The big news over the last couple of days has been the execution of Saddam Hussein. I
want to put in my own two cents about it. It’s not math, but it does at least involve a bit of logic.
I wish I could remember who first said this, but I really don’t know. But the important thing,
in a moral sense, about the whole mess with Saddam is that he was a thug. A vicious,
bloodthirsty, sadistic, evil thug who believed that *power* justified itself. *He* was the
strongest thug in Iraq; therefore, according to his own worldview, he got to do whatever he
wanted until someone stronger came along. Rape, torture, murder were all perfectly acceptable
to him – he had the power to do it, therefore he was *allowed* to do it.
We, Americans, claim to not believe in that calculus of power. We claim to believe in
the idea of *law*: a set of fundamental rules that transcend the individual humans who are in positions of power, that limit them and their actions. No matter who you are, no matter how strong you are, no matter how many guns or bombs or soldiers you have, there are some things
that you simple *are not* allowed to do.
And that’s where the problem with the execution of Saddam comes in.
Did he get what any objective observer would call a fair trial? No. The justification
we keep hearing is *”we know he was guilty”*. But that’s not the point: if we really believe in the rule of law, then *even if the accused is obviously, undeniably, unquestionably guilty*, we have to give them a full and fair trial, with the right to hear the evidence against them, confront their accusers, and present their own defense. Not because they *deserve* it – but because **we** require it. The laws, the fundamental rules that
make us different from thugs like Saddam, say that we must do it; if we ignore our laws,
even in the case of an outrageously evil person like Saddam, then we *validate* the things he did, the way he acted.
After the trial is over, and a sentence is selected, the way that the sentence is carried
out is also dictated by laws. Even in the case of a death sentence, there are rules that
must be followed about how the condemned criminal is treated, and about how and when his
execution must be performed.
Under pressure from the American government, the Iraqi government executed Saddam *in violation of their laws concerning executions*. In the execution chamber, being led to his death, the guards spit at him and cursed at him. Witnesses were allowed to bring in cellphone video cameras and tape his execution, and take souvenir photos of his dead body. His execution
was illegal under the law of the land, and it was carried out with the same kind of
spectacle as the executions that he commanded when he was in charge.
Saddam himself summed it up well. On the way to his execution, he said “I am a militant and I have no fear for myself. I have spent my life in jihad and fighting aggression. Anyone who takes this route should not be afraid.” He spent his life as a thug ruling because he had the power to do it. Now we came along, and we were stronger than him. So by his own standards, his own rules, he did nothing wrong. He wasn’t being *punished*; he was simply being killed
because his opponents were stronger than he was. He knew it; everyone who sees the
video of reads the news reports about his execution will know it. He was killed by
a mob of thugs.
We *could* have done something different. We could have given him a fair and open trial,
with all of the charges against him clearly set out, enumerated, and presented with evidence. We could have allowed him to try to defend himself and justify his actions. We could have seen a genuine, fair conviction of him on the basis of public, open evidence. If (as one would expect), the fair trial ended with the sentence of death, we could have executed him in accordance with the law, with the dignity that he denied to his victims, but which is *required* by law.
We could have shown that we were different from him. But we didn’t. In the end, we and the Iraqi government we created acted as a gang of thugs. We allowed Saddam Hussein to die secure in the knowledge that his view of power was correct, and that he was justified in doing
all of the evil things that he did in his life. We *betrayed* everything we claim to stand for, everything we claim to believe, and everything we claimed that this war was meant to bring to the people of Iraq.
It’s a crime. Literally.
Good Math/Bad Math
The beauty of math; the humor of stupidity.
“Under pressure from the American government, the Iraqi government executed Saddam in violation of their laws concerning executions…His execution was illegal under the law of the land….”
How so? Because it was carried out so swiftly? I had read that Iraqi law requires sentences to be carried out within 30 days.
Note that I am not defending the execution per se. Just unclear on the basis for your quoted statements.
qetzal:
The Iraqi law requires a death penalty to be approved by the president and both vice presidents. One of the VPs did *not* approve the execution order. The Iraqi law also prohibits executions during an Islamic holiday called Id al-Adha. He was executed on the morning of Id al-Adha.
