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The ex-dictator of Iraq has been executed by hanging just before sunrise on Saturday. His punishment was for the murder of a 148 Shiites, which occurred in 1982.

Moments after his execution, citizens across Iraq have exploded in celebration. "In Baghdad’s Shiite enclave of Sadr City, people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate the former dictator's death."


Heres more on what transpired:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16389128/?GT1=8816





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hmm. yeah. i understand, but i'm not happy that someone was killed. i'm not all that big on executions, knamean?

nachoboy wrote:hmm. yeah. i understand, but i'm not happy that someone was killed. i'm not all that big on executions, knamean?

...um...he executed 10s of thousands of people because he did not like them....so did his sons

*sings* Ding dong the dictator's dead! the dictator's dead! the dictator's dead! Ding dong the dictator's dead!

serves that bastard right! that a** hole was asking for it from the start! One less moster in the world!

We certainly live in an ugly time, don't we?

they should have stuck him in a federal prison with the main ppopulation and let the prisoners deal with him.

It brings out just how diabolical a man he was that I'm actually rejoicing in something like this.

I have very mixed feelings about capital punishment. I feel that ultimately it goes against the forward direction of the evolution of human sensibilities. And yet, I'm still happy to see the monster die. He has a way of bringing out the savage id in people.

From a logical standpoint, capital punishment is something we should hope to abolish, but yet it's so equitable a solution in this day and age. I do not advocate it for the reasons most do. Human justice today is frequently more about revenge than order and balance. I'm not interested in revenge; I'm interested in fixing problems and improving the world. But, there are some people who cannot be fixed; they are inherently damaged, and their damaged aspects override any positive presence they can bring to the world. They are not as common as most people today would believe, but they are none-the-less unmistakably real. These people spread their damage to others, corrupting humanity and the world around them, assimilating others into their momentum of hate, fear, and brutality. To suggest that Saddam Hussein could in any way have been reformed is a statement of absolute absurdity. And, keeping him alive would have exhausted resources while granting him the opportunity to use his dark intellect and force of personality to continue to manifest emotional and physical damage to an entire civilization.

Ultimately, however, I find myself looking at it with no feelings at all--simply an observation. He created and maintained a regime responsible for the murder and torture of countless people, and a regime responsible for attempted genocide. His fate was therefore a predictable one. If you commit horrific acts of savagery against a savage species, don't expect plush tranquility.

I've found that with just about everybody, no matter how strongly opposed to the death penalty some stand, we all have that deep buried feelin' that some people (such as, say, a just recently deceased dictator) had it comin' to 'em. It's a shame if they do, but that tends to be their own fault. We shouldn't probably take our time torturin' an killin' em an takin' delight in their demise, but just send 'em on their way and let God tell 'em "Congradulations, you have an eternally reserved spot in this level of Hell!"

When ya kill probably countless thousands of innocent men, women and children, just because they're of a different religious denomination than you are (and other selfish reasons), then yeah, you deserve to go meet your maker, and then some. Of couse, that's my opinion as a native Texan. Like ol' Ron White said, "The rest of the country's tryin' to get rid of the death penalty. Mine's putin' in an express lane."

I'm Glad he's gone. He deserved everything he got.

But one thing about his death makes me sad. I fear that his demise is a catalyst., and that the sectarian violence, while increasing day by day anyway at the moment, will now explode and thousands more innocent Iraqi's and allied servicemen and women are going to pay with their lives. Even in death, Saddam will cause more sufferring. Good Riddance all the same.

I'd find it better if he were to die by his aging organs than to have him die by a noose. But what's been done has been done. The oppressed people can now rejoice since the person who oppressed them has now been vanquished. What an eventful decade we have been receiving. Don't you think?

golf clap

Fenrir wrote:

nachoboy wrote:hmm. yeah. i understand, but i'm not happy that someone was killed. i'm not all that big on executions, knamean?

