Should Iraq Hang Saddam Hussein?

Jerusalem----December 29...... Should Saddam Hussein die by hanging? This is a question that each and every one of us should ask.

First, should Saddam die? According to a senior Vatican official, the Pope has condemned the death sentence against Saddam Hussein reiterating that capital punishment goes against the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Cardinal Renato Martino, Pope Benedict XVI’s top prelate for justice issues and a former Vatican envoy to the United Nations, said that Hussein’s execution would punish “a crime with another crime” and expressed hope that the sentence would not be carried out. “The death penalty is not a natural death. And no one can give death, not even the State,” he said.

On Tuesday, Iraq’s highest court rejected Saddam's Hussein’s appeal against a conviction and death sentence for the killing of 148 people in Dujail, in northern Iraq, in 1982. The court said the former president should be hanged within 30 days.

In Jewish law, we do not believe in capital punishment. The death penalty does not exist in Israel. Only once was it ever enforced and that was for Adolph Eichmann who engineered the Holocaust in Europe.

Former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark denounced the Iraq Special Tribunal's death sentences against Saddam Hussein and two co-defendants in a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington on December 20. Clark served on Hussein’s defense team during the trial.

"The consequences of execution will be greater violence." Clark warned, "I don't think you can rationally expect anything else." Hussein and the co-defendants have been held in American custody at Camp Cropper, an American military prison near the Baghdad airport. Clark charged that if they were turned over to Iraqi authorities they faced torture and death. Noting the biased nature of the trial, which was roundly condemned by human rights groups, foreign offices of several countries, U.N. observers and others, Clark questioned the speed with which the court is moving to execute the defendants.

"Prime Minister Maliki has repeatedly said the execution should take place this year," Clark said. "Iraq law seems to provide that the sentence of death is to be carried out mandatory within fifteen days of the final judgment." In addition to Saddam, the court also imposed death sentences on Awad Hamed al-Bandar and Barzan al-Tikriti. Further, near the end of the recent trial, an Iraqi puppet judge told one of the defendants, "You had blood on your hands since you were a child." There was no attempt to prove that the recent trial was anything other than a rigged show trial. As Clark said, it represented "victor's injustice, victor's justice being an oxymoron." The implications of execution are dire. Clark noted that "The Pentagon [had] announced that violence in Iraq was at an all time high." Clark also commented on the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. He observed that long many knew that the U.S. government’s war of aggression against Vietnam was doomed to failure, the war dragged on with massive casualties mounting.

Hussein collaborated with the United States in launching the 1980 war with Iran. But the Iraqi regime was never a comprador, puppet government of U.S. interests in the same way as the client regimes in Jordan, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. When Hussein began to assert Iraqi national interests independent of U.S. interests—for example, the 1990 invasion of Kuwait— was his regime then targeted for destruction? Is the real reason Hussein and members of his government face execution is because they stood up to U.S.? Many claim that the U.S. occupation regime was illegal and had no authority to try or convict Hussein or any of his co-defendants. Some argue that real trials for "crimes against humanity" would have Bush administration officials and Pentagon generals as the defendants. No different than charges that Ariel Sharon and today Ehud Olmert face in Israel.

Ken Joseph Jr. reports from Iraq stating a different perspective: "As an Assyrian Christian, the indigenous people of Iraq, with family who were terrorized and imprisoned by Saddam Hussein, hate is a mild word when asked how one feels towards Saddam Hussein." Joseph Jr. continues: "I cannot erase from my memory the terror in our family. The sheer horror when there was an unexpected knock on the door or an unknown telephone call. The family members and for that matter nearly one million Iraqis he killed and the countless million lives he destroyed."

"How do you forgive this? First of all it is important to never forget. One of the true dangers outside of Iraq is that somehow in all that has transpired in Iraq ; the sheer evil of Saddam has been forgotten. I remember! The biggest lesson Saddam taught me concerned the existence of evil. For those who live in democratic and free countries, the concept of evil has gone somewhere. In a world of political correctness, much of the world is unable to understand because they have never experienced sheer evil. This was Saddam. His face was everywhere. From the moment you woke up to the time you went to bed he was everywhere. He was on the money, his three pictures - one in Arab Headdress, one with his rifle and the other, the old black and white picture in every office - was always somewhere. Driving, his statues were everywhere. He was in your dreams."