“He was executed on the morning of Id al-Adha.”
No, no. As I understand it, he was executed on the morning of the Sunni Id al-Adha. Since the Iraqi government (such as it is) is run by Shi’ites, whose Id al-Adha starts a bit later, the execution squeezed in under the Shi’ite holiday. C’mon Mark, you gotta know your holiday nuances to know when an execution is legal. These theological niceties make a real difference, dontcha think?
Did he get what any objective observer would call a fair trial? No.
If by that you mean an American-style jury of his peers, then you are right. He couldn’t have possibly been given a fair trial in that sense. No jury in Iraq could be expected to be truly neutral and the situation for those testifying against him was extraordinarily dangerous. Nuremberg was also grossly unfair by that standard. I’m not losing any sleep over the trials of Himmler, Goering, or a host of other Nazi war criminals. I won’t lose any sleep over the execution of Saddam, either.
Under pressure from the American government,
In the execution chamber, being led to his death, the guards spit at him and cursed at him. Witnesses were allowed to bring in cellphone video cameras and tape his execution, and take souvenir photos of his dead body.
The problem is that you are now conflating Iraqi actions with U.S. intent. I’m sure it wasn’t the administration’s decision to have cellphone video cameras in the room or to have guards spit on Saddam. Welcome to the Third World.
We could have done something different. We could have given him a fair and open trial, with all of the charges against him clearly set out, enumerated, and presented with evidence. We could have allowed him to try to defend himself and justify his actions.
OK. We could have done that for the Nazis also, I suppose. It would help if you would provide more detail on what you mean by a “fair and open trial, with all charges against him clearly set out, enumerated, and presented with evidence” that wasn’t practiced in this case. How about some specific complaints so we can better know what you mean, Mark?
We could have shown that we were different from him. But we didn’t. In the end, we and the Iraqi government we created acted as a gang of thugs.
Well, if there is one thing you liberals and the neoconservatives both possess, it is endless faith in the capacity of people from Third World countries to act like immaculate saints by western standards! That is the entire problem with this absurd misadventure in Iraq: like liberals, those formerly liberal folks we call the neoconservatives, hold a very optimistic view of human nature. (At least, so long as the people in question are not white or western.)
Liberals and neoconservatives alike both act as though the differences between cultures amount to little more than differences in cuisine, attire, and language. They think that Islam, with its built-in and inflexible system of Sharia and its open-ended commandments to wage war upon non-believers, is pretty much like Christianity or Judaism ‘cept a bit different. They don’t understand how tribal societies like Iraq, where the rate of cousin marriage hovers around 50 percent, are functionally different from western societies like the United States. They pretty much assume that people over there must think like us. After all, they are people too. They must care about pretty much the same things, right? Clueless.
Liberals have their own misadventures. Kosovo is a good example. In Kosovo we stepped in to prevent one “genocide” and now NATO is stuck there for fear of another genocide. We prevented the Serbs from harming the Kosovar Albanians. The problem is that now the Kosovar Serb population is living in fear of being driven out or wiped out themselves. Trade one set of atrocities for another. The good news? We might, at the end of the day, have another Muslim majority of state in Europe with all the good things that entails.
By the way, we didn’t create this government. It was elected by the Iraqi people. If that doesn’t reflect highly on the nature of Iraqi (or greater Arab) society, in your opinion, then so be it. But let us not blame the U.S. for what is fundamentally the same essential behavior that we see throughout the Arab world. Liberals and neoconservatives simply cannot accept that our power to change the way these people behave is limited. They are not “blank slates” to be molded as we see fit. That is even more true when we rely upon our relatively soft western approach in trying to change the way things work.
We betrayed everything we claim to stand for, everything we claim to believe, and everything we claimed that this war was meant to bring to the people of Iraq. It’s a crime. Literally.
The Arab world is full of crimes. Most are crimes that liberals could care less about. They are committed by, among other individuals, thugs like General Mubarak in Egypt who has received the support of successive presidential administrations, both Republicans and Democrats, and of the American taxpayer to the tune of around $2 billion a year. You won’t see much liberal hand-wringing over that. There isn’t much opportunity for political comeuppance in caring about those crimes. But really, in the grand scheme of things, Saddam’s trial is small potatoes.
