Al-Hurra and al-Arabiya television are both reporting that Saddam Hussein has been executed, just before 10 pm eastern time. CNN can not independently confirm this. I will update.
Update [2006-12-29 22:26:18 by BooMan]: CNN reports that Iraq state-run television is airing passages from the Koran that are traditionally read following the death of a Muslim.
Update [2006-12-29 22:34:50 by BooMan]: One of Hussein’s lawyers has confirmed that he is dead. Also, Iraq state-run television has also confirmed that Saddam was executed. His half-brother will also be executed, as well as a judge.
May all the pwoers that be protect the innocents who will be caught in the blood bath that is sure to follow this.
CNN just mentioned that the trial for the gassing of the Kurds was not yet complete, yet the execution has, seemingly taken place.
Would the origins of the chemical weapons been mentioned in that trial?
Imho, it was absolutely essential that Saddam be executed as soon as practically possible, for reasons not unrelated to that possibility.
Naturally and even with us controlling the behind closed door trial bits our glorious leaders are too scared at would leak out.
It is also good timing as it hides the Ford criticisms of Bush, hides the Israeli human rights groups reports exposing a 300% increase in the questionable killing of Palestinians.
It is also bad tining as the Sunnis will now extract a big revenge just as the insane King George tries to take on al-Sadr. Nobody thinks this kangaroo court had anything to do with the Iraqis but that we stage managed the whole thing. Mind you it was a nice present to give the Shia and Iran.
I’m not convinced Saddam did gas the Kurds, and it’s not my first disagreement with Juan Cole either. He’s very smart, but also very gullible, and believes government documents as if they were written by saints, not people with an agenda.
Here’s an interesting article from Canada suggesting the Iran, not Saddam, gassed the Kurds. A sampling:
I trust that the administration will begin milking the corpse immediately.
Maybe the can do a brain transplant for shrub cause he sure needs one.
A desperate attempt to produce a bounce in Bush’s numbers is now paramount over the needs of those that will be living within a civil war. The word decency should just be stricken from the dictionary.
In Riverbend`s diary, she postulates that bush staged the execution to have the country erupt into even more horrific violence so he can leave & say, Ya it`s a civil war, let them fight it out.[ that`s one idea I got from it, out of much more incredible information. You might want to say a prayer for her also.] The only thing I see that makes that idea incorrect, is that I don`t think bush is leaving & couldn`t care less. He`s going to have a “legacy” come “hell or highwater”.
If you haven`t read Riverbend`s diary, you definitely should.
Another “f..k you” by bush. He has Saddam executed a few hrs. before the official begining of Eid al-Adha. There are between 2/3 million pilgrims in & around Mecca for the Haj, from all over the world right now. Smooth move, stupid.
Some voice on the radio (I think it was whoever was reading the 6 PM news (9 PM EST) on ABC Radio) was saying that Eid is a holiday based on forgiveness. I’ll bet there are a few million Iraqis right now who aren’t feeling very forgiving right at the moment.
The Haj! I’d forgotten.
I heard a couple of weeks back that Saudi royal family members have been funneling money to the Suni’s in Iraq.
2-3 million on the doorstep right this minute and all Bush wants is another 20-30 thousand troops delivered in a few months.
Your handle is a misnomer. (;^>)
Thanks but I`ve had it for 30 years. It`s what I ride.
According to Larisa Alexandrovna (Raw Story managing editor), this ‘smooth move’ is in keeping with the administration’s interests, regarding justification for the ‘surge’ & ultimately, decisive action against Iran.
She writes with regard to the likely outcome here.
An interesting read, to say the very least.
Bush has taken off the gloves. We went there and killed their leaders, destroyed their nation. So now there is nothing stopping them from coming here and killing our leaders, destroying our nation.
ALL of the Republicans and Democrats who voted for the Iraq invasion could reasonably on any eye-for-an-eye vengeance list.
We set the goal post, destroy the nation.
I fear for the safety of the innocent and dedicated American Secret Service agents who are forced to protect Bush’s sorry ass.
I take it from your statement that they didn`t volunteer for the job.
What if they pulled a “Serpico” on him.
Oh exactly we are now a legitimate target in the eyes of so many world wide. The feeling extends well beyond Muslim communities too.
A chnage from the worldwide condemnation and sympathy we found after 9/11 eevn from countries we had bad relations with. What an opportunity we not only missed to assume a great role in the world but managed in no short time to turn into an event that now many believes was a justified action against us.
It is us both as a people and nation that need to change. We need to move away from this forever threatening evryone garbage.
A superficial reading of this site seems like a defense of Saddam. Sadly, some will no doubt pull a quote or two out of context and make that absurd claim. The Bush team has so twisted the world and debased language itself, that genuine expressions of anguish over the plight of the Iraqi people, a beaten down, but proud and ancient people, risk condemnation from self-appointed guardians of supposed American moral superiority. I am too tired to care what those censorious voice bellow from their castle battlements. Their time will come. Their fortresses are crumbling around them.
If Saddam had been killed in an uprising of the Iraqi people, that would have been good news. Instead, the tyrant’s death is another bungle by the Bush Administration. I don’t know how the situation in Iraq can get worse, but I’m sure we’re about to find out. I wonder how the braintrust that got us into this mess live with themselves. So many people have died for the failed neo-con ideology. All those smart men sitting in their think tanks and government offices, writing papers, making speeches, arranging meetings, talking on Fox, justifying their actions, blaming Rumsfeld or Bush, all the while more and more people die every day, sacrifices to the neo-con ideology. The pen is mightier than the sword, indeed. And the pen can be brutally misused, as well.