"The message of Saddam Hussein, is to remind the world that there is evil." It exists and Saddam Hussein and his even more evil sons and all their henchmen embodied it completely. The fatal flaw following the liberation of Iraq was the clash of cultures - one who had lived under evil and knew it firsthand and the other that denied its existence. This denial of evil brought us to where we today, where the successors to Saddam Hussein in the form of Hakim, Sadr, Sistani and their bosses in Iran are viewed through the prism of situational ethics which see something "good" in all men, in spite of the simple fact that some men are evil. Second, though can Saddam be forgiven ? The real ones to ask are those whose lives were destroyed by him. For us, we need to face the uncomfortable fact that evil exists and that we must stand against it, at the same time never forgetting that there is a God and that in the end, it is He that wins."

In a Friday sermon, one preacher at a mosque in the Shiite holy city of Najaf describes the execution as "God's gift to Iraqis." He says Saddam "killed millions of Iraqis in prisons" and in wars with neighboring countries. The preacher also says the former Iraqi leader is responsible for mass graves, and prays that God will "take revenge on Saddam."

Human Rights Watch has a different take: "The Iraq government should not implement the death sentence against Saddam Hussein, which was imposed after a deeply flawed trial for crimes against humanity. The Appeals Chamber of the Iraqi High Tribunal, which was first reported by Iraq’s national security adviser to have upheld the sentence, should have conducted a thorough legal review of the verdict and then announced its findings. Imposing the death penalty, indefensible in any case, is especially wrong after such unfair proceedings. That a judicial decision was first announced by Iraq’s national security advisor underlines the political interference that marred Saddam Hussein’s trial."

So does the UN: ”The appeal judgment is a lengthy and complex decision that requires careful study. There were a number of concerns as to the fairness of the original trial, and there needs to be assurance that these issues have been comprehensively addressed. I call, therefore, on the Iraqi authorities not to act precipitately in seeking to execute the sentence in these cases."

Amnesty International says: "We are against the death penalty as a matter of principle, but particularly in this case because it comes after a flawed trial."

The Prime Minister of Italy Romano Prodi: "While I don't want to minimize the crimes committed by Saddam Hussein, and the ferocity with which he governed during his regime, and while respecting the autonomy and legitimacy of Iraq institutions, I must express the Italian government's, and my personal, firm opposition to the death sentence."

And the EU President stated: "The EU opposes capital punishment in all cases and under all circumstances, and it should not be carried out in this case either." The Times of India: "One of the main criticisms of the trial was that the special court was not equipped to handle such a complex case. Questions have also been raised about timely disclosure of evidence, the rights of defendants to confront witnesses and impartiality of the judges. New Delhi has rightly condemned the trial as lacking credibility. It has also raised the issue of the effect of the death sentence on Iraq's future. There is good reason to believe that executing Saddam can only worsen the situation in Iraq. The memory of Saddam as a martyr is likely to have much more of a hold on popular imagination than a Saddam behind bars.

The Asian Tribute: "The confirmation yesterday of the death sentence against Saddam Hussein is the final act in a legal charade directed from Washington. The Iraqi Appeal Court upheld the verdict against Hussein and two of his co-accused—Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Awad Hamed al-Bandar—brought on November 5 for the execution of 148 Shiites from the town of Dujail in 1982. With the only avenue of appeal exhausted, all three can be hanged at any time within the next 30 days. White House spokesman Scott Stanzel hailed the court decision, declaring it to be "an important milestone" in efforts "to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law." In fact, the Bush administration has repeatedly demonstrated its contempt for basic legal norms, riding roughshod over international and US law. It has pressed for the execution of Hussein as a means of demonstrating to the world that it is capable of killing its opponents with impunity."

The Australian: "The Iraq Government should have spared Saddam the death penalty."

