Al Jazeera reports that a US-sponsored tv station has reported that Saddam Hussein was hanged today at 3 am GMT Saturday, or less than one-half hour ago.

The former Iraqi president, who was ousted in April 2003 by a US-led invasion, was convicted last month of crimes against humanity over the killings of 148 Shia villagers from Dujail after a failed assassination attempt in 1982.

An appeals court upheld the death penalty on Tuesday and the Iraqi government rushed through the procedures to hang him by the end of the year and before the Eid al-Adha holiday that starts on Saturday.

The government had kept details of its plans shrouded in secrecy amid concerns that it may provoke a violent backlash from his former supporters with Iraq on the brink of civil war…

“If my soul goes down this path [of martyrdom] it will face God in serenity,” he wrote.

Now, of course, comes the countdown to the video being broadcast/uploaded to YouTube.

My guess is that the tv stations who were undoubtably on-hand (check the source for this info in the first place) will not want to lose control of the very valuable footage, and will do everything they possibly can to keep it off YouTube (Google video being very much an also-ran at this stage). Will the video be broadcast on mainstream news in the US, Canada or the UK? No, not in my opinion. Will footage of Hussein‘s dead body be shown? Yes, I think so. CNN has certainly shown footage of non-Americans in such circumstances, so the only reason for not showing it would be either because he was the leader of a nation and they are considered to some degree worthy of respect, whoever they may have been (see countless snivelling obituaries for Richard Nixon) or that familiarity has bred respect and that because of his long custody, exposure, and fairly light skin, he’s seen as somehow more human than anonymous dead Haitians or Nigerians, and the public would think showing such footage icky.

Will footage of the hanging be shown on television in other countries? Certainly; it is necessary, to shut up the conspiracy theorists. Of course, it won’t succeed in doing that, but there’s another reason it will be shown: so that the mainstream media in the US, Canada, and the UK can reference it and thereby suck all the news value out of it without actually showing (and paying for) it.

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