He's dead.
Watch as the conflict gets worse.
[QUOTE]BAGHDAD, Iraq - Saddam Hussein struggled briefly after American military guards handed him over to Iraqi executioners. But as his final moments approached, he grew calm.
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He clutched a Quran as he was led to the gallows, and in one final moment of defiance, refused to have a hood pulled over his head before facing the same fate he was accused of inflicting on countless thousands during a quarter-century of ruthless power.
A man whose testimony helped lead to Saddam's conviction and execution before sunrise said he was shown the body because "everybody wanted to make sure that he was really executed."
"Now, he is in the garbage of history," said Jawad Abdul-Aziz, who lost his father, three brothers and 22 cousins in the reprisal killings that followed a botched 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in the Shiite town of Dujail.
Iraqi television showed what it said was Saddam's body, his head uncovered and the neck twisted at a sharp angle.
The footage showed the man identified as Saddam lying on a stretcher, covered in a white shroud. His neck and part of the shroud have what appear to be bloodstains. His eyes are closed.
In Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City, hundreds of people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate. The government did not impose a round-the-clock curfew as it did last month when Saddam was convicted to thwart any surge in retaliatory violence.
It was a grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three U.S. presidents. Despite his ouster, Washington, its allies and the new Iraqi leaders remain mired in a fight to quell a stubborn insurgency by Saddam loyalists and a vicious sectarian conflict.
The execution took place during the year's deadliest month for U.S. troops, with the toll reaching 108.
President Bush said in a statement issued from his ranch in Texas that bringing Saddam to justice "is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain and defend itself, and be an ally in the war on terror."
He said that the execution marks the "end of a difficult year for the Iraqi people and for our troops" and cautioned that Saddam's death will not halt the violence in Iraq.
Within hours of his death, at least 46 people died and more than 80 were wounded in two bombings — 31 in one attack south of the capital and 15 in a Baghdad blast.
Ali Hamza, a 30-year-old university professor, said he went outside to shoot his gun into the air after he learned of Saddam's death.
"Now all the victims' families will be happy because Saddam got his just sentence," said Hamza, who lives in Diwaniyah, a Shiite town 80 miles south of Baghdad.
But people in the Sunni-dominated city of Tikrit, once a power base of Saddam, lamented his death.
"The president, the leader Saddam Hussein is a martyr and God will put him along with other martyrs. Do not be sad nor complain because he has died the death of a holy warrior," said Sheik Yahya al-Attawi, a cleric at the Saddam Big Mosque.
Police blocked the entrances to Tikrit and said nobody was allowed to leave or enter the city for four days. Despite the security precaution, gunmen took to the streets of Tikrit, carrying pictures of Saddam, shooting into the air, and calling for vengeance.
Security forces also set up roadblocks at the entrance to another Sunni stronghold, Samarra, and a curfew was imposed after about 500 people took to the streets protesting the execution of Saddam.
A couple hundred people also protested the execution just outside the Anbar capital of Ramadi, and more than 2,000 people demonstrated in Adwar, the village south of Tikrit where Saddam was captured by U.S. troops hiding in an underground bunker.
In a statement, Saddam's lawyers said that in the aftermath of his death, "the world will know that Saddam Hussein lived honestly, died honestly, and maintained his principles."
"He did not lie when he declared his trial null," they said.
Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, were not hanged along with their former leader as originally planned. Officials wanted to reserve the occasion for Saddam alone.
"We wanted him to be executed on a special day," National Security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie told state-run al-Iraqiya television.
Sami al-Askari, the political adviser of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, told The Associated Press that Saddam initially resisted when he was taken by Iraqi guards but was composed in his final moments.
He said Saddam was clad in a black suit, hat and shoes, rather than prison garb. His hat was removed and his hands tied shortly before the noose was slipped around his neck.
Saddam repeated a prayer after a Sunni Muslim cleric who was present.
"Saddam later was taken to the gallows and refused to have his head covered with a hood," al-Askari said. "Before the rope was put around his neck, Saddam shouted: 'God is great. The nation will be victorious and Palestine is Arab.'"
Iraqi state television showed footage of guards in ski masks placing a noose around Saddam's neck. Saddam appeared calm as he stood on the metal framework of the gallows. The footage cuts off just before the execution.
