The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => History => Topic started by: linnea on December 30, 2006, 05:44:58 am
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6218485.stm
Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been executed by hanging at an unspecified location outside Baghdad's Green Zone for crimes against humanity.
The news was confirmed to the BBC by the Iraqi deputy foreign minister.
Iraqi TV said the execution took place just before 0600 local time (0300GMT). A representative of the prime minister and a Sunni Muslim cleric were present.
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I have extremely mixed feelings about this.
On one hand, if ever anybody deserved the death penalty it's Sadaam. I'm pretty dubious about the morality of government sanctioned killing, SH was a pretty darn bad guy.
Looking at it from a purely pragmatic/political/how will this affect American interests perspective, I'm concerned that the timing was bad. It's hard to imagine that this won't spur some level of violence from the Sunnis. Plus, today is first day of one of the Eids. (What? They executed him on Christmas?) And the Kurds were upset because they thought the trial for the Kurdish gassings should be completed before any execution took place. On the other hand, it does seem possible that such a quick, decisive execution could minimize the reaction. An extended pre-execution period may have only worsened conditions.
All in all, it sucks. It sucks that we're over there. It sucks that our soldiers are dying. It really sucks that thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqis are being killed and injured. Please please please can we stop killing each other?
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What a ghoulish fulfillment of the Celebrity Rule of Threes.
I dunno... I'm of a mind to believe that there isn't something awful enough one can do to deserve death. I don't think that anyone who's ever lived has ever deserved to die... even with the worst of us, the needed communal effort as a species against going into that dreamless sleep supercedes any sin. Sadaam Hussein, Adolf Hitler... the guy who cut me off in traffic, the guy who murdered my cousin when I was a kid... Ted Bundy, Ben Stiller, nobody.
All this said, you wonder who he would've been able to rat out had he gotten to live and talk. Oil For Food culprits in the UN? The neo-con progenitors in Washington who propped him up? All his death does is further burying the secrets to which he was the primary witness further into the ground with his corpse.
Maybe a martyr has been created, maybe it hasn't... maybe this is a milestone, maybe he's one more corpse in a growing pile of Cold War blowback sacrifices.
But nothing's been gained, as far as I can tell.
If for nothing else, the son of a bitch probably had some stories to tell that could bring down more than a couple of gods and monsters and... even if you could deserve death, I'd think that usefulness would trump anything else. But I'm possessed of a contradictory combination of humanism and cynicism and I could be wrong.
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I think there are lots of people who probably deserve to die, but that no one else deserves to decide who they are.
Aside from that, what August said. The whole situation is so fucked up, and this might just fuck it up more. Happy fuck*ng New Year.
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yeah. for real, Wombie. My opinion is that the only person who has the moral authority to decide who lives or dies is me.
...but no, seriously, I get all weird about death-penalty stuff. Because there's a very real human urge towards revenge/"justice". But at the same time, that is the result, basically, of people being pissed off and vengeful. And, of course, human beings will always be vengeful.
But shouldn't we strive to make our government better than the sum of its parts?
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He sure looked incredibly cool and collected in the end (I mean, further down the footage there's also him yelling at the soldiers, calling them cowards and that type of stuff, but I felt like it was coming off more stern-like than whiny). In that there's something to envy already because I really hope I'm not the type of guy that would completely lose his marbles when faced with the prospect of death-in-a-couple-of-minutes. And what were they talking about so much, his executioners and he? For a while it seemed so Lynchian (hah), like if they were overworried about passing on the exact specific details on the whole mechanism and its outcome - and Saddam's expression of quiet assent as the masked men kept talking and waving. All in all, gripping television. A+
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070105/ap_on_re_us/mimicry_hanging (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070105/ap_on_re_us/mimicry_hanging)
Damn. That's really quite sick revenge from beyond the grave.
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This whole thing is just creepy and weird. There was taunting between Saddam and some of the crowd before he died, and some Iraqi got it captured with a phone camera. And then there was the little boy in Texas who hung himself, which was linked by Judy.
I'm all for the death penalty, but it's weird how it's really blown up in the face of the current administration.