Posted on 01/15/2007 9:21:52 AM PST by Sax
Like the old drill instructor used to say, "Hey yard bird, get your head and a$$ wired together!"
Anyone know if it's on YouTube or similar sites yet? :)
Reminds me of when Grandma used to kill the fryers and roasters. I used to help capture them. Had long heavy wire with a hook on the end. I would hook 'em like a bad act on amateur night.
They were right tasty too. Grandma was way ahead of her time. We had eggs from free range chickens way before it became "cool", the meat was firmer and less mushy too. It took us decades to get used to the store bought variety of both chicken and eggs, to the extent that we ever did. Now we buy the "cage free" eggs, and they actually do approach what we got from Grandma (or in my wife's case the lady down the road from Grandma, her grandma was allergic to chicken feather, although she had raised them at one time).
Botched hanging arouses suspicions
Jan 16, 2007
The botched hanging of Saddam Hussein's half-brother Barzan on Tuesday aroused Arab suspicions of foul play, deepening the divide between the Iraqi government and Arabs in other countries.
The noose pulled off Barzan al-Takriti's head as he fell from the gallows, suggesting that the hangman had misjudged the length of rope needed just to break his neck.
Government spokesman Ali Dabbagh said there was no "violation of procedure" in the hanging of Barzan and fellow convict Awad Hamed al-Bander, Saddam's former chief judge, for crimes against humanity over the killings of 148 Shi'ites.
But from Morocco to Yemen, ordinary Arabs cast doubt on the official explanation. Some recalled the chaotic and abusive treatment of Saddam Hussein when he was hanged on December 30.
Zaid al-Boudani, a shopkeeper in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, said: "I am very sad today, as many other Muslim Arabs are. This execution is part of the revenge campaign going on in Iraq. The way his head was ripped off shows hatred and revenge."
The president of Morocco's Human Rights Centre described the hangings as a barbaric and vengeful act carried out under external pressure, probably from Iran and the United States.
"We had never heard that the head of a hanged person was ripped from his body, only in this case, which mirrors the hatred and violence," said the president, Khaled Charkaoui.
Azzam Saleh Abdullah, Barzan's brother-in-law, told Al Jazeera in a telephone call that the Iraqi authorities had not informed the family in advance that the execution was imminent.
"We heard the news on television and were shocked. The Iraqi government should have informed us. They know the traditions very well," he added.
"As for ripping off his head, this is the Safavids' rancour. They only came to Iraq to commit revenge and shed Iraqi blood. They did not come for democracy or to build a state. May God curse this democracy," he said.
'Iraqi blood'
"Safavid" is a reference to the dynasty which established Shi'ite Islam as the Iranian state religion from the 16th century and which sometimes controlled parts of Iraq.
Hardline Iraqi Sunnis have started using the term to suggest that the Shi'ites are not true Iraqis.
Issam Ghazzawi, a Jordanian lawyer who saw Barzan on Friday, said he was convinced the decapitation was deliberate.
"His head was cut off after he was hanged to mutilate his body in an a barbaric act of revenge that is against any human values and is vigilante justice by a group of thugs," he said.
At the hanging of Saddam, the executioners shouted sectarian taunts at the former president, who was overthrown and captured after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
The Moroccan Human Rights Association, the main independent human rights body in the North African country, said the hangings were a "criminal political assassination".
"The trial of Saddam Hussein and his aides by a pro-US Iraqi court lacks the conditions for a fair trial and makes the verdicts unjust and their hangings a criminal political assassination masterminded by American imperialism", it said.
Yemeni bus driver Hassan Mohammad agreed in blaming the US military presence. "Barzan is another victim of the American occupation in Iraq and the way he was executed shows how the Iraqi government is punishing (people) to avenge their rejection of American dominance and occupation," he said.
But some Arabs in the Gulf, where Saddam was not popular, said they were happy to see Barzan hang.
Ali al-Baghli, a leading Kuwaiti analyst and a former oil minister, said: "Justice has finally been done! ... (Barzan) committed a lot of crimes against humanity and at least he had undergone a legal trial."
"This is the rule of law... They deserved what they got. They cannot kill and torture without facing justice," added Mansoor Al-Jamri, editor of the independent Bahraini newspaper Al Wasat.
http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411366/960621
Saddam aides hanged, film shows brother beheaded
Mon Jan 15, 2007 10:55am ET
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Two of Saddam Hussein's aides were hanged before dawn on Monday, the Iraqi government said.
But despite its efforts to avoid the uproar that marred the execution of the former president two weeks ago, news that the noose ripped the head from Saddam's cancer-stricken half-brother as he plunged from the gallows appalled international critics of the process and fueled fury among Saddam's fellow Sunni Arabs.