...um...he executed 10s of thousands of people because he did not like them....so did his sons

well you see, i said i understand. i realize that he did some bad things, and i know why he has been executed. it's just that i don't like death as a punishment, and i don't like it that people are celebrating a person's death. mebbe he did deserve it, mebbe he didn't (from the sounds of things, it appears as though most of you think he did). but i don't think that even if he did deserve it people should be celebrating the death of a human being. mebbe they should be celebrating that he can't do what he did again, but celebrating that he's dead? i don't like that.

nachoboy wrote:

Fenrir wrote:

nachoboy wrote:hmm. yeah. i understand, but i'm not happy that someone was killed. i'm not all that big on executions, knamean?

...um...he executed 10s of thousands of people because he did not like them....so did his sons

well you see, i said i understand. i realize that he did some bad things, and i know why he has been executed. it's just that i don't like death as a punishment, and i don't like it that people are celebrating a person's death. mebbe he did deserve it, mebbe he didn't (from the sounds of things, it appears as though most of you think he did). but i don't think that even if he did deserve it people should be celebrating the death of a human being. mebbe they should be celebrating that he can't do what he did again, but celebrating that he's dead? i don't like that.

I don't celebrate death, I'am just saying that it needed to be done, people like him will eventually get out of prison, and when someone is given a life sentance, it's only for fifty years tops, that's why you hear sentances like 200 years. Either his supporters or his lawyers would have gotten him out, or maybe the government would colapse and he'd regain power because of a complication. It's safer to eliminate the problem.

It is irrelivant to think of what he deserves. It is what the iraqis deserve that is important. And after the tens of thousands he killed, the nation deserved to rejoice in his death.

Saddam Hussein was a mob boss that did (unfortunately) staggeringly "well" (by that scale; I'd seriously beg to differ). I used to call him and his sons "Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius."

Okay, rant time. Everytime I turn around I'm hearing people going, "Oh, the trial was a sham, we shouldn't have killed him, it's an abridgement of justice." 'Course I'm currently in the Bay Area where a sizeable percentage of the populace think anything with brown eyes automatically and incontrovertibly craps marble (one reason I moved to Oregon, where they're not afraid to call a spade a shovel). The Iraqi deputy ambassador was the most sensible person on CNN's coverage, he kept saying, "People — let's stop worrying about whether Saddam's rights are being violated and focus on the millions of people he killed and held in a reign of terror."

Hey. As far as I'm concerned, even if the defense team was blowing smoke up everyone's assessments when they said that every one of his human rights was violated severely...the guy had it coming. Bigtime. He had people whipped then thrown into open sewers so the wounds would get infected. This isn't to say I agree with the Iraq war; I'm hoping this will be an impetus to pull out of there. Bush has screwed up a lot of times and his war of choice is sucking this country dry like a leech, but he never did anything like shoot bullets over the heads of a crowd of people.

One of my Myspace friends posted this absolute BULLSHIT bulletin riddled with conspiracy theories. He said Bush killed millions upon millions of Iraqis...No!...he said Osama was working for the CIA...give me a break...he said we had no right to kill Saddam. Do me a frickin' favour. I booted his a** out of my site. I have no time or space for tin foil hat claptrap like that.

Okay, rant over. Straight ahead, I think justice has been served. May he fester in Tiamat's belly alongside the residue of Oday and Qusay.

I dont know why they got rid of hangings. What an awesome way to punish someone.

Hrmmm...should have put him in a torture chamber...See how he likes to suffer..He didn't even suffer no doubt.. People who do such things get out of the pain the so deserve. Just killing them instantly they don't feel it..What the law needs to start doing is letting these bastards that cause people real pain an death to let them feel pain 100 fold...

Teh_DarkJokerWolf wrote:He didn't even suffer no doubt..