Ray Hanania, who was named 2006/2007 best ethnic American columnist by the New America Media, says: "I don’t sympathize with Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein, but I do hold sacred the international rule of law and the principle that justice must be blind. That’s why I oppose the execution of Saddam Hussein."

Hanania continues: "It’s also why I believe that Saddam Hussein did not receive a fair trial. His execution is a war crime and an act of murder. Why should I believe any of the claims made against Saddam Hussein when nearly every claim used to justify the invasion of Iraq have all proven to be false? There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Saddam Hussein never conspired with the al-Qaeda terrorists who planned the World Trade Center attacks. Iraq was never a threat to America. I also do not believe that Americans who backed the war above and beyond the lies that justified the war really cared about freeing the Iraqi people. The court established by the United States military occupation of Iraq is also illegal and has no jurisdiction to prosecute anyone. It’s a sham, so much so that everyone knew Saddam Hussein would be convicted and sentenced to death."

"When the judge at the court expressed sympathies for Saddam Hussein, he was immediately removed, which also proves that the purpose of the court, like the purpose of the Iraq invasion, was never about justice or rights, but about politics. Saddam Hussein should be prosecuted before the International Criminal Court in the Hague where other international leaders have been charged, prosecuted and convicted on the powerful foundation of the International Rule of Law. Or, brought before an International Tribunal set up under the auspice of the United Nations as was Slobodan Milosevic."

"Saddam Hussein was not sent to the Hague, nor was an International tribunal convened because Bush cannot guarantee a conviction or death sentence there," says Hanania. "It might also open questions about Bush’s conduct in Iraq. If Saddam Hussein can be prosecuted for quelling a rebellion against his regime, cannot President Bush therefore be prosecuted for violating international law? Why should American soldiers in Iraq facing war crimes charges be held accountable but not Bush? I believe far more war crimes have been committed in Iraq, but we have only chosen to prosecute those that are unavoidable and clear for all to see. There is also one more legal issue that is being ignored by the kangaroo court in Baghdad. If we accept the assertions that the war in Iraq is legal, then Saddam Hussein is a prisoner of war. His murder is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Conventions, that we have already ignored in our conduct in torturing and mistreatment other prisoners. Regardless, sentencing Saddam Hussein to death is a violation of international law. But killing him is an immoral act tantamount to murder exposing Bush administration hypocrisies. All of these violated principles and laws may one day come back to haunt us as Americans," says Hanania.

At the time of this writing I suspect that Saddam has already been hung. "The execution could occur in "another day or so" - before the start of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha," said a U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Iraq officials have said their government would be loath to carry out an execution during the Eid festival, and have suggested that it would not take place until the holiday ends next week. The U.S. official noted that the Bush administration had been "in close contact with the government of Iraq" on Hussein's fate.

According to Iraqi law the convicted person has the right to see family 24 hours before the death sentence is carried out. Yesterday, Saddam said good-bye to his two brothers. And a top Iraq official said Saddam Hussein would be executed before six am. Saturday, Baghdad time, that's tonight at 10 PM Eastern/7 PM Pacific.

That would make sense from a security perspective. Hang Saddam before the Eid al-Adha holiday begins. Under the cover of darkness and then announce it at dawn. With daylight US troops would have a better idea as to what would be coming at them.

This writer has had his own personal experiences with Saddam Hussein. I watched from the roof of the Tel Aviv Hilton in 1991 as Iraq scuds slowly hovered over and fell onto Israel soil. One missed my home in Ramat Gan by only 200 meters. I have no sympathy for Saddam Hussein. But nor do I care to see Saddam turned into a martyr.

Saddam should rot in jail but should not be hanged. What would his hanging serve? He was not responsible for 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction were found (though I suspect they did exist earlier) and it was rumored his administration had met with the US Embassy the day before invading Kuwait and was given a green light by the US. And the war crimes that Saddam is accused of occured in 1982. Why didn't the international community take action then? Why only after 2001?

Saddam's death will only serve to polarize more moderate Muslims. It will not make them fear the US, England or Israel even more so.

Islamic terrorists embrace death. They do not fear it. So who is the US punishing?