On the defensive after Shi'ite sectarian taunts were heard in illicit film of Saddam's execution, a spokesman for the Shi'ite-led government insisted there was "no violation of procedure" during the executions of his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and former judge Awad Hamed al-Bander.
But defense lawyers and politicians from the once dominant Sunni Arab minority expressed anger at the fate of Barzan, Saddam's once feared intelligence chief, and there was also skepticism and condemnation of Iraq's Shi'ite-dominated leadership across the mostly Sunni-ruled Arab world.
Government officials showed journalists film of the two men standing side by side in orange jumpsuits on the scaffold, looking fearful before they were hooded and the nooses placed around their necks. There was no disturbance in the execution chamber -- apparently the same one where Saddam died on December 30.
Bander muttered the prayer: "There is no god but God."
Barzan, 55, a vocal presence during the year-long trial for crimes against humanity, appeared to tremble quietly. As the bodies plunged through the traps, Barzan's hooded head flew off and came to rest beside his body in a pool of blood below the empty noose under the gallows. Bander swung dead on his rope.
Officials said they would not release the film publicly.
Government adviser Bassam al-Husseini said the damage to the body was "an act of God". During his trial for crimes against humanity over the killings of 148 Shi'ites from Dujail, a witness said Barzan's agents put people in a meat grinder.
Hangmen gauge the length of rope needed to snap the neck of the condemned but not to create enough force to sever the head.
Saleem al-Jibouri, a senior Sunni Arab lawmaker, said Barzan may have been weakened by the cancer he was suffering.
SECTARIAN INSULT
Barzan's son-in-law hurled a sectarian insult at the government on pan-Arab Al Jazeera television: "As for ripping off his head, this is the grudge of the Safavids," he said -- a historical term referring to Shi'ite ties to non-Arab Iran.
"They have only came to Iraq for revenge," Azzam Salih Abdullah said from Yemen. "May God curse this democracy."
The hangings took place at 3 a.m. (0000 GMT) at the same former secret police base where Saddam was hanged on December 30, an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said. Officials tried to impose a media blackout for some hours but word leaked out.
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq said the executions were an entirely Iraqi affair with little U.S. involvement. Asked about the hangings, Zalmay Khalilzad told reporters: "It was an Iraqi process. It was an Iraqi decision, an Iraqi execution."
After Saddam was hanged, the United Nations urged Iraq to reconsider death sentences and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, an opponent of capital punishment, said last week he thought there should be a delay in executing the other two condemned men. Talabani left the country on Sunday to visit Syria.
The video showing Saddam being taunted, angered Sunni Arabs, embarrassed the government and the U.S. administration and raised sectarian tensions in a nation on the brink of civil war.
Shi'ites again celebrated in the streets of Baghdad's Sadr City slum, a bastion of the cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr. His name was heard being chanted at Saddam on the gallows. An unnamed guard faces legal proceedings following a government inquiry into the circumstances of Saddam's execution.
After Barzan's hanging, Moussa Jabor in Sadr City said: "This is the least he should get. He should have been handed over to the people. Execution is a blessing for him."
Barzan was a feared figure in Iraq at the head of the intelligence service in the 1980s, at a time when the Shi'ite majority was harshly oppressed, some like those from Dujail due to suspected links to Shi'ite Iran, then at war with Iraq.
Bander presided over the Revolutionary Court which sentenced 148 Shi'ite men and youths to death after an assassination attempt on Saddam in the town in 1982. With Saddam, they were convicted on November 5 and their appeals rejected on December 26.
Both are to be buried in the village of Awja, near the northern city of Tikrit, where Saddam was born and where he was buried two weeks ago, the provincial governor told Reuters.
Muslim tradition dictates they be interred within a day.
They would lie close to Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay, who were killed by U.S. troops in 2003, not in the building that has become Saddam's mausoleum, visited by thousands of mourners.
(Additional reporting by Claudia Parsons, Aseel Kami and Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad and Inal Ersan and Diala Saadeh in Dubai)
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007-01-15T185617Z_01_MAC638878_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ.xml&pageNumber=2&imageid=&cap=&sz=&WTModLoc=NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage2
Flag on the play. Fifteen-yard penalty. Automatic First down...
Oops...f*&k it, lets go watch the game.
it's nothing to lose your head about...
One offer I might make to the Iraqi's is to strap bomb belts on these perps, send them wherever large caches of munitions are found and use them as a less expensive way to rid the area of those harmful munitions and help them arrive at their quest for getting their 72 virgins at the same time. Another suggestion - with the same bomb vests firmly attached, use the guilty to check for those pesky mines that are left over on the Iran/Iraq border.
Besides that, can you just imagine the price hemp rope is going to be at the rate that the Iraqi judicial system seems headed?
I get the point.
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