The not so dignified execution of Saddam Hussein, people speak

Saddam Hussein was indeed a bad man and killed thousands and thousands of innocent people, but the spectacle that went with this execution was more like some heathens carrying it out.
He deserved what he got but how it was done in "my" opionion was disgraceful and distgusting.
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How one mobile phone made Saddam's hanging a very public execution
Ned Parker and Ali Hamdani

Those close to him said he had wanted to die with dignity. Within a day, a million people had seen an illicit film of his last moments

The final image of Saddam Hussein was on jerky unedited footage filmed by an anonymous onlooker standing at the foot of the steps beneath the gallows. The video showed the noose around his neck as he recited the shahada, or last testimony. Before he could finish, he dropped through the floor to the sound of the trapdoor crashing open. After a few seconds of confusion the footage ended with a close-up of the dictator’s twisted head.

None of the images was part of the “official” footage filmed from the top of the gallows, which was aired on Iraqi state television and beamed around the world. In Iraq the other footage, which was filmed on a mobile phone, was being swapped on handsets for 20p and soon spread around the world on the internet.

At the height of his power Saddam had always had himself filmed in military uniform with shiny epaulets or standing on a balcony firing a gun — an image that would play again and again on state television in homage to his self-declared greatness. Just before sunrise on Saturday, a witness to the former Iraqi President’s death filmed his ignonimous end using the phone. Hours later the grainy, darkly lit footage was on the internet.

In a former military intelligence building, now an Iraqi prison, Saddam was sandwiched between two stout men in black hoods who guided him to the gallows. He bundled himself in a dark overcoat to warm himself in the December cold in Baghdad and stood on an elevated platform with its rusty metal bars. Beneath the coat was the white shirt and black blazer and trousers that he had worn throughout his trial on charges of crimes against humanity.

The two hangmen lifted the thick hemp noose over his neck and Saddam stood passively, his piercing brown eyes indicating a flicker of fear.

“Ya Allah [Oh God],” he said. The room’s 15 witnesses roared back: “Peace to be upon Muhammad and his followers. Peace be upon Muhammad and his followers.” Their voices rose in glee and some added a rallying cry belonging to the followers of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose militia movement has helped to fuel Baghdad’s current sectarian bloodletting. “And quicken his [the Mahdi’s] appearing and curse on his enemy,” and then one zealous spectator shouted: “And support his son Moqtada Moqtada Moqtada.”

Ignoring the baying crowd, Saddam, whose dyed black hair was askew, pretended that he misheard the young cleric’s name, whose movement in its violence is reminiscent of Saddam’s own ruthless Baathist cells that paved his way to power. Saddam smirked at his tormentors.

A voice shouted back: “Long live Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr”, the name of the ayatollah who helped to found the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Dawa party and was murdered by Saddam in 1980.

“To Hell,” another spectator bellowed. The scene had begun to resemble a medieval execution or a wild hanging in Texas. “Please stop, the man is being executed, please stop,” one witness shouted over the clamour. Saddam peered down at the mob and then recited the shahada. His skin was wrinkled; he looked tired and knew the end was near.

“God is great and Muhammad is His prophet,” he said and started to repeat the phrase intended to ensure one dies a good Muslim and goes to paradise. But the trapdoor opened and his body plummeted. His neck snapped.

“Peace be upon Muhammad and his followers,” some shouted. “The tyrant is gone,” another cried. Pandemonium reigned in the shadowy room. A voice interjected: “Leave him for eight minutes. No one pulls him down. Leave him for eight minutes . . . .Everyone back please, everyone back.” Saddam’s body swung beneath the trap door, eyes partly open, and his neck crooked, like his many nameless victims. He swung like the corpses of those who had been executed in his name in prisons across Iraq throughout the Baath party’s 35-year reign.

