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Saddam execution: Your reaction What difference will Saddam's death make to people in Iraq? Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has been hanged. His sentence was carried out for the killings of 148 Shias in Dujail in the 1980s following a failed assassination attempt. US troops and Iraqi security forces are on high alert for any violent backlash. What is your reaction to the event? Do you think he should have been executed? Should he have faced other charges? How do you think news of his hanging will affect the violence in Iraq?

SADDAM HANGS Just in time for Eid, the Iraqis decided Saddam Hussein was one old acquaintance who really should be forgot. Despite The New York Times’ protests that it’s all been too rushed, it’s three years since the mass murderer was pulled from his spider hole. Here’s what I wrote in The Spectator in December 2003, outlining the possible approaches to the trial: In a nutshell: A courtroom in Baghdad: good. A courtroom in The Hague: bad. Iraqi and coalition judges: good. International jet-set judges: bad. Swift execution: good. Playing Scrabble with Slobo in the prison library for the next...

Within days of taking power, Saddam Hussein summoned about 400 top officials and announced he had uncovered a plot against the ruling party. The conspirators, he said, were in that very room. As the 42-year-old Saddam coolly puffed on a cigar, names of the supposed plotters were read out. As each name was called, secret police led them away. Twenty-two people were executed. To make sure Iraqis got the word, Saddam videotaped the entire proceeding and distributed copies across the country. The plot claim was a lie. But in a few terrifying minutes on July 22, 1979, Saddam eliminated his...

MRC’s Michelle Humphrey passed along an example of CNN already feeling the pain of Saddam Hussein. On Thursday night’s "Anderson Cooper 360" – re-aired Friday in the 9 AM hour – CNN reporter Randi Kaye did a whole story suggesting the idea that hanging Saddam was a cruel and outdated mode of execution. This is the same program that recently focused on the coldly efficient killers of American troops without focusing any sympathy on their suffering. Instead, they focused on how insurgents supposedly tried not to slaughter innocents as they shot at American troops. Kaye began: "This is what...

<p>The Drop Broke Saddam's neck killing him instantly. At the executions following the Nuremberg Trials others were not so lucky.</p> <p>"..The executions, in a brightly lighted prison gymnasium where three looming black wooden gallows had been erected, were witnessed by a handful of Allied military officers and eight journalists, one of whom, Kingsbury Smith of International News Service, wrote a famous newspaper article, "The Execution of Nazi War Criminals, 16 October 1946," based on his eyewitness observations. Although Smith discreetly omitted mentioning it, the experienced Army hangman, Master Sgt. John C. Woods, botched the executions. A number of the hanged Nazis died, not quickly from a broken neck as intended, but agonizingly from slow strangulation. Ribbentrop and Sauckel each took 14 minutes to choke to death, while Keitel, whose death was the most painful, struggled for 24 minutes at the end of the rope before expiring..."</p>

Since it now seems very imminent, I decided that it was an appropriate time to start this up. Links to information and pictures (if we get them) can be posted here.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein's lawyers have been asked to pick up his personal effects but Iraq's Justice Ministry denied it had taken custody of the former president and dismissed a U.S. suggestion he would hang as early as Saturday. One defense lawyer, who declined to be identified, said Saddam had been handed over by U.S. forces to Iraqi government custody. U.S. military spokesmen said they had nothing to add to a statement late on Thursday that he was still in their control. Asked about comments from the defense lawyer that Saddam had been handed over, Deputy Justice Minister Bosho...