The Other White Meat [Archive] - Marine Corps

thedrifter

01-01-07, 08:48 AM

Rush to hang Saddam was questioned
By John F. Burns and Marc Santora

Sunday, December 31, 2006

BAGHDAD

With his plain pine coffin strapped into an American military helicopter for a predawn journey across the desert, Saddam Hussein, the executed dictator who built a legend with his defiance of America, completed a turbulent passage into history on Sunday.

Like the helicopter trip, just about everything in the 24 hours that began with Saddam's being taken to his execution from his cell in an American military detention center in the post- midnight chill of Saturday had a surreal and even cinematic quality.

Part of it was that the Americans, who turned him into a pariah and drove him from power, proved to be his unlikely benefactors in the face of Iraq's new Shiite rulers, who seemed bent on turning the execution and its aftermath into a new nightmare for the Sunni minority privileged under Saddam.

The 180-kilometer, or 110-mile, journey aboard a Black Hawk helicopter brought Saddam's body to an American military base north of Tikrit, Camp Speicher, named for a U.S. Navy pilot who was lost over Iraq in the first hours of the Gulf war in 1991. From there, an Iraqi convoy carried Saddam's body to Awja, the humble town beside the Tigris River that Saddam, in the chandeliered palaces that became his habitat as ruler, spoke of as emblematic of the miseries of his lonely and impoverished youth.

The American role extended beyond providing the helicopter that carried Saddam home. Iraqi and American officials who have discussed the intrigue and confusion that preceded the decision late on Friday to rush Saddam to the gallows have said that it was the Americans who questioned the political wisdom — and justice — of expediting the execution, in ways that required Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al- Maliki to override constitutional and religious precepts that might have ensured Saddam the prospect of a more dignified passage to his end.

The American concerns seem certain to have been heightened by what happened at the hanging, as evidenced in video recordings made just before Saddam fell through the gallows trapdoor at 6:10 a.m. on Saturday. A new video that appeared on the Internet late Saturday, apparently made by a witness with a cellphone camera, underscored the unruly, mocking atmosphere in the execution chamber.

This continued, on the video, through to the hanging itself, with a shout of "The tyrant has fallen! May God curse him!" as Saddam hung lifeless, his neck snapped back and his glassy eyes open.

The cacophony from those gathered before the gallows included a shout of "Go to hell!" as the former ruler stood with the noose around his neck in the final moments, and his riposte, barely audible above the bedlam, which included the words "gallows of shame."

It continued despite appeals from an official-sounding voice, possibly of Munir Haddad, the judge who presided at the hanging, saying, "Please no! The man is about to die."

American officials in Iraq have been reluctant to say much publicly about the pell-mell nature of the hanging, apparently fearful of provoking recriminations in Washington, where the Bush administration adopted a hands-off posture, saying that the timing of the execution was for Iraq to decide.

Apart from an instinct to treat Saddam better than he treated his victims, the concern of the Americans in Baghdad has been for the outrage that the execution scenes seemed likely to cause among Saddam's fellow Sunnis.

But a narrative assembled from accounts by various American officials, and by Iraqis who were present at some of the crucial meetings between the two sides, shows that it was the Americans who counseled caution in the way the Iraqis carried out the hanging. The issues uppermost in the Americans' minds, these officials said, were a provision in Iraq's new Constitution that required the three-man presidency council to approve hangings, and a stipulation in a longstanding Iraqi law that no executions can be carried out during the holiday of Eid al-Adha, or Feast of the Sacrifice, which began for Iraqi Sunnis on Saturday, and for Shiites on Sunday.

A senior Iraqi official said that the Americans staked out their ground at a meeting on Thursday, 48 hours after an appeals court had upheld the death sentences passed on Saddam and two associates. The three were convicted in November of crimes against humanity for the persecution of the Shiites of Dujail, north of Baghdad, where a fury of retaliation had been unleashed after an attack in 1982 on Saddam's motorcade, which he termed an assassination attempt. Saddam, as president, signed a decree to hang 148 men and teenage boys.