Depends on whether or not he got a clean break in his neck. Hanging can, and has, gone horribly wrong before. It's designed to snap the neck. When it doesn't, whoever's being hanged can slowly be strangled to death. There was one case in the old west where it cut the artery of some poor bastard condemned to the gallows, and another where it took the man's head clean off. Hanging is not a nice fate.

Im glad that he got hanged but the US shouldnt have put him out of power yet. They could have sort of used him, he kepts some of the bad shiites under control, now we have to deal with everything. We got one part that loved Saddam and whats to kill us, while the others loves us for putting him out of power. And also we still got Iran to face. I dont know, if it were up to me, I would have used him and then kill him, people feared him, we could have used that to our advantage. No one is afraid of America, they all know we got the most regulations and stupid rules than any other military in the world and they are using that againts us. But regardless he did deserved to die (they should have tortured him atleast).

Z wrote:

MoonKit wrote:I dont know why they got rid of hangings. What an awesome way to punish someone.

america got rid of inhumane ways of practicing death sentences becuz too many innocent ppl got put to death, and well at least now thier death wont be so terrible. im sure if u found urself in the gallows after having been wrongfully accused, you'd regret your statement.

Well Hanging doesnt seem as bad to me as the electric chair or lethal injection. Its traditional.

My issue with the execution is that Hussein's military rule ended when he was removed from power, not when he died. Saddam wanted to be a martyr, and the way his executioners taunted him and videotaped him made it look more like that. The Iraqis needed to understand that Saddam Hussein was executed for 100+ murders. He was not a martyr, he was a murderer.

He's gone and I can't say I'm in the least bit surprised or saddened by his death.

Hanging kinda caught me off guard though. I didn't think people did that anymore. But in Iraq I guess there isn't much alternative save like, a firing squad.

He got a clean and merciful death because, well, we shouldn't be like him. What's the point in removing one monster if in the process of doing so we sink to his level?

He got what he deserved, he's gone, move on. Focus on something that matters - like what the living Iraqi people are going to do now. Leave the dead be.

Aki wrote:Hanging kinda caught me off guard though. I didn't think people did that anymore. But in Iraq I guess there isn't much alternative save like, a firing squad.

Actually, it's still regarded as one of the more quick and merciful ways of killing someone, at least provided that someone drops instead of being pulled up, and that was the norm even in Western Europe during the World Wars. Witnesses said Saddam was dead within seconds.

Saddam wanted to die by a firing squad, but that was because hanging was the norm for criminals and he wanted to be a martyr. He got what he wanted regardless though, and his death was more merciful to boot.

I am a libertarian and so I don't feel people should be economically responsible for the prisoners and wrongdoers to live out their lives, to have a voice, a cause, or prison endured suffering - thus that 5 cents a bullet or re-used rope at the gallows doesn't disturb me. Not as much as letting him live would have.

Our humanness does not exempt us from death or the ability to deliver it, only our culture happens to by the way we define or lack the abstract, cultural notion of justice. For the Iraqi people who tried Saddam, this was justice, regardless of cross cultural notions of right or wrong (such a thing is subjective).

While Saddam, in death or in life will always be made a martyr by whatever causation his followers will come up with, he's no longer the root of their power. They, by lack of a living leader as notorious as Saddam, can be scattered and separated, even under one cause, thanks to Saddam's death.

It's now a job for the people of Iraq to come together, as many people are now noting. If they don't, no US force will be able to hold up that government. The United States ultimately made a fault in pushing out all the native military and taking command - they should have been guiding the Iraq people with the dictator's over-throw not bumping them from position. Whether or not they can gather the forces to do so now, to install a native force, will ultimately define whether removing Saddam will mean a fruitful tomorrow or another battle over beliefs ever repeating the past dramas, yet again.

I hope they can - at least they're swinging on the heels of the man who once persecuted them. A small joy for a little while.

first of all, I will say sorry for the bad taste.

I will probably get strung up myself for this but i found this picture of Saddams cat and had to post it.



It is kind of funny tho