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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
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January 3rd,
2007 - Iraq to Review Hussein’s Execution |
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Iraq to Review Hussein’s
Execution By John F. Burns and James Glanz New York Times January 3, 2007 Baghdad, Jan. 2 - Iraq’s
Shiite-led government said Tuesday that it had ordered an investigation into
the abusive behavior at the execution of Saddam Hussein, who was subjected to
a battery of taunts by official Shiite witnesses and guards as he awaited his
hanging. Officials said a three-man
Interior Ministry committee would look into the scenes that have caused
outrage and public demonstrations among Mr. Hussein’s Sunni Arab loyalists in
Iraq, and widespread dismay elsewhere, especially in the Middle East. In an
unofficial cellphone video recording that was broadcast around the world and
posted on countless Web sites, Mr. Hussein is shown standing on the gallows
platform with the noose around his neck at dawn on Saturday, facing a barrage
of mockery and derision from unseen tormentors below the gallows. As the shock of those scenes
reached a new crescendo in Iraq, American officials said that they had worked
until the last hours of Mr. Hussein’s life to persuade Prime Minister Nuri
Kamal al-Maliki to delay the execution. The officials, who spoke on condition
that they not be identified, said they appealed to Mr. Maliki not to execute
Mr. Hussein at dawn on Saturday because of the onset of a major Islamic
festival, and because of constitutional and legal questions that the
Americans believed threw the legitimacy of the execution into doubt. But when Mr. Maliki decided
to go ahead with the hanging, the Americans said they made no further attempts
to stop it, having concluded that they could advise the Iraqis against the
execution, but not prevent it if the Iraqis persisted, out of respect for
Iraqi sovereignty. When asked if that decision
had been made in the White House, the Americans refused to say, noting only
that it came some time before the final exchanges on Friday night. Mr.
Hussein was hanged at 6:10 a.m. on Saturday, about seven hours after what the
officials said was their final attempt to postpone the hanging. “We told the prime minister
that going forward on the first day of Id would have a negative reaction in
the Islamic world, and among the Iraqi people,” a senior American official
said, recounting a telephone conversation with Mr. Maliki that began at 10:30
p.m. Baghdad time on Friday. The reference was to the Id al-Adha holiday,
which began for Sunnis on Saturday, marking the end of the annual pilgrimage
to Mecca. “Therefore,” the official said, “we said we thought it would be
better if they delayed until after Id, and use the delay to resolve the legal
issues.” The American official said
that Mr. Maliki had never fully explained his urgency in carrying out the
death sentence, which was upheld last Tuesday in an appeals court ruling that
set off a 30-day countdown for executions to be carried out after a final
appeal has been turned down. But the prime minister gave one explanation that
appeared to weigh heavily on his mind, the American said, and that was his
fear that Mr. Hussein might be the subject of an insurgent attempt to free
him if the procedural wrangling over the execution were protracted. “His concern was security,
and that there was a danger that if it continued, maybe there would be a mass
kidnapping to bargain for Saddam Hussein’s release,” the official said. “He
was concerned that he might somehow get free.” The American decision to
confirm that they had opposed the quick execution came after days of silence
from the American Embassy and the United States military command in Baghdad,
which appeared to have been shocked, like so many others, by the unofficial video
recording that showed the bedlam at the gallows. With some Iraqi politicians
raising fresh demands for Mr. Maliki’s dismissal, the Americans, in offering
to have a senior official discuss the matter in a telephone interview with
The New York Times, appeared eager to protect the Bush administration from a
fresh surge of criticism for its handling of events in Iraq. The official said that among
American officials in Iraq who had tried to stop Mr. Maliki from rushing Mr.
Hussein to the gallows, the reaction to the scenes of abuse had been one of
dismay. “Well, yes, when I think of
the behavior of the people who were there, I’m disappointed and distressed,
that’s true,” the official who spoke in the telephone interview said. He said
he had been one of the Americans who intervened with Mr. Maliki on Friday
night and earlier last week to try to delay the hanging. Mr. Maliki seemed equally
eager to ward off the opprobrium stirred by the execution. His aides
announced that the events at the hanging would be the subject of an inquiry.