Here is a small taste of the Mubarak regime. Here are your taxpayer dollars at work. (Warning: not work safe.)
It was a deliberate and calculated insult to the Sunni population. The Sunni festival of the martyrs – Eid Al-Adha – started on Saturday whereas the Shia Eid Al-Adha stated on Sunday. Speaking day earlier one of the ruling Shia stated that Eid begins on Sunday and that’s that. In a country torn by sectarian strife it was a remark, and the act of execution was an act, deliberately intended to inflame those sectarian tensions. Why? Could it be that the ruling Shia are, at the behest of Bush and company, trying to force Iran (with a vast Sunni majority) to step up their support of the Sunni minority in Iraq and thus give Bush an excuse to go to war against Iraq, one the rest of the UN might go along with?
Great post, Mark. I have basically the same view of the whole mess.
Thanks for the response. Regarding approval by the Pres/VPs, my googling suggests that is not clear cut. For instance, see here.
According to that article, even a director with Human Rights Watch acknowledges confusion over who must ratify a death sentence in Iraq.
I completely agree with your overall point, though. Our principles demand that even poeple like Saddam must be afforded fair and lawful trials and sentences.
Saddam got off a lot easier then his victims. He was dispached in seconds. A more fitting punishment would have been burning at the stake.
Huh? Iran is 89% Shia, and only 9% Sunni. Saddam and his Sunni pals weren’t particularly friendly with Iran. Remeber the Iran-Iraq war?
More likely, it was just Iraqi Shiites taking advantage of a chance to insult Iraqi Sunnis, as a form of retaliation for what went on when the Sunnis were in power.
SLC:
As I said in the post – the question isn’t “What did Saddam deserve?”
Saddam, and people like him, *deserve* to be tortured to death slowly. I won’t question that, and I doubt that any reasonable person would disagree that someone who spent his life murdering and torturing other people *deserves* the same.
To me the question is: What kind of people are we?
We claim to be a country based on *laws*. What people in power are allowed to do in our system is not supposed to be determined by whim, or by who has the biggest guns, or by who can convince the army to go along with them. It’s determined by the law. The president *can’t* do some things, no matter how good it might seem for them to be done. In our legal system, we *cannot* torture a criminal to death, no matter how much they deserve it. That’s what we supposedly stand for: democracy, freedom, and rule of law – the first two cannot exist without the third.
The execution of Saddam Hussein betrayed *our* principles. We disgraced ourselves by breaking the rules that we ourselves made. We violated the fundamental code of justice that we purport to believe in.
I’m happy that Saddam Hussein is dead. He was a disgusting human being who did a mindboggling amount of evil in his lifetime. But I’m ashamed of *how* we killed him – not because he didn’t deserve it, but because *we* violated our own principles.
Mark, great post, I agree completely with you.
The best commentary on Saddam’s trial by far I’ve seen. (Not that I’ve read too many yet.)
I’m no longer an idealist (sins of a prolonged youth) but I would also add that I’m not totally convinced that death penalty was the best, regarding potential reactions and martyrdom vs remaining political influence.
This post raises for me the question if not the ICC had been the best course after all. Both the process and the execution could have been better. (And of course a fledgling ICC needs all support it can get, if one looks besides Iraq’s benefits.) The many crimes against for example the Kurds were not actualized, perhaps for political reasons. They also didn’t get justice, only revenge.
Re Chu Carroll
As I believe Voltaire said, god marches with the big battalions.
It’s becoming clear that the execution of Saddam was just another act of sectarian violence.
IRC was the first blog on the Internet late Saturday night to announce a link (the first link that was created by whoever got a hold of the original tape) to the raw, uncut, untampered video from a cell phone showing the creepy hanging of Saddam:
http://www.indierockcafe.com/2006/12/cell-phone-video-hanging-of-saddam.html
Today there are dozens of versions of the tape edited and manipulated flying around the Internet and on cable news.
How can you report or comment on something if you haven’t seen the entire, unedited thing from start to finish?
Example: The Washington Post reported that Saddam hanged for five minutes.
