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Saddam Hussein Sentenced to Death
indraneil writes "Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death along with his half brother. Three Baath party officials charged with Hussein in the killings of 148 Shiite civilians have been sentenced to 15 years in prison, while a fourth has been cleared.
He is to be hanged inside 30 days from now. Saddam Hussein has been given 10 days to appeal against the decision.
His lawyer has warned to a bloodbath if the sentence is carried out."
Unless they voted him to death via a web-2.0 enabled internet site, I don't see how this is an issue for Slashdot.
So, Saddam Hussein's verdict, the death sentence, is read 48 hours before the U.S. midterm elections...
That's just a coincidence, right?
But, when Republican congressmen are discovered to be gay pederasts, or famous evangelical ministers are outed for using methamphetamines with male prostitutes and the news comes out in the weeks prior to the election...
That's a deliberate attempt to time the news with the election, right?
What do you believe?
If you are an American Republican, you will incur the wrath of your fellow party members unless you answer yes to both questions.
What do you think the Iraqis believe?
Given that there are very few Republicans in Iraq, do you suppose it's possible that they might take a more cynical view on the timing of the verdict?
Could an appearance of impropriety by the Iraqi court could be, by far, the most reckless of the "October Surprises"? (Though neither in October, nor a surprise...)
U.S. troops could actually die in greater numbers because of such blows to the credibility of Iraq's supposedly new, independent government (and its courts).
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Wow, now our troops can come home, it's over.
And just 2 days before an election, how convenient.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
The US hand picked the judges and the sentence was a forgone conclusion.
Will Saddam get a chance to talk about how he had US support during the war with Iran? I doubt it.
Saddam shouldn't be executed he should be kept alive in a cell for the rest of his life as a lesson for the Iraqi's to learn from.
Executing Saddam will only turn him into a martyr.
Thoughts?
So we have one man responsible for thousand of deaths (Saddam) and they're now liberated. Only since the beginning of their liberation, they've actually being dying by the thousands. The irony.
Infiltrated dot Net
Could it actually become any worse than it is? So far it seems like people are being killed just about as quickly as the killers can sort out who's a Shi'ite, Suni, or Kurd. The only way I could imagine it getting worse is if they stopped trying to sort out each other, which I doubt will happen.
Several minutes ago, I saw this picture of him over on Wikipedia, and I just felt really, really sorry for him.
The man has already been stripped of his wealth and power, and imprisoned. Will killing him bring back the 148 dead Shiites?
This is the thing about the appearance of impropriety. It's an important, and formal, concept in credible court systems like those in America.
If there may be an appereance that the verdict was planned or timed, you do things to avoid even that appearance.
Such as not announcing a verdict on the weekend before the U.S. elections.
I'm not saying for sure they timed it, because I just don't know. But I do know for sure that they could have waited 3 days and changed the whole image of the thing.
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Punish killing by killing! Go hypocrisy!
Man, you are so cynical. I mean sure, we invaded a country to topple a dictator with whom previous Republican administrations armed to the teeth in its war with a neighboring coutry we hate, who then had to be ousted from another neighbor we like to preserve the flow of gas to our SUVs, but was allowed to brutally quell an uprising by a group with undesirable religious affiliation, but then we got hit by terrorists and the current administration said "hey, where's that Iraq invasion plan we wrote on our first day here? Here it is -- cool!" and figured we were all so ready for vengeance we wouldn't notice them Mad-Libbing in some excuses for invading to fill in the spots where they had written "FOR DELICIOUS LIFE-GIVING OIