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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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January 16th,
2007 - Second Iraq Hanging Also Went Awry |
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Second Iraq Hanging Also
Went Awry By John F. Burns New York Times January 16, 2007 Baghdad, Jan. 15 - Iraq’s
turbulent effort to reckon with the violence of its past took another macabre
turn on Monday when the execution of Saddam Hussein’s half brother ended with
the hangman’s noose decapitating him after he dropped through the gallows
trapdoor. An official video played to
a small group of Iraqi and Western reporters more than 13 hours after the
hanging showed Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, former head of Mr. Hussein’s secret
police, standing nervously on the trapdoor in a flame-orange jumpsuit of the
kind used at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, his
head and mustache shaved. Beside him, praying feverishly in identical garb,
stood the other condemned man, Awad Hamad al-Bandar, the former chief judge
of Mr. Hussein’s revolutionary court. After executioners in
full-face balaclavas pulled black hoods over the two men’s heads, tightened
nooses around their necks and pulled the lever opening the trapdoors, both
fell like weights. But the hangmen’s calculations of weight, gravity and the
momentum needed to snap their necks - a grim science that has produced
detailed “drop charts” used for decades in hangings around the world -
appeared, in Mr. Ibrahim’s case, to have gone seriously awry. Iraqi officials said their
execution procedures had been exhaustively reviewed after the Hussein
execution on Dec. 30, which culminated with the former dictator facing a
volley of verbal abuse from members of the execution party as he waited with
the noose around his neck. The officials said that their goal was to prevent
a recurrence of those scenes, which were sectarian in nature and set off a
storm of protest around the world, and that they had consulted with Western
“humanitarian organizations” to get the procedures right. Under pressure from American
officials, the hanging of Mr. Ibrahim and Mr. Bandar, who were sentenced in
November for their roles in the torture and execution of scores of Shiites in
the town of Dujail after an alleged assassination attempt against Mr. Hussein
in 1982, had been delayed for more than two weeks while the Maliki government
drew up new guidelines for executions. American and Iraqi officials
said the aim was to prevent a recurrence of the scenes that turned Mr.
Hussein, a mass murderer in the eyes of many Iraqis, into something of a
sympathetic figure at his death and, across the Arab world, into an icon of
dignity and courage. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal
al-Maliki had assured the Americans that instead of having 25 witnesses, as
at the Hussein hanging, only about half as many would attend. Moreover, he
pledged to exclude any known loyalists of the Shiite militia leader Moktada
al-Sadr, a polarizing figure whose name was invoked by guards to antagonize
Mr. Hussein. With those assurances, the
Americans agreed to release the two men, and flew them by helicopter from the
American detention center at Camp Cropper to the same execution spot used for
Mr. Hussein, at the former headquarters of the Istikhbarat, the deposed
government’s military intelligence agency. But events at the gallows in
the predawn hours of Monday had something of the same surreal and freakish
quality that enveloped the Hussein hanging. Iraqi officials who attended
the hanging said the calculation in the case of Mr. Ibrahim, a 55-year-old of
medium height and build, had allowed for a “drop” of eight feet - too much,
according to at least one United States Army manual - and about that amount
of thick yellow rope could be seen coiled at Mr. Ibrahim’s feet before the
hanging. The video showed his head
being snapped off as the rope went taut, and ending up, still inside the
hood, lying in the pit of the gallows about five feet from his headless body. Mr. Bandar could be seen
dangling from the rope above Mr. Ibrahim, whose body was lying on its chest
on the floor of the dark, dank pit, blood pooling beside his severed neck.
The silent, three-minute video then ended abruptly, with officials saying
they would run it only once, and not show it in public again. To ensure no illicit copies
of the video were made with cellphone cameras, as happened at the execution
of Mr. Hussein, reporters attending the showing had their cellphones taken
away by hawk-eyed Iraqi security men. Ali al-Dabbagh, spokesman
for Mr. Maliki who supervised the details of Mr. Hussein’s execution, said
officials wanted to ensure that Mr. Ibrahim and Mr. Bandar died instantly,
and were not left dangling at the end of the hanging rope for 15 to 20
minutes before they were asphyxiated, which he said had been a deliberate
tactic used in thousands of hangings under Mr. Hussein. That seemed to
suggest that the executioners had deliberately allowed for a long “drop” for
the two men hanged Monday, to be sure their necks were broken cleanly by
their fall. The Iraqis described the
decapitation of Mr. Ibrahim as a “rare incident,” but they acknowledged that
a similar thing had happened at least once before in the score or more of
hangings that have been carried out since the fall of Mr. Hussein. They cited
the case of an Egyptian man hanged in the northern city of Mosul for offenses
linked to the insurgency, who had also had his head separated as he fell. In
Mr. Hussein’s case, an illicit video taken after the hanging showed a bloody,
egg-sized gouge in his neck, below his left ear, where the noose had cut into
him as he dropped. An Internet search for
manuals on hanging suggested that Mr. Ibrahim was the victim of an
overestimate by his executioners. One of the most authoritative manuals, the
United States Army’s “Procedure for Military Executions,” issued under the
authority of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was Army chief of staff in
1947, gave a chart that recommended that a man of about Mr. Ibrahim’s weight,
about 185 pounds, would need a “drop” of five feet seven inches - nearly two
and a half feet less than the drop for Mr. Ibrahim - to assure what the
manual called “a proper execution.” The manual added: “A medical
officer should be consulted to determine whether any factors, such as age,
health or muscular condition, will affect the amount of drop necessary for a
proper execution.” At his trial, Mr. Ibrahim,
though second only to Mr. Hussein in his angry declamations against his Iraqi
and American captors, mentioned his need for medication on a number of
occasions, and complained bitterly about the “disgusting” American cigarettes
he said he was given in lots of 10 a day. Mr. Ibrahim’s decapitation
appeared to have badly unnerved the Maliki government. The Iraqis involved
were so shaken that they waited more than seven hours after the 3 a.m.