That is impossible if you watch or download the original, the REAL original, video here:
http://www.indierockcafe.com/2006/12/cell-phone-video-hanging-of-saddam.html
>It was a deliberate and calculated insult to the Sunni population. The Sunni festival of the martyrs – Eid Al-Adha – started on Saturday whereas the Shia Eid Al-Adha stated on Sunday.>
I do wonder at this confusion, as I understand from muslims I work with here in Saudi (Shia & Sunni) in Islam the day officially starts at dawn not midnight. As Saddam was executed before daybreak he wasn’t strictly speaking killed during any timing of Eid given that Eid is a muslim festival and so starts according to muslim dates and timing.
This doesn’t make the killing correct or just but if people were claiming to be annoyed because he was executed during Haj I could understand the religious reasoning better.
Happy & Prosperous 2007 and thank you Mark for having such and intersting and intelligent blog.
Off back to lurking :o)
Danish philosopher Soeren Kierkegaard once wrote ‘The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.’ We might have to wait a little to see how it applies to Saddam in particular, but for now it seems quite appropriate for describing the mess in Iraq in general.
I quote : “Rape, torture, murder were all perfectly acceptable to him – he had the power to do it, therefore he was allowed to do it.”
You talking about preznit Bush?
“Saddam, and people like him, *deserve* to be tortured to death slowly. I won’t question that, and I doubt that any reasonable person would disagree that someone who spent his life murdering and torturing other people *deserves* the same.”
I will question it. I don’t know what Saddam ultimately deserved, and don’t care – it’s not important. Because it’s none of our business to go around giving people what we think they deserve (against their will), whether we do it with laws or with more direct actions. Rather, our actions and laws have to be justified from our own interests.
The reason for this restriction is what some have called the liberal principle: that everyone should be free to do whatever they wish, as long as it doesn’t interfere with other’s freedom.
So whether killing Saddam was necessary to preserve someone’s liberties is a relevant question – whether he ‘deserved’ to die on account of what he had done in the past isn’t.
The US arranged for its client state to try, condemn and execute Saddam in order to show that it is independent.
I agree that he was killed by thugs. I could hardly believe the taunting that went on during the execution. It sounded like I imagine a lynching must sound.
Mark:
This is by far the sanest and most coherent post on Saddam’s execution I have read anywhere.
Thanks!
A commentary from a Left wing Israeli newspaper in the following link.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/808349.html
SLC:
I find that link infuriating. The objections that I, and many other people, have is *not* that the idea of executing Saddam is intrinsically wrong. There certainly *are* people who object to the death penalty in principle, and therefore oppose it in all cases, including Saddam. But that is *not* the bulk of the criticism that I’ve seen, and it’s certainly not the viewpoint that I expressed in this post.
The issue is *how* he was executed. Assuming you support the death penalty, the correct way to execute him would have been to give him a fair and open trial, openly present the full list of crimes he was accused of and the evidence of his guilt, and then given him a chance to defend himself.
Doing it the right way shows respect for *our* principles and demonstrates how we are different from a thug like Saddam. And even more important even than the issue of our principles is that giving him a fair trial where all of his crimes and all of the evidence was presented would have made it very clear *what he was*: a brutal murderous tyrant who stole, raped, and killed whoever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Instead, we threw him into a blatantly unfair trial where he was accused of a crime that was *trivial* in comparison to what he really did, and then rushed him into a hangmans noose. In the eyes of many people around the world, we turned him into a martyr.
Was Saddam worse than the people we tried at Nuremberg? Was he worse than Adolf Eichmann? To the Nazis, we gave fair, open trials where we showed the world the evidence against the accused – and when we executed them, they died as humiliated criminals, aware that they had been judged and
proven guilty to the world.
In some ways, the execution of Saddam Hussein reminds me of the execution of king Charles the first of England and Scotland. He was tried by a kangaroo court hand-picked by the victors; he was not permitted to properly defend himself even if he had chosen to; the result was a foregone conclusion; and he went to the scaffold with more dignity than his accusers could even dream of.
Charles I’s reputation was largely salvaged twenty-odd years later when the Commonwealth collapsed and Cromwell and his lackeys were vilified to the extent that their bodies were dug up and quartered and their descendants deprived of their titles and property. I wonder what will happen when the American puppet state collapses, as it most assuredly will.