Saddam was executed at a former military intelligence headquarters in Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah, al-Askari said. During his regime, Saddam had numerous dissidents executed in the facility, located in a neighborhood that is home to the Iraqi capital's most important Shiite shrine — the Imam Kazim shrine.
Al-Askari said the government had not decided what to do with Saddam's body.
The Iraqi prime minister's office released a statement that said Saddam's execution was a "strong lesson" to ruthless leaders who commit crimes against their own people.
"We strongly reject considering Saddam as a representative of any sect in Iraq because the tyrant only represented his evil soul," the statement said. "The door is still open for those whose hands are not tainted with the blood of innocent people to take part in the political process and work on rebuilding Iraq."
The execution came 56 days after a court convicted Saddam and sentenced him to death for his role in the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims from Dujail. Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam's appeal Monday and ordered him executed within 30 days.
A U.S. judge on Friday refused to stop Saddam's execution, rejecting a last-minute court challenge.
U.S. troops cheered as news of Saddam's execution appeared on television at the mess hall at Forward Operating Base Loyalty in eastern Baghdad. But some soldiers expressed doubt that Saddam's death would be a significant turning point for Iraq.
"First it was weapons of mass destruction. Then when there were none, it was that we had to find Saddam. We did that, but then it was that we had to put him on trial," said Spc. Thomas Sheck, 25, who is on his second tour in Iraq. "So now, what will be the next story they tell us to keep us over here?"
At his death, he was in the midst of a second trial, charged with genocide and other crimes for a 1987-88 military crackdown that killed an estimated 180,000 Kurds in northern Iraq. Experts said the trial of his co-defendants was likely to continue despite his execution.
Many people in Iraq's Shiite majority were eager to see the execution of a man whose Sunni Arab-dominated regime oppressed them and Kurds. Before the hanging, a mosque preacher in the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Friday called Saddam's execution "God's gift to Iraqis."
In a farewell message to Iraqis posted Wednesday on the Internet, Saddam said he was giving his life for his country as part of the struggle against the U.S. "Here, I offer my soul to God as a sacrifice, and if he wants, he will send it to heaven with the martyrs," he said.
One of Saddam's lawyers, Issam Ghazzawi, said the letter was written by Saddam on Nov. 5, the day he was convicted by an Iraqi tribunal in the Dujail killings.
Najeeb al-Nauimi, a member of Saddam's legal team, said U.S. authorities maintained physical custody of Saddam until the execution to prevent him being humiliated publicly or his corpse being mutilated, as has happened to previous Iraqi leaders deposed by force. He said they didn't want anything to happen to further inflame Sunni Arabs.
"This is the end of an era in Iraq," al-Nauimi said from Doha, Qatar. "The Baath regime ruled for 35 years. Saddam was vice president or president of Iraq during those years. For Iraqis, he will be very well remembered. Like a martyr, he died for the sake of his country."
Iraq's death penalty was suspended by the U.S. military after it toppled Saddam in 2003, but the new Iraqi government reinstated it two years later, saying executions would deter criminals.
Saddam's own regime used executions and extrajudicial killings as a tool of political repression, both to eliminate real or suspected political opponents and to maintain a reign of terror.
In the months after he seized power on July 16, 1979, he had hundreds of members of his own party and army officers slain. In 1996, he ordered the slaying of two sons-in-law who had defected to Jordan but returned to Baghdad after receiving guarantees of safety.
Saddam built Iraq into a one of the Arab world's most modern societies, but then plunged the country into an eight-year war with neighboring Iran that killed hundreds of thousands of people on both sides and wrecked Iraq's economy.
When the U.S. invaded in 2003, Iraqis had been transformed from among the region's most prosperous people to some of its most impoverished.
[/QUOTE]
[url]http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061230/ap_on_re_mi_ea/saddam[/url]
thanks for sharing.blackhawk tactical pants.
— Spambot
"I could have done worse!" exultantly cried the murderer Lebret, sentenced at Rouen to hard labor for life. — Félix Fénéon
"Merry Christmas, Dad. I finally got him for ya'. Hope you like it cuz he cost several thousand American lives (American lives being the only life American's care about) to date."