Told that Maliki wanted to carry out the death sentence on Saddam almost immediately, and not wait further into the 30-day deadline set by the appeals court, American officers said at the meeting Thursday that they would accept any decision but needed assurance that due process had been followed before relinquishing custody of Saddam.

The American pressure sent Maliki and his aides into a frantic quest for legal work-arounds, the Iraqi official said. The Americans told them that they needed a decree from President Jalal Talabani, signed jointly by his two vice presidents, upholding the death sentence, and a letter from the chief judge of the Iraqi High Tribunal, the court that tried Saddam, certifying the verdict. But Talabani, a Kurd, had long made it known that he objected to the death penalty on principle.

The Maliki government spent much of Friday working on legal mechanisms to meet the American demands. From Talabani, it obtained a letter saying that while he would not sign a decree approving the hanging, he had no objections. The Iraqi official said that Talabani first asked the tribunal's judges for an opinion on whether the constitutional requirement for presidential approval applied to a death sentence handed down by the tribunal, a special court operating outside the main Iraqi judicial system. The judges said the requirement was void.

Maliki had one major obstacle: the Saddam-era law proscribing executions during the Eid holiday. This remained until late Friday, the Iraqi official said. He said that he attended a late-night dinner at the prime minister's office at which American officers and Maliki's officials debated the issue, which the Americans had first raised at the meeting Thursday.

One participant described the meeting this way: "The Iraqis seemed quite frustrated, saying, 'Who is going to execute him, anyway, you or us?' The Americans replied by saying that obviously, it was the Iraqis who would carry out the hanging. So the Iraqis said, 'This is our problem. and we will handle the consequences. If there is any damage done, it is we who will be damaged, not you.'"

To this, the Iraqis added what has often been their trump card in tricky political situations: They telephoned officials of the marja'ia, the supreme religious body in Iraqi Shiism, composed of ayatollahs in the holy city of Najaf. The officials came back saying they had the ayatollahs' approval.

Maliki, at a few minutes before midnight on Friday, then signed a letter to the justice minister, who is responsible for prisons and executions. The letter told him to "to carry out the hanging until death" of Saddam and the two codefendants sentenced to death in the Dujail trial.

The co-defendants were Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and a former head of the Mukhabarat secret police, and Awad Hamad al- Bandar, chief judge of the Revolutionary Court, which passed the death sentences in the Dujail affair, who Iraqi officials have said will be hanged after Eid ends.

Fourteen Iraqi officials, including senior members of the Maliki government, were called at 1:30 a.m. on Saturday and told to gather at the prime minister's office. At 3:30 a.m., they were driven to the helicopter pad beside Saddam's old Republican Palace, and taken on a three-minute flight to the prison in the northern suburb of Khadimiya, where the hanging took place.

At about the same time, American and Iraqi officials said, Saddam was roused at his Camp Cropper cell, 16 kilometers away, on the edge of the Baghdad airport, and taken to a Black Hawk helicopter for his journey to Khadimiya.

Not one of the Iraqi officials who discussed the sequence of events was able to explain why Maliki had been unwilling to allow the execution to wait until it could be better organized. Nor would any explain why those who conducted it had allowed it to deteriorate into a sectarian free-for-all that had the effect, on the video recordings, of making Saddam, a mass murderer, appear a pillar of dignity and restraint, and his executioners, representing Shiites who were his principal victims, seem like bullying street thugs.

Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi and Khalid W. Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Tikrit.

Jesse Jackson assails hanging

The execution of Saddam Hussein will not make the United States safer and will only increase the violence in Iraq, the Reverend Jesse Jackson said, The Associated Press reported from New York. "We've missed a moment to appeal to those in Iraq to break the cycle of violence," said Jackson, who has traveled to the Middle East on peace missions.

Ellie