Thugs strike again!
Iraqi PM orders investigation into who taunted Saddam
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070102/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_070102184330
Clearly these people are no better than Saddam. Remember all those investigations Saddam ordered into those cases where people who were killed under his watch were “taunted?” I don’t either.
The problem with a fair and open trial of Saddam is that it would implicate many people that the current administration does not want to see implicated — people like Rumsfeld, Cheney, GHW Bush, Reagan, Wolfowitz. So that sort of trial was not going to happen. But for PR purposes alone a legal execution was vital.
But as was said recently in the blogosphere, the one thing you can count on with the Bush-Cheney administration is that if something can possibly be made worse, they will.
mike:
I’m glad to see that that’s happening. It should happen. But more importantly, *the events we’re discussing should never have happened*. And when the authorities at the execution saw it happening, they should have intervened. Calling for an “investigation” after the fact, after the authorities permitted it to occur without intervention, after it became apparent that permitting that had caused a public outcry… Pardon me if I’m not overwhelmed by the nobility of the Iraqi government.
I’ll agree that Saddam wouldn’t have called an investigation into how a victim was treated on their way to their execution. But is that the standard you want to hold us to? “Not as bad as Saddam?” Did we send hundreds of thousands of Americans to rotate through multiple duty tours in Iraq just so that we could replace Saddam with something “Not as bad as Saddam”? Is that what this war is for? Not for freedom,
or democracy, or rule of law – just for something not as bad as Saddam?
Mark writes: “To the Nazis, we gave fair, open trials where we showed the world the evidence against the accused – and when we executed them, they died as humiliated criminals”
How much have you actually read about the Nuremberg trials? U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone called them a “fraud” and a “high-grade lynching”. U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas called them “unprincipled”. And having a Soviet judge rule on whether the German defendants committed “acts of aggression against Poland”? Please.
As for the executions, I’d rather be taunted and have my neck snapped like Saddam than be strangled to death for half an hour like Field Marshal Keitel.
It seems certain that Saddam was not pleased about being executed, but quite pleased with how it was done since it was going to happen. He wanted to play a role that could make him a martyr, and the Bush administration and the Iraqis who did it obliged him to a degree which was probably far greater than Saddam could’ve hoped for.
Much like Osama bin Laden got far more than he could ever have imagined from Bush et al.
Why don’t we stop helping these thugs acheive their goals?
So execution might be (for the sake of argument) wrong on Christmas in a Christian country. But, since that is celebrated on different days in Catholic or Protestant versus Greek, Russian, or Armenian Orthodox churches, it could ignite sectarian violence if someone of one sub-faith were executed on the holiday of the other sub-faith? [sub- meaning via schism, not a well-ordering or partial ordering by some sort of intrinsic merit].
Would it matter if Mitt Romney were President of the US in 2009, the first Mormon President? Or matter if Lieberman were President? Hard for me to see this one by analogy.
But I do agree that the monster Saddam did not get a Fair Trial, based on my 20 years of litigtation experience. I Am Not A Lawyer. But I have worked as a de facto paralegal for at least 3 law firms, and as consultant for Patent Law firms, to a six-figure tune. The USA did rest on Rule By Law, at least when I was younger. It has drifted, I feel, over the line to Might Makes Right. Things may have been changed in the most recent election. Maybe. Time will tell.
Here in Germany lots of people (me included) think that even in the case of Saddam the death penalty is not an option.
But I don’t think, that this is a topic in the US.
Good or not Saddam’s execution won’t help the situation in Iraq. If anything the civil war will get worse.
The USA should have never invaded in the first place.
The biggest problem I have with your commentary is stated below:
Did he get what any objective observer would call a fair trial? No. The justification we keep hearing is “we know he was guilty”. But that’s not the point: if we really believe in the rule of law, then even if the accused is obviously, undeniably, unquestionably guilty, we have to give them a full and fair trial, with the right to hear the evidence against them, confront their accusers, and present their own defense. Not because they deserve it – but because we require it. The laws, the fundamental rules that make us different from thugs like Saddam, say that we must do it; if we ignore our laws, even in the case of an outrageously evil person like Saddam, then we validate the things he did, the way he acted.