Robert Baer of TIME Magazine states: "If the deposed Iraqi leader is executed now, the country's Sunnis will always think of Saddam's rule as a golden era. Now is not the time to execute Saddam Hussein. With Iraq still under coalition occupation, as far as Iraqis are concerned the rope around Saddam's neck will be American. The Shi'a and the Kurds may not care whose rope it is - they just want the man dead and their pound of revenge. But for the Sunni, Saddam will become an instant martyr." Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, could not be more correct.

Many news media are now reporting the fine details of a hanging. Providing minute by minute accounts of what would happen if the rope was too short or too long. Are we as a civilized Western world any different from the crowds that gathered to watch the French Guillotine at work or the hangman's noose in the Old US West?

What distinguishes us from the Islamic terrorists that we fight is that we cherish life. Yes, in war we can be more barbaric using pyschops as good if not better than the enemy by hanging blood dripping heads on wooden sticks. But do we need now to place Saddam's head on a wooden stick? Will video of his hanging decrease conflict or increase it in the Middle-East?

Attorneys for former Iraq president Saddam Hussein, who could be hanged within hours, today asked a US court to order a halt to his execution. In a last-minute filing to the US District Court of Washington, Hussein's lawyers asked for a temporary stay of execution because Saddam is a defendant in a civil case in the same court and he has been prevented from being able to defend himself.

"People ought to come, have a good time, they ought to feel confident," White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend said in a nationally broadcast television interview. Asked specifically if people should be concerned about threats by Saddam Hussein loyalists in Iraq to attack U.S. interests, Townsend said Saddam had "the kind of legal due process that many of his victims were denied." She added: "We don't see any specific uptick in threats."

I trust the White House will use this legal stay as a last minute face saving gesture for themselves to avoid deepening the mud for which brave US troops presently stand. To lessen the reality of Sunni Islamic suicide bombers visiting shopping centers in New York, Washington, Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Let Saddam die of a heart attack, AIDS, a stroke or other "natural causes" in jail. It worked for Yasser Arafat, it can work for Saddam Hussein.

America represents life. So does Israel. It's time for us to illustrate what kind of society we live in. What are values are. Yes, fight for freedom, but remember we are Christians and Jews. We are not the people who beheaded Daniel Pearl and celebrated.

Should Iraq Hang Saddam Hussein?

I don't know you tell me.
Saddam's chambers of horrors

By MARGARET WENTE

Saturday, November 23, 2002 – Print Edition, Page A23

Abu Ghraib, 30 kilometres west of Baghdad, is Iraq's biggest prison. Until recently, it held perhaps 50,000 people, perhaps more. No one knows for sure. No one knows how many people were taken there through the years and never came out.

For a generation, Abu Ghraib was the centrepiece of Saddam Hussein's reign of torture and death. Yahya al-Jaiyashy is one of the survivors.

Mr. Jaiyashy is an animated, bearded man of 49 whose words can scarcely keep up with the torrent of his memories. Today he lives in Toronto with his second wife, Sahar. This week, he sat down with me to relate his story. With him were his wife, a lovely Iraqi woman in her mid-30s, and a friend, Haithem al-Hassan, who helped me with Mr. Jaiyashy's mixture of Arabic and rapid English.

"Nineteen seventy-seven was the first time I went to jail," he says. "I was not tortured that much."

He was in his mid-20s then, from an intellectual family that lived in a town south of Baghdad. He had been a student of Islamic history, language and religion in the holy city of Najaf, but was forced to quit his studies after he refused to join the ruling Ba'ath party. His ambition was to write books that would show how Islam could open itself up to modernism.

In Saddam's Iraq, this was a dangerous occupation, especially for a Shiite. Shia Muslims are the majority in Iraq, but Saddam and his inner circle are Sunni. Many Shiites were under suspicion as enemies of the state.

