their custody.

[Say_What]

17. I don't believe it either, I think it's a smokescreen..

They hung him before he was tried for the major atrocities the US was involved in--Saddam couldn't be kept alive, he knew too much.

...The Reagan administration stopped Congress from condemning Saddam’s use of poison gas, and the US State Department tried to protect Saddam when he gassed his own Kurdish citizens in Halabja in 1988, spreading stories (which it knew to be false) that Iranian planes had dropped the gas. It was the US that finally saved Saddam’s regime by providing naval escorts for tankers carrying oil from Arab Gulf states while Iraqi planes were left free to attack tankers coming from Iranian ports. Even when one of Saddam’s planes mistakenly attacked an American destroyer in 1987, killing 37 crewmembers, Washington forgave him.

And it was George W. Bush’s father who urged Iraq’s Shiites and Kurds to rebel after Saddam was driven out of Kuwait in 1991, and then failed to use US air power to protect the Shiites from massacre when they answered his call. The US was deeply involved in all of Saddam’s major crimes, one way or another, so no trial that delved into the details of those crimes could be allowed.

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=90555&d=1&m=1&y=2007

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

[MrPrax]

15. Why does NYT drivel

get posted here so often? Esp on weekends?

The American role extended beyond providing the helicopter that carried Mr. Hussein home...

No shit...

"This continued, on the video"

The US media is pissed at being scooped; they can't show 'dead people' in context.

Yup, that's right...some crappy cellphone video got more hits than the NYT in spite of *ad/block* trolling, promoting a war and basically filling some part of the American 'liberal' Psyche with plain old narratives provided by reliable megaphones.


A good example of 'feature writing' is here.

[SpiralHawk]

16. Unruly? Mocking? Hmmm? Who does that sound like?

Could it be the pervasive vibe of an AWOL Connecticut Preppy Skull & Bones Texecutioner ?

[girl gone mad]

19. Pure propoganda. n/t

[jhain]

23. Ford's Comments were lost

hang Hussein = no one hears Ford's statements. Works every time.

[Briar]

24. Nonsense

Just when is the NYT going to stop enabling Bush and allowing liberal warmongers to feel better about themselves?

[ckramer]

25. I just don't believe BushCo didn't involve in this whole hanging thing

call me cynical

[leesa]

27. Now Bush will be able to justify escalation...sort of a 'Pearl Harbor in Iraq'

for the Neocons, by executing Saddam on a sacrificial Sunni holiday after a highly flawed, probably illegal "trial".

[Left Coast Lynn]

28. Two years too fast for ya?

Geesh.

[The Stranger]

29. It looked like a lynching.

That is why they had to float this article, distancing themselves from it.

[localroger]

30. Rush to Hang

I almost shouted yippee! before I realized it wasn't about Limbaugh.

OK, OK, I know. I'll go away now.

[DBoon]

37. that was two of us...

:evilgrin:

[HuffleClaw]

31. REVISIONIST BULLSHIT, every stinking word.

what a disgrace. and a disgrace that the nyt would print such drivel.

[daleo]

32. What a crock

The Iraqi puppet government couldn't have done anything that the American government didn't agree with. To pretend otherwise is a joke.

[EFerrari]

33. Are we sure this isn't The Onion? n/t

[Rose Siding]

36. Poor poor powerless USA -bested, at last, by the mighty Iraq.

:eyes:

"Iraqi and American officials" aren't missing Judith Miller any more -they have some useful new friends at the NYT.

[Imagevision]

38. I agree, it'd good Saddam is buried, now let's let sadr make his move so Bush

can figure out what to do with him??

[Bushies gotta go]

39. Dangit. When I read the first part of that title... "Rush to hang" ....

I thought..... well now we're talkin'. I had to read it twice.