George W.
[QUOTE=Spike;910122]If he rises from the dead in three days, I just give up.[/QUOTE]
If he rises from the dead in any time frame, i give up.
*sigh* and another one bites the dust...
what good is any of this doing for us anyway?
[b]Robert Fisk: A dictator created then destroyed by America[/b]
[i]Published: 30 December 2006[/i]
Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.
But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers - what about the other guilty men?
No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.
In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.
Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.
And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our "victory" - our "mission accomplished" - who will be found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect will come, no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in comfortable and wealthy retirement.
Hours before Saddam's death sentence, his family - his first wife, Sajida, and Saddam's daughter and their other relatives - had given up hope.
"Whatever could be done has been done - we can only wait for time to take its course," one of them said last night. But Saddam knew, and had already announced his own "martyrdom": he was still the president of Iraq and he would die for Iraq. All condemned men face a decision: to die with a last, grovelling plea for mercy or to die with whatever dignity they can wrap around themselves in their last hours on earth. His last trial appearance - that wan smile that spread over the mass-murderer's face - showed us which path Saddam intended to walk to the noose.
I have catalogued his monstrous crimes over the years. I have talked to the Kurdish survivors of Halabja and the Shia who rose up against the dictator at our request in 1991 and who were betrayed by us - and whose comrades, in their tens of thousands, along with their wives, were hanged like thrushes by Saddam's executioners.
I have walked round the execution chamber of Abu Ghraib - only months, it later transpired, after we had been using the same prison for a few tortures and killings of our own - and I have watched Iraqis pull thousands of their dead relatives from the mass graves of Hilla. One of them has a newly-inserted artificial hip and a medical identification number on his arm. He had been taken directly from hospital to his place of execution. Like Donald Rumsfeld, I have even shaken the dictator's soft, damp hand. Yet the old war criminal finished his days in power writing romantic novels.
It was my colleague, Tom Friedman - now a messianic columnist for The New York Times - who perfectly caught Saddam's character just before the 2003 invasion: Saddam was, he wrote, "part Don Corleone, part Donald Duck". And, in this unique definition, Friedman caught the horror of all dictators; their sadistic attraction and the grotesque, unbelievable nature of their barbarity.
But that is not how the Arab world will see him. At first, those who suffered from Saddam's cruelty will welcome his execution. Hundreds wanted to pull the hangman's lever. So will many other Kurds and Shia outside Iraq welcome his end. But they - and millions of other Muslims - will remember how he was informed of his death sentence at the dawn of the Eid al-Adha feast, which recalls the would-be sacrifice by Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which even the ghastly Saddam cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners from his jails. "Handed over to the Iraqi authorities," he may have been before his death. But his execution will go down - correctly - as an American affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this - that the West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington, that, for all his wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible get-out for Arab historians, this shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a "martyr" to the will of the new "Crusaders".
When he was captured in November of 2003, the insurgency against American troops increased in ferocity. After his death, it will redouble in intensity again. Freed from the remotest possibility of Saddam's return by his execution, the West's enemies in Iraq have no reason to fear the return of his Baathist regime. Osama bin Laden will certainly rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And there's a thought. So many crimes avenged.
But we will have got away with it.
[URL=http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2112555.ece]http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2112555.ece[/URL]
[Quote]Al-Askari said the government had not decided what to do with Saddam's body. [/quote]
I find that really odd and slightly disorganized.
They should have made him wear a hood.
So has Bush killed as many as Saddam has yet?
[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v251/graeme2004/turksmako.jpg[/IMG]
[SIZE=1]Every word is an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.[/SIZE]
[QUOTE=Grae;910161]So has Bush killed as many as Saddam has yet?[/QUOTE]
Not yet.
Has anyone else noticed that this whole thing has sort of a Hatfields and McCoys, the South Will Rise Again flavor to it?
There is hope, but not for us.
[QUOTE=mirka;910160]I find that really odd and slightly disorganized.
They should have made him wear a hood.[/QUOTE]
Its customary for them to have those about to get hung not wear a hood.
Also I don't really understand why, if he's dead, we're still at war.