A prosecutor who attended the execution, Munkith al-Faroun, said he thought
one of the invited witnesses had recorded the session on a cellphone, but he
could not recall his name. The government inquiry was
ordered as a groundswell of protest grew at Sunni population centers across
Iraq. The protests, sporadic in the first 72 hours after the hanging,
appeared to be building in intensity as Iraqi and American troops relaxed
security cordons that had been thrown around centers of diehard support for
Mr. Hussein, including his hometown, Tikrit, 100 miles north of Baghdad, and
Awja, the village where he was born, a few miles away. The protesters carried
portraits of Mr. Hussein, chanted his name, and fired weapons in the air. Thousands of mourners
flocked to Awja, where Mr. Hussein’s body has lain in a reception hall. The
body, in a plain wood coffin draped in an Iraqi flag, has become a point of
pilgrimage for loyalists. Many of those reaching Awja have wept as they filed
past the coffin, shouting slogans of fealty of the kind that were universal
in Iraq when Mr. Hussein was the country’s dictator. “Maliki, you coward, you are
an American agent,” cried one demonstrator in Tikrit, referring to the prime
minister. “Iran, out, out!” another man shouted, echoing anger among Sunnis
at the rise to power in Baghdad of Shiite religious groups backed by Iran,
including Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party. After Mr. Maliki made it
clear to the Americans in Baghdad that his decision was final, the official
who discussed the events on Friday night said, American commanders were told
to deliver Mr. Hussein to an execution bloc in the Kadhimiya district of
northern Baghdad that Mr. Hussein’s military intelligence agency used to
execute countless opponents of his government. At 4 a.m., Mr. Hussein was
flown by an American military helicopter from an American detention center
and handed over to the Iraqis. He was hanged with only Iraqis present, in a
group of about 25, including executioners and guards, according to accounts
by American and Iraqi officials. A postponement of the
execution until after the holiday would have delayed it at least until
Thursday of this week. But the American officials said they had made no
stipulation as to how long the delay should be, since their concern, beyond
respecting the sanctity of the Id al-Adha holiday, had been that Mr. Maliki
should await a formal judicial ruling resolving the legal issues before going
ahead with the hanging. The Americans said Mr.
Maliki had agreed, as the Americans had urged, to ask the chief judge of
Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council, Midhat al-Mahmoud, to issue a formal written
judgment saying that the uncompleted legal procedures that concerned the
Americans were not necessary to the lawfulness of the hanging. But Judge
Mahmoud refused, the Americans said, and around midnight on Friday the Iraqi
leader decided to go ahead with the execution, signing a decree ordering that
Mr. Hussein be “hanged by the neck until dead.” The legal issues the
Americans said they urged Mr. Maliki to resolve before the hanging centered
on a constitutional provision requiring Iraq’s three-man presidency council
to affirm all executions before they are carried out. That posed a potential
obstacle to the hanging because Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, is opposed
to the death penalty. One of the other members of the council, Tariq
al-Hashemi, is a Sunni from a moderate party that has disavowed Mr. Hussein,
but has been careful not to endorse his trial and execution. Mr. Maliki, in pushing ahead
with the hanging, relied on a provision in the statute that established the
Iraqi High Tribunal, which convicted Mr. Hussein, which said that the
tribunal’s verdicts, once upheld by its own appeal bench, were final and not
subject to presidential review. It was that conflict the Americans said they
wanted resolved by a written ruling from Judge Mahmoud. “Mr. Maliki said that
Judge Mahmoud had given that opinion orally, but we said it would be better
for everybody if he said it in writing,” the American official who discussed
the standoff said. Sami al-Askari, a political
adviser to Mr. Maliki who attended the hanging, said in a telephone interview
that the committee would question everyone present at the execution. He said
those who used their cellphones to record the event would be one focus of the
inquiry. He said his own observation was that the worst sectarian taunts had
come from a guard he described as a poorly educated Shiite man with a thick
Arabic accent. “It was horrible, it was terrible, it was a mistake,” he said.
“We were supposed to sit there quietly, just looking at what’s going on.” The first images of the
execution that were released were in the form of an official video recording
without sound. The unofficial cellphone images showed Mr. Hussein, with the
noose around his neck, facing shouts of “Go to hell!” and taunts of “Moktada!
Moktada! Moktada!” in reference to an unruly Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr,
who has become a populist hero among Shiites. Speaking of those protesting
the abuse of Mr. Hussein, Mr. Faroun, the prosecutor, asked, “Where were
these critics when Saddam’s people were executing whole prisons full of
innocent people?” He said he had been deeply offended by the taunting of Mr.
Hussein, and had tried to stop it. “You heard my voice on the cellphone
recording,” he said. “I was the one shouting, ‘Please, no. The man is about
to be executed.’ ” Reporting was contributed by
Ali Adeeb, Qais Mizher, Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, Marc Santora and Sabrina
Tavernise in Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times in Awja. External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/world/middleeast/03iraq.html |