executions to formally announce them, and then read a statement that dwelled
on the two men’s “big crimes against humanity” while serving as acolytes to
Mr. Hussein. The statement made only a passing reference to the severing of
Mr. Ibrahim’s head. “In a rare incident, the
head of the convict Barzan Ibrahim al-Hassan” - his name as it appeared on
court documents - “was separated from his body during the execution,” it
said. Further details were left to
a news conference called six hours later, when rumors were circulating among
Sunni Arab loyalists of the former government, and on Arabic-language
television channels broadcasting across the Middle East, that Mr. Ibrahim had
been deliberately decapitated in an act of revenge by the Maliki government
and as an insult to the Sunni Muslim world. The depth of suspicion, and
the readiness among Sunni Arabs to blame the United States for everything
grim in Iraq, was reflected in interviews conducted in neighboring countries
after the hangings. “The U.S. is 100 percent guilty,” said Turki al-Rasheed,
who heads an organization promoting democracy in Saudi Arabia. “It means they
cut Barzan’s head in the execution chamber.” Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, in Egypt on a Middle East tour, joined the recriminations.
“I would be the first to say that we were disappointed that there was not
greater dignity given to the accused under these circumstances,” she said,
referring to Mr. Hussein’s execution and the two carried out Monday. “I think
that passions run high after years of turmoil, under dictatorship, and that
is apparently what happened. But it shouldn’t have happened and I think that
it did not reflect well on the Iraqi government that it came out that way.” When officials from Mr.
Maliki’s office appeared at the Baghdad Convention Center with the video of
the hangings, they were at pains to offer a minutely detailed account of
their procedures. Their accounts were about equally apologetic and assertive
as they explained how Mr. Ibrahim had come to have his head severed, and how
sympathy for the condemned man and his family should be attenuated in the
light of the brutalities he had committed when serving his half brother. Perhaps significantly, the
video was soundless, making it impossible to confirm the officials’
assertions that the two condemned men had been spared the verbal abuse that
was directed at Mr. Hussein. Mr. Dabbagh, the official
spokesman, said all attending the Monday executions - all Iraqis, as was the
case with Mr. Hussein - had been required to sign documents saying they would
behave with dignity and restraint. He held up a signed copy of one of the
affidavits as another of Mr. Maliki’s aides, Basam Ridha, summarized what he
said was the air of restraint at the executions. Mr. Ridha is an
Iraqi-American who lived for years in California before returning to Baghdad
to a position on Mr. Maliki’s staff that made him the point man for the
hangings. “The whole process was very
transparent,” Mr. Ridha said, comparing the hangings favorably with what
happened to Mr. Hussein. “No ethnics, no chanting, everything a very smooth
transaction, everyone very well behaved.” Others in the execution
party seemed somewhat more taken aback. “When the trapdoor opened, I realized
that I was looking at the rope swinging freely, and I asked myself, ‘Where did
Barzan go?’” said Jaafar al-Moussawi, who was chief prosecutor at the trial
that ended with the death sentences for Mr. Hussein, Mr. Ibrahim and Mr.
Bandar. He added: “I thought that somehow he had gotten loose. So I moved
forward toward the pit and looked down, and saw the convict Barzan lying on
the ground without his head.” After Mr. Hussein’s hanging,
his body was kept on the back of a police pickup truck in the parking lot of
Mr. Maliki’s office in Baghdad’s Green Zone for 18 hours, while an argument
raged over whether to hand it over to members of his Albu-Nasir tribe for
burial. That dispute was resolved by the Americans, who insisted that the
Iraqi leader hand over the body. After Monday’s hangings, the
bodies of Mr. Ibrahim and Mr. Bandar were handed over more swiftly, and like
Mr. Hussein’s, flown by American military helicopter for burial at Mr.
Hussein’s - and Mr. Ibrahim’s - home village of Awja, near the Tigris River
city of Tikrit. Officials in the office of
the local governor said that Mr. Bandar’s son, Bandar al-Bandar, a defense
lawyer at his trial, had accompanied the bodies on the flight from Baghdad,
and that Mr. Ibrahim’s body had been delivered. Abdullah Jabara, the deputy
governor, said that roads between Awja and the American airbase at Camp
Speicher, outside Tikrit, had been sealed off by the police, and that the
bodies would be buried under cover of darkness on Monday night, with a
special grave for Mr. Bandar next to Mr. Hussein in a marbled reception hall
at Awja. He made no mention of a grave for Mr. Ibrahim, who had a stormy
relationship with Mr. Hussein. Mr. Bandar’s fealty to his
old boss, Mr. Hussein, was reflected in his decision, said by Iraqi officials
to have been written in his will, to be buried at Tikrit, in Iraq’s Sunni
heartland, and not in Basra, the predominantly Shiite southern city where Mr.
Bandar, a Sunni Arab, was born. After the hangings were announced, Basra
residents drove through the city honking car horns and waving Iraqi flags. “Some people noted that
Barzan’s head was separated from his body during the execution, and said that
this was God’s punishment for his crimes,” an Iraqi staff member reported
from Basra. “They said this punishment was an expression of what a bad man he
was during his life.” Reporting was contributed by
Marc Santora, Ali Adeeb, Iraqi staff members of The New York Times in Tikrit
and Basra, Hassan M. Fattah in Beirut, Lebanon, and Thom Shanker in Luxor,
Egypt. External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/world/middleeast/16hang.html |