Posted on 11/17/2010 1:55:56 PM PST by WebFocus
PARIS (Reuters) – Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said on Wednesday he will not sign an execution order for Tareq Aziz, the former deputy of dictator Saddam Hussein sentenced to death last month for crimes against humanity.
"No, I will not sign the execution order for Tareq Aziz, because I am a socialist," Talabani told French television France 24 in an interview.
"I sympathize with Tareq Aziz because he is an Iraqi Christian. Moreover he is an old man who is over 70," he said.
Iraq's high tribunal passed a death sentence on Aziz, once the international face of Saddam's government, in October over the persecution of Islamic parties in Iraq during Saddam's rule.
The Vatican and Russia both called on Iraq not to carry out the death sentence on humanitarian grounds, noting his age and health problems. The Vatican said mercy would help the war-torn country make progress toward reconciliation, peace and justice.
Aziz, a Christian, was well known in foreign capitals and at the United Nations before Saddam's downfall.
The U.S. government did not join the appeals to spare Aziz's life. Analysts said that was partly because the United States itself carries out the death penalty and also possibly because it did not consider his hands to be entirely clean.
It was not clear whether Talabani's opposition to signing the death sentence would prevent it from being carried out.
Iraq executed Saddam in 2006 despite Talabani's apparent refusal then to sign, and the president's powers since his re-election last week are not the same as they were during his last term.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Their choice. I don’t have a problem with this one.
LLS
Another reason why Socialists should never be permitted into positions of authority.
No Christian could have worked for Saddam.
He sounds just like one of my relatives (a very left-leaning one) who, after I went through a list of ways Chavez in Venezuela was making himself a dictator, replied: "Well at least he's a socialist". For many on the left, that is an irrational but automatic dispensation for anything a Marxist political figure has done.
Our government has basically p!ssed away thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to wage a "war on terror" and a "fight for democracy" that somehow ended up including:
1. the protection of royal families in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia;
2. the overthrow of one of the most tolerant Islamic governments in the Middle East (the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein); and
3. not even a peep of any kind about one of the most radical Islamic governments in the world (that of Saudi Arabia)
The simple fact that Saddam Hussein's cabinet included a Chaldean Christian should have been a clear indication that something stunk to high heaven all the way back in 1990 . . . when U.S. military personnel were ordered to refrain from any open displays of Christian religious symbols while serving in Saudi Arabia.
What? You mean like the German Workers Socialist Party?
>he overthrow of one of the most tolerant Islamic governments in the Middle East (the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein); and
Oh please.
Saddam was a murderous thug that paid the families of suicide bombers when they killed a Jew.
His tyranny included Christians because it was the Ba’ath party, which did have some Christian roots in its founders (much like the NAZI party did) and is one of the most despotic, murderous parties in the history of the world, not because it was more tolerant,
The Ba’ath have also run the Syrian government since 1963. - Syria is a nice, tolerant country, right?
If you don’t know the complete history of the Ba’ath, then you are basically not informed enough on this.
Perhaps you can add some comments about "controlled demolition" as well.
Footnote: Tariq Aziz is as much a "Chaldean Christian" as Madonna Ciccone is a "devout Catholic."
He was born Mihail Yuhanna, but he changed his characteristically Christian name to a Sunni Muslim one.
Al taqiyya is practiced by Chaldean Christians as much
as Muslims. They have a large community in the
El Cajon area. Some merchants have referred to
them as “ethically challenged”. Don’t let the label
“Christian” disarm your ability to discern an honest
vs a dishonest individual.
Soooo,
Iraq has a few bleeding heart libs there too?
Nah, just protecting one of their own.
Scum.
Fry him, shoot him, hang him, drag him through the streets behind a toyota truck (seems the way things are done there).
You'll never hear me stand up and pretend the Ba'athist government in Iraq was filled with Boy Scouts and altar boys . . . but there was nothing about them that was atypical of the ruling regimes in those Islamic countries in the Middle East.
I didn't think so.
I think that the Iraq War was the best example of strategic overreach since Athens went on the Sicilian expedition, losing their empire, and with similar self-destructive effects that we are witnessing as we speak. As you have probably learned, however, one does not become popular here by suggesting that sometimes it is wise to back away from taking on all the world’s troubles.
Thank you for so ably stating what I have been saying for all of these years. It all started with Bush Sr. sending in US troops to save a Muslim monarchy. From there it spread to destroying the Saddam Hussein dictatorship. Was Saddam a murderous dictator? Yes, but he kept the peace among his country’s factions just as Tito kept the peace in Yugoslavia until he died.
It was none of our business. Now, years later, after thousands of American troops have been killed and billions of dollars spend, what do we have? We have a splintered and dysfunctional Iraq, an Iran that no longer has a counter-balance, a mess in Afghanistan, etc., and now the current banana occupying the White House is out to destroy the one true friend we have in the Middle East, that being Israel.
Hmmm... mebbe. But the fact is that Islam has set up, and the global socialist/communist corporate banking structure has heavily funded, a massive interlocked terrorism training and operational infrastructure throughout the middle east.
While the "War on Terror" against Islam has obviously been used for all sorts of nefarious political objectives (both planned and opportunistic), it has also taken on this terrorism infrastructure directly, and as a rsult has seriously damaged, infiltrated and destroyed a lot of it. And to do so it has required a narrative suitable for public consumption.
This infrastructure took a long time to create, from Carter, through Bush I and then very heavily during the Clinton years, and it developed an incredible momentum. People forget, but by the time Hillary left the White House in her black leather Nazi greatcoat with all of the silverware underneath it, almost nobody was flying an American flag in this country anymore. Through the utter degradation and continual - even weekly - corruption of eight years of these traitors, we were psychologically ripe for an attack. And then surprise, surprise, the moment they leave the White House, 9/11 hits.
You don't have to invoke conspiracy theories to note that if you make a target turn against itself, very little is needed to take it down. Past all of their particular filth, this was the overriding goal of the Clintons, and reversing it has been a very long, hard road.
And we're not out of it yet.
Execute the miserable bastard . . . just allow a priest to hear his last confession.
I have personally seen womens jewelry and baby cloths strewn about the edges of Saddams mass graves South of Baghdad where he and his cousin Chemical Ali helped fill. From what I know, Aziz did not have anything to do with mass murder. Unless he signed orders for mass murder, I would hope that he is allowed to continue in life. OIF veteran
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