I mean I understand it in a reality-type sense, but not in a bigger "omg what is war!!" sort of sense.
Good Morning Vietnam.
There is hope, but not for us.
[QUOTE=jane s.;910232]Also I don't really understand why, if he's dead, we're still at war.
I mean I understand it in a reality-type sense, but not in a bigger "omg what is war!!" sort of sense.
Good Morning Vietnam.[/QUOTE]
I don't think its really being called a war anymore
didn't we already claim victory ?
all thats left is fighting and shouting
[QUOTE=Smartazboy;910230]Its customary for them to have those about to get hung not wear a hood.[/QUOTE]
It says in the article he refused to wear a hood. I don't think he should be able to refuse shit at that point.
[QUOTE=mirka;910281]It says in the article he refused to wear a hood. I don't think he should be able to refuse shit at that point.[/QUOTE]
Hmm, conflicting stories. I saw a news video and they said what I said, so now I sound un-informeded.
I'm watching the video now
wouldl I be allowed to post a link or can y'all find it for yourself?
What if i told you where to get it
[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v251/graeme2004/turksmako.jpg[/IMG]
[SIZE=1]Every word is an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.[/SIZE]
[QUOTE=mirka;910281]It says in the article he refused to wear a hood. I don't think he should be able to refuse shit at that point.[/QUOTE]
I might be talking out of my ass, but I think that's Geneva convention shit, they have to offer it but you don't have to accept.
Why should he have to wear it anyway? I don't think I'd want it.
There is hope, but not for us.
[QUOTE=xec8;910113]Watch as the conflict gets worse.
[url]http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061230/ap_on_re_mi_ea/saddam[/url][/QUOTE]
As a left-leaning blogger, I'm right now this minute mourning his death.
[QUOTE=Grae;910161]So has Bush killed as many as Saddam has yet?[/QUOTE]
Give him time. And a a couple decades. Eight years vs. 30+, not really a fair comparison. Plus, Saddam did not have the ACLU, the Supreme Court, or any need for the women's vote.
[QUOTE=jane s.;910232]Also I don't really understand why, if he's dead, we're still at war.
I mean I understand it in a reality-type sense, but not in a bigger "omg what is war!!" sort of sense.
Good Morning Vietnam.[/QUOTE]
As we learned in so many other wars, just because it doesn't make sense, don't expect the fighting to stop.
When we call soccer 'football' the terrorists have won.
I think it's better he did not wear a hood, now nobody can say, "Hey, that wasn't really Sadam that they hung, that was some other guy who happens to be the same height, Sadam is really still alive" all that crazy conspiracy shit. I think a lot of Iraqis were kind of "hedging their bets" y'know, like they don't want to go against the old regime just in case it comes back into power. I'm hopeful (although not really optimistic) that for the Iraqi people this will be some kind of turning point.
I think the whole "martyr" thing is really overblown by the West. Do you have any idea how many "martyrs" they have? They have thousands, probably tens of thousands if not more, martyrs are like a dime a dozen.
This is a really good idea.
[QUOTE=jane s.;910395]I might be talking out of my ass, but I think that's Geneva convention shit, they have to offer it but you don't have to accept.
Why should he have to wear it anyway? I don't think I'd want it.[/QUOTE]
I didn't know that about the Geneva convention. If that's true, fine.
It's just my barbaric, blood thirsty side coming out. If he was [I]supposed [/I]to wear the hood, then he should have worn it and not be offered the dignity of refusing it.
I don't think you'll ever have to face the "to wear or to not wear a hood" dilemma when you hang, sweet Jane. 
[QUOTE=mirka;910554]I don't think you'll ever have to face the "to wear or to not wear a hood" dilemma when you hang, sweet Jane. :)[/QUOTE]
I find it far more likely that Jane will be burned at the stake.
This is a really good idea.
Meatthinker's right too, it's probably good in the end that he didn't wear the hood so everyone knows for sure that it wasn't some guy with a similar height and weight or whatever.
Also if I was going to die in a public fashion, I'd want to hang myself in the background of a movie set and then become urban legend!!
There is hope, but not for us.
This has not affected me in any way.
If he rises from the dead in three days, I just give up.
FUCK YEAH BABY ANIMALS