"My father was scared for me," says Mr. Jaiyashy. " 'You know how dangerous this regime is,' he told me. 'You know how many people they kill.' "

Mr. Jaiyashy continued his studies on his own. But, eventually, he was picked up, along with a dozen acquaintances who had been involved in political activity against the regime. They were sent to Abu Ghraib. The others did not get off as lightly as he did. One was killed by immersion into a vat of acid. Ten others, he recalls, were put into a room and torn apart by wild dogs. Several prominent religious leaders were also executed. One was a university dean, someone Mr. Jaiyashy remembers as "a great man." They drove a nail through his skull.

For three decades, the most vicious war Saddam has waged has been the one against his own people. Iraq's most devastating weapon of mass destruction is Saddam himself. And the most powerful case for regime change is their suffering.

Sometimes, it is almost impossible to believe the accounts of people who survived Saddam's chamber of horrors. They seem like twisted nightmares, or perhaps crude propaganda. But there are too many survivors who have escaped Iraq, too many credible witnesses. And Mr. Jaiyashy's story, horrible as it is, is not unusual.

Saddam personally enjoyed inflicting torture in the early years of his career, and he has modelled his police state after that of his hero, Stalin. According to Kenneth Pollack, a leading U.S. expert on Iraq, the regime employs as many as half a million people in its various intelligence, security and police organizations. Hundreds of thousands of others serve as informants. Neighbour is encouraged to inform on neighbour, children on their parents. Saddam has made Iraq into a self-policing totalitarian state, where everyone is afraid of everybody else.

"Being in Iraq is like creeping around inside someone else's migraine," says veteran BBC correspondent John Sweeney. "The fear is so omnipresent, you could almost eat it."

To Stalin's methods of arbitrary arrests and forced confessions, Saddam has added an element of sadism: the torture of children to extract information from their parents.

In northern Iraq -- the only place in the country where people can speak relatively freely -- Mr. Sweeney interviewed several people who had direct experience of child torture. He also met one of the victims -- a four-year-old girl, the daughter of a man who had worked for Saddam's psychopathic son Uday. When the man fell under suspicion, he fled to the Kurdish safe haven in the north. The police came for his wife and tortured her to reveal his whereabouts; when she didn't break, they took his daughter and crushed her feet. She was 2 then. Today, she wears metal braces on her legs, and can only hobble.

"This is a regime that will gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents," writes Mr. Pollack in his new book, The Threatening Storm. "This is a regime that will hold a nursing baby at arm's length from its mother and allow the child to starve to death to force the mother to confess. This is a regime that will burn a person's limbs off to force him to confess or comply. This is a regime that will slowly lower its victims into huge vats of acid. . . .

"This is a regime that practises systematic rape against the female victims. This is a regime that will drag in a man's wife, daughter or other female relative and repeatedly rape her in front of him." And if he has fled the country, it will send him the video.

After nearly two years in prison, Mr. Jaiyashy was released and sent to do military service in the north. Then the security police decided to round up the followers of one of the executed clerics. In 1980, Mr. Jaiyashy was arrested again, along with 20 friends, and taken to a military prison. He was interrogated about criticisms he was supposed to have made of the regime, and urged to sign a confession. During one session, his wrists were tied to a ceiling fan. Then they turned on the fan. Then they added weights onto his body and did it again. Then somebody climbed on him to add more weight. "It was 20 minutes, but it seemed like 20 years," he recalls.

He was beaten with a water hose filled with stones. When he passed out, he was shocked back into consciousness with an electric cable. They hung him by his legs, pulled out a fingernail with pliers, and drove an electric drill through his foot.

Mr. Jaiyashy took off his right shoe and sock to show me his foot. It is grotesquely mutilated, with a huge swelling over the arch. There is an Amnesty International report on human-rights abuses in Iraq with a photo of a mutilated foot that looks identical to his. The baby finger on his left hand is also mutilated.

He didn't sign the confession. He knew that, if he did, they would eventually kill him.

They put him in solitary confinement, in a cell measuring two metres by two and a half, without windows or light. Every few weeks, they would bring him the confession again, but he refused to sign. He stayed there for a year.

In 1981, he was sent to trial, where he persuaded a sympathetic judge not to impose the death sentence. He got 10 years instead, and was sent back to Abu Ghraib. "They put me in a cell with 50 people. It was three and a half by three and a half metres. Some stood, some sat. They took turns."

