Category Archives: Iraq

would you watch Saddam Hussein die?

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This got started in the comments section of another post, but it seems to me more than deserving of its own post; it is far more important than Saddam Hussein’s last words. I started to watch the Daniel Pearl video, then I stopped it and did not go on. But I have read all kinds of banned documents, including the manual of Afghani Jihad, and I think I would watch the Steve Irwin video if his family would allow it to be released, so why I draw the line here but not there, I am not really sure I know.

Here’s the debate so far:

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Saddam Hussein’s last words

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NOTE: This is not the thread in which to pimp out the death video. There IS a thread to discuss whether or not you’d watch the video, and that thread is here. Not here. I’m getting rather cranky about this and future such comments will probably be deleted. Deal with it.

Saddam Hussein in custody

No, I’m not going to show the video. I’m not even going to watch it. Watching an execution to me is unconscionable, but recording someone’s last words is quite literally the least we can do.

The Guardian is reporting that, according to witnesses, his last words were taunts and boasts, followed at the last moment by prayer, and there you have the Platonically perfect end to a secular and opportunistic dictator.

By several accounts, Saddam was calm but scornful of his captors, engaging in a give-and-take with the crowd gathered to watch him die and insisting he was Iraq’s savior, not its tyrant and scourge.

“He said we are going to heaven and our enemies will rot in hell and he also called for forgiveness and love among Iraqis but also stressed that the Iraqis should fight the Americans and the Persians,” Munir Haddad, an appeals court judge who witnessed the hanging, told the British Broadcasting Corp.

Another witness, national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, told The New York Times that one of the guards shouted at Saddam: “You have destroyed us. You have killed us. You have made us live in destitution.”

“I have saved you from destitution and misery and destroyed your enemies, the Persian and Americans,” Saddam responded, al-Rubaie told the Times.

“God damn you,” the guard said.

“God damn you,” responded Saddam.

New video, first broadcast by Al-Jazeera satellite television early Sunday, had sound of someone in the group praising the founder of the Shiite Dawa Party, who was executed in 1980 along with his sister by Saddam.

Saddam appeared to smile at those taunting him from below the gallows. He said they were not showing manhood.

Then Saddam began reciting the “Shahada,” a Muslim prayer that says there is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger, according to an unabridged copy of the same tape, apparently shot with a camera phone and posted on a Web site.

Saddam made it to midway through his second recitation of the verse. His last word was Muhammad.

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Ali Eteraz on Saddam Hussein

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Step one accomplished...now for the branding...

Eteraz is a genius, but it’s not hard to see why some of us are a tad bit worried for him; the Muslim comic strip wasn’t really very funny, but it was really very dangerous. That was nothing, however, to today’s post about the execution of Saddam Hussein.

 

How To Slaughter A Beast At Eid ul Adha

By Ali Eteraz
Posted on Sat Dec 30, 2006 at 02:08:21 PM EST

The first step in slaughtering an animal at Eid ul Adha is to establish to the animal that you are the man and he the beast, with you being firmly in charge.

The second step in slaughtering an animal at Eid ul Adha is to capture the beast. Often the animal can be found grazing upon various desert shrubs. He can be baited by way of grass, water, or sometimes, doritos…

Read the rest here.

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Saddam Hussein is dead

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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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