You keep using the word “we” as in the United States. Maybe we shouldn’t have been there in the first place but Iraq has to start taking responsibility for itself. Had “we” conducted the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein, the world and , more importantly, Iraq would have gone nuts. The Iraqi government has shown the world its attempt at justice. “We” had nothing to do with it and the world can’t blame us for the outcome.
From what I’ve read, the execution came within the 30 day limit imposed by Iraqi law and the president’s signature was not required for the execution. Yes, they came up short on giving a fair trail but it’s important that “they” conducted it. It’s a start and it’s time for us to leave.
Those American-backed thugs just can’t help themselves: now they’ve gone and arrested the guy who made the cell phone video of Saddam’s execution.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1167467654524&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
They are no better than Saddam. When will this madness end?
There was a certain ironic justice in the way that Saddam was executed that appeals to me.
Still, it sets a precedent that is unduly unsettling. I could be the subject of a show trial and execution one day. It wouldn’t matter if i were innocent. That’s why i should support the rule of law.
It also makes me look bad. I’m a citizen of a ruthless, thoughtless and uncivilized country.
Apparently, it is my right, even duty, to buy a new SUV every couple years, despite decades of obvious evidence that this behavior is having permanent negative effects on the planet we all live on. Further, i can complain about how (for example) the Brazilians are burning the rain forests.
I agree with you. I didn’t read through all of the posts above – but I think ‘we’ had a real chance here to show that we were different, and we missed the opportunity. I think it was a crime too, and a tough way to end/begin a year.
“The problem with a fair and open trial of Saddam is that it would implicate many people that the current administration does not want to see implicated — people like Rumsfeld, Cheney, GHW Bush, Reagan, Wolfowitz. So that sort of trial was not going to happen. But for PR purposes alone a legal execution was vital.”
Bingo, QrazyQat.
Bingo,
Granted,I am no fan of Rumsfeld, Cheney, GHW Bush, Reagan, Wolfowitz but the trial had nothing to do with them. They would not have been implicated in anything. Saddam was on trial for what he did to the residents of al-Dujail. Read below.
“Hundreds of the al-Dujail residents were detained following the firing of shots at the motorcade of the head of the former regime, the defendant Saddam Hussein. Six hundred and eighty-seven persons (687) were detained. One hundred and eighty-four (184) of the detainees were referred to the Revolutionary Court, which condemned them to death after a brief trial. Another three hundred and ninety-nine persons (399), all of whom were women, children, and elderly men, were detained in the desert Lia camp close to the Saudi borders, where they spent four years before their release. Another forty-six persons (46) died in prison as a result of corporal and psychological torture during investigation.”
I ask you, what did they have to do with this?
Lee
We all know that Saddam was set in power and armed vociferously by US administrations, and that our administrations supported him even long after he’d begun his bloody behavior. Silencing him via execution helps keep such facts off the front pages.
This is pretty ingenuous. “Oh, those crazy Iraqis, they just went ahead with a kangaroo trial and an execution that seems intentionally designed to promote sectarian violence and endanger US troops, and we were just powerless to do anything about it.” Except, of course, that the survival of the current Iraqi government is entirely dependent upon the presence of US troops. There is no particular reason why the US could not have made an international trial of Saddam Hussein an absolute condition of continued military support for the Iraqi government. The entire world knows this. So yes, the world can and will blame us, because we were in charge, and we let it happen, just as is the case for most of the avoidable catastrophes of this war. Trying to blame the Iraqis for our failures looks cowardly, and it is.
“We all know that Saddam was set in power and armed vociferously by US administrations, and that our administrations supported him even long after he’d begun his bloody behavior. Silencing him via execution helps keep such facts off the front pages.”
You are correct. We all know the U.S supported Iraq back in the 80s. It’s unlikely anything of significance would have come out in the trial about additional U.S. activities with Iraq. But it is not at all my point. You are talking about previous administrations and not the current one. I was simply addressing Bingo’s comments about the current administration.
As far as an international trial goes, that would have been the better option. I agree. But don’t you find it curious that the world didn’t make a big fuss about making this an international trial? There’s a reason. That’s because in private they wanted Saddam dead as much as the U.S. Remember the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor? The French openly condemned the bombing like much of the rest of the world. But in private it is well known that the French leaders really didn’t have a problem with it…much like the rest of the world. Saddam’s trial and death are no different. Sorry, but it’s all politics.