Those close to him said he had known for months that the end was coming and had no illusions that he would survive. But he wanted his dignity. The man whose vanity led him to portray himself as the defender of the Arab world was determined to get the better of his adversaries. He refused their offers of cigarettes and a last meal of chicken. When the hangmen took Saddam into an unheated room before Judge Munir Haddad, one of the nine judges who had upheld his death sentence on Tuesday for the killing of 148 Shia villagers from Dujail, north of Baghdad, after a 1982 assassination attempt on his life, the man did not panic and chastised his enemies.

“I read the death sentence to him and asked him if he wanted to say anything or has any final words. Then he said: “I commend you to adhere to liberality and to beware of the Persians,” Mr Haddad told The Times. Mr Haddad asked him if he had any final request and Saddam asked him to hand his Koran to the son of Awad al-Bandar, the former judge who had also been sentenced to death for sanctioning the killing of the Dujail villagers. Mr Bandar’s son, Badr, has served on the defence team for Saddam and his six co-defendants. Saddam then went readily to the execution room. “He looked very calm and quiet and wasn’t shaking or afraid at all and was walking very normally but his face became pale when they took him to the other room but he was very calm,” Mr Haddad said.

For hundreds of years they gathered in squares, greens and other public spaces to watch the condemned.

For voyeurs of the internet age there was no need to leave home: images of the former dictator’s execution were piped around the world courtesy of Google and YouTube.

Within 24 hours of the dictator’s death, his hanging had become the most watched execution in history.

An almost blanket ban by television stations could not hold back the tide of people wanting to see the two-minute mobile phone footage. By lunchtime yesterday at least a million people had viewed the sequence, with Google Video users awarding four stars out of five.

On YouTube, viewers scrambled to find the unedited version, with dozens of different execution films listed among the day’s “most viewed” videos.

The identity of the people who distributed the video around the web is unknown. Last night it had been put up on different websites dozens of times, and the source was impossible to trace. The video appeared not to have any identifying marks.

LiveLeak, another internet video site offering “uncensored news”, ground to a halt after receiving more than 100,000 visitors an hour.

On the internet the reaction to the footage tended towards one extreme or another.

One Google Video user said that it was “something out of Goya: black, meaningless, without justice, barbaric. Why was someone even allowed to make a film out of this man’s last moments?”

Another said: “Somewhere in between now and 9/11, I think we lost our humanity.”

But others said that they should be free to see it. “After losing just under 3,000 US troops, we as Americans have a right to see him die.”

Another said: “All people posting and saying that Google are bad for showing the video shouldn’t of bothered looking for it. You do have freedom to look or not look?”

Some responses suggested that the video may become a starting point for conspiracy theorists.

“Just so everyone is clear, this video, IN NO WAY, proves that Saddam Hussein has been hung.”

It said that crucial parts which were out of focus meant that it could all be a hoax. “Until Americans seen him actually hung by a clear and concise video, everyone should live in fear. If there is such a video, then we should be allowed to view it.”

Saddam’s execution was greeted with delight in Iran and quiet relief in Kuwait, but many others in the Middle East regarded the hanging as victor’s justice that was crudely delivered on the holiest day of the Muslim calendar.

Even the West’s leading Arab allies spoke out against the decision to send him to the gallows as their peoples were celebrating Eid al-Adha.

The official media in Saudi Arabia, a close US ally, condemned the timing. “There has been a feeling of surprise and dismay that the implementation of the sentence came . . . on the first day of Eid al-Adha during which . . . Muslims come together,” the Saudi Press Agency said. The sentiments were echoed by officials in Egypt, a main recipient of American aid.

In Qatar the daily al-Watan newspaper said: “What some people have not realised is that Saddam has become today a martyr.”

Libya declared three days of national mourning, and a member of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, condemned the execution as a “political assassination”.

Iran shed no tears for Saddam, whose invasion of the Islamic Republic in 1980 led to a devastating eight-year war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the still-powerful former Iranian president, described Saddam’s execution as “a clear example of divine justice”.