There was a small window in the cell, with a view of a tree. It was the only living thing the prisoners could see. The tree was cut down. There were informants in the cells and, every morning, guards would come and take someone and beat him till he died. "This is your breakfast!" they would say.

Mr. Jaiyashy spent the next six years in that cell. His parents were told he was dead.

Abu Ghraib contained many intellectuals and professional people. Among them was the scientist Hussein Shahristani, a University of Toronto alumnus who became a leading nuclear scientist in Iraq. He was imprisoned after he refused to work on Saddam's nuclear program. He spent 10 years in Abu Ghraib, most of them in solitary confinement, until he escaped in 1991.

Saddam has reduced his people to abject poverty. He wiped out families, villages, cities and cultures, and drove four million people into exile. He killed between 100,000 and 200,000 Kurds. He killed as many as 300,000 Shiites in the uprising after the Persian Gulf war. He killed or displaced 200,000 of the 250,000 marsh Arabs who had created a unique, centuries-old culture in the south. He drained the marshes, an environmental treasure, and turned them into a desert.

In a recent Frontline documentary, a woman who fled Iraq recounted how she and others had been forced to witness the public beheadings of 15 women who had been rounded up for prostitution and other crimes against the state. One of the women was a doctor who had been misreported as speaking against the regime. "They put her head in a trash can," she said.

In 1987, Mr. Jaiyashy and a thousand other inmates were transferred to an outdoor prison camp. There, they were allowed a visit with their relatives, so long as they said nothing of their lives in prison. Mr. Jaiyashy's parents came, hoping he might still be alive. He remembers the day all the families came. "There was so much crying. We called it the crying day."

In 1989, he was finally released from prison. Then came the gulf war and, after that, the uprising, which he joined. It was quickly crushed. He fled with 150,000 refugees toward the Saudi border. But the Saudis didn't want them. "They are Wahhabis," he says. "They consider the Shia as infidels." The United Nations set up a refugee camp, where Mr. Jaiyashy spent the next six years. He began to paint and write again.

Finally, he was accepted as an immigrant to Canada. He arrived in Toronto in 1996, and is now a Canadian citizen.

Mr. Jaiyashy has a deep sense of gratitude toward his adoptive country. Canada, he says, has given him back his freedom and his dignity. He paints prolifically, and has taken courses at the art college, and is the author of three plays about the Saddam regime. He makes his living stocking shelves in a fabric store. "I'm a porter," he says. "No problem. I'm happy."

But Saddam's spies are everywhere. After one of his plays was produced here, his father was imprisoned. His first wife and three children are still in Iraq. He hasn't seen them since his youngest, now 12, was a baby. He talks with them on the phone from time to time, but it is very dangerous. One of his brothers is in Jordan, another still in Iraq.

Sahar, his second wife, is soft-spoken. She covers her head and dresses modestly, without makeup. Her face is unlined. She arrived in Canada with her two daughters the same year as Mr. Jaiyashy; they were introduced by friends.

She, too, has a story. I learned only the smallest part of it. "I was a widow," she told me. "My husband was a doctor in Iraq. He wanted to continue his education and have a specialty. But they didn't allow him. He deserted the military service to continue his education on his own. They beat him till he died."

Today, her daughters are in high school and she teaches at a daycare centre. Her new husband pushed her to study hard here. "ESL, ESL," she says affectionately.

Like many Iraqis, they are conflicted about the prospect of war. They want Saddam gone. But they do not want more harm inflicted on their country. "I want Saddam gone -- only him," says Mr. Jaiyashy.

A few weeks ago, Saddam threw open the doors of Abu Ghraib and freed the prisoners there. Many families rejoiced, and many others, who did not find their loved ones, mounted a brief, unheard-of protest against the regime. The prison is a ghost camp now. Nothing is left but piles of human excrement that cake the razor wire.

Saddam's Iraq is a rebuke to anyone who may doubt that absolute evil dwells among us. No one has put it better than Mr. Sweeney, the BBC reporter. "When I hear the word Iraq, I hear a tortured child screaming."

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