Marc: No response to the dawn/midnight distinction? NPR reported the same thing on the day of his execution. I’d be curious what you think about it.
billb:
I’m not an expert on Islam; my understanding, such as it is, is that the Muslim day does start at dawn – but that doing something immediately before the sun rises doesn’t mean that you did it the day before.
While they *might* have slipped it by the letter of the law, to the Sunni’s of Iraq, Saddam *was* executed on the holiday.
As a metaphor: American presidents have an annoying tradition of last-minute pardons issued on their last day in office. Would any American credibly say that a pardon issued at 11:55 the night before the president leaves office as *not* being a last-day pardon?
Saddam was deliberately executed on the *Sunni* date of the holiday, with a token gesture to make it sort-of legal by doing it immediately before dawn.
Mike:
Seriously: do you *really* believe that the people in charge of the execution *didn’t know* what was going on? That they somehow *didn’t notice* people holding up camera phones? That they didn’t notice people shouting insults, or the guards bringing him to the gallows spitting at him?
The “investigation” and arrest are a response to the uproar that was caused when people found out how the execution was conducted. It’s a face-saving gesture, not a genuine attempt at justice. The justice minister of the Iraqi government was a *witness* to the execution. He was there, *in the room*, and did *nothing* to intervene. The people in the Iraqi government who are supposed to be responsible for these things *were there* and did nothing. Calling an investigation *after* the riots started is just bullshit.
“Sort-of” legal? No such thing. It was legal, offensively timed perhaps, but legal. That the Sunnis of Iraq (worldwide?) choose to take offense at their government for the timing is their prerogative. I just objected to your characterization in light of the evidence that perhaps the Muslim day starts at dawn, contrary to the Western day which starts at midnight.
Presidential pardons are traditionally done once a year. There’s a whole branch of the DoJ that handles the pettitions. Bush did his latest round not too long ago. Presidents tend to save the high-profile ones for the last day of their last term (which is only a month or so later than when they do it in other years) to avoid any political backlash (since POTUS is really a terminal job in a political career), but I don’t really find anything extra unseemly about it. It’s a privelge of office. That members of the opposing political party choose to try to make political hay out of it some years doesn’t make the act, in the abstract, wrong or any more wrong than when it’s done in other years of the term.
BTW, when the video rental store says that your videos are due back tomorrow by 5, and you return them at 4:55, does that give them the right to charge you a late fee? Or, perhaps a better question for you is, what time on the day before the beginning of the Sunni holiday would have been acceptible in your eyes to hold the execution (assuming, arguenndo, that the execution must take place)? 1 hour before dawn? Before 11:59pm? 10:59pm? Do you honestly think any of these times would have provoked a lesser reaction?
Lee wrote:
“You are correct. We all know the U.S supported Iraq back in the 80s. It’s unlikely anything of significance would have come out in the trial about additional U.S. activities with Iraq. But it is not at all my point. You are talking about previous administrations and not the current one. I was simply addressing Bingo’s comments about the current administration.”
The current US administration contains many that were involved at cabinet levels with the activities of past US administrations. This was part of QrazyQuat’s and my points.
Btw, “Bingo” was not a signature; it was my concurring response to QrazyQuat.
>Marc: No response to the dawn/midnight distinction? NPR reported the same thing on the day of his execution. I’d be curious what you think about it.
Posted by: billb | January 4, 2007 08:03 PM >
Curiouser: After posting what I understood about the day starting at dawn in islam; it appears that in the lunar calendar (http://www.ummah.net)the day is sunset to sunset. So if this is used then he was killed on the 1st day of a sunni Eid.
The dawn to dawn reckoning may be an interpretation based on what is meant by a day (i.e. day does not include night time).
Oh well, as they use the standard 24h clock here we have a mix of all three.
Not because they deserve it .. NOT because we require it ..
but because we deserve it.
“it” being plural .. clean reputation and clear conscience.
Although the shysterish bickering over the beginning of Eid suggests that maybe we don’t deserve it.