How did we let things get so bad in our country? How did we let that small group of men cause so much death and destruction in our name? Instead of a celebration of a New Year, this Sunday calls out for national acts of contrition for the past, disastrous one.
How can it happen? Far too many of us are willing to go along with anything that we think buys us a little temporary security, and far too many of the rest of us have forgotten that the only thing that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to stand aside and do nothing.
So true. Do you think America will wake up?
One can hope. The problem is, an awakening has to come from within. You can’t impose democracy on people, and you can’t impose freedom.
Unfortunately the entertainment-industrial complex doesn’t make it easy, what with zombifying the populace with dumbed-down news and televised entertainment that lowers your IQ as you watch.
/me walks away singing “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds . . . won’t you help me sing these songs of freedom . . . “
That is hitting the nail on its head.
Beautifully said, Teach.
I realize that your final questions might be rhetorical; however, I answer them for myself with the reminder that the current state of affairs is the result of a completely dysfunctional system of governance (which is not, in any case, actually democratic) coupled with outright criminal compliance.
TO: Teach313;
Well said.
I don’t share your surprise at America getting to this sad point in history. I have been watching America’s transient morals careen down this slippery slope away from justice for three dozen years. what america has done to impoverish and marginalize the poor, minorities and social nonconformists under the guise of the drug war has been little different from what Bush has been doing these past five years.
How many have died of AIDs from gang rapes in American prisons thanks to Bill Clinton’s world record prison population. More than 3 hundred thousand rapes a year in America’s drug war over-crowded prisons and even ‘liberal’ Americans turn their heads away rather than confront this American atrocity. It is easier for American liberals to point fingers at Bush than to look in the mirror at how they passively allowed the right wing to take over the Democrats and turned them into a drug war rubber stamp since 1980. So that today Democrats are nothing more than the liberal wing of the Republican Party. As the Democrats have ardently sanctioned mandatory minimums and ever more draconian drug laws our morals have slid from Camalot into the right wing muck of today.
I am not surprised at all. and it will get worse before it gets better.
The violence that will come of this judicial assassination will corner the Democrats into giving Bush everything he wants in escalating the Iraq war.
You are absolutely correct in saying this mess has a long history. I was born and raised in Olney in North Philly and now live and teach in Detroit. I read your recent diary and began comments three different times, but couldn’t get my thoughts together. In Detroit,we have had 412 murders this year as of last week. I have students, 8 years old, who have been emotionally devastated by the violence that has scarred their lives. We have declared war on the sick, the poor, the different.
I keeping coming back to a New Year’s Day nearly 40 years ago. It was 1972, I think. The Philadelphia Bulletin published pictures of the nearly 800 people, if I remember correctly, who had been murdered in the city that year. Page after page of school pictures of mostly young Black men, so many dead before they were out of their teens. When is it going to change?
it will get worse before it gets better
Let’s just hope it gets better.
There is no way I speak in defense of Saddam. I just do not believe in the justice he received. Anyone here in the USA, would instantly recognise they were being railroaded to hang, had they had the same trial. This poor example of justice renders the moral standing of the US even further into the septic pit. I do not take your post personally at all Teach, but until these wrongs do not have to be discussed, because they`ve been corrected, they must be discussed. Who will be next. Tonight I rail against this injustice, tomorrow it will be about the prisons, of which I have very personal knowledge. Months ago I was talking about the drugs that would be coming into this country at an increasing rate, due to the fiasco in Afganishtan. And a few days ago in the LA Times, what do we see; an increase of 78% of Afghani heroin overdoses, another topic with which I`m very well acquainted. What`s next? Who knows. Tonight it`s murder, not Saddam.
I agree that it does not appear justice was fully served. This was a rush to judgment, by any stretch of the imagination.
I’m still suspicious re Milosevich’s death before his trial concluded as well.
Justice takes time. Those who want to rush clearly are not seeking justice, but retribution, which is not related, in my opinion.
I fear that we have set into motion a chain of events that no one now living will see the end of, all because one petty tyrant had to start a pissing contest with another petty tyrant.
Between the conflagration that is now enveloping the middle east to the reignition of the cold war with the Russians, George W. Bush has destroyed the stable order that emerged sixty years ago from the ashes of the second world war.
The irony is that when a united Arab world finally starves the oil-dependent west into submission, it may well be the martyred Saddam Hussein whose image provides their rallying point.
FOX “News” is showing the snuff film…errr, execution video. Actually, the video they have only shows the noose being put around his neck…leading whichever talking head was on (I think it was Brit Hume but I’m not sure) to say that the Iraqis will think the execution was fake, that only seeing the body (like was done with Uday and Qusay, sorry if I butchered the spelling) will bring closure or some sort of rot like that.
So far looks like FOX is the only news organization showing the tape…nope, MSNBC’s got it on now…just hope I don’t have nightmares tonight, even though they don’t show the actual hanging… 🙁
is ironic. The hooded cowards taking him to his death look exactly like the hooded cowards who kidnapped and beheaded Americans.
just a quibble, but “al-hurra” does not really count as “arab TV” IMHO. sure, it is broadcast in the arab language, but it is an american owned and run station, that largely is seen as a propoganda organ for the u.s.
and the fact that al-hurra and al-arabiyya (the american leaning saudi financed channel), the two most pro-american news channels in the arab world, were the first to report the execution suggests who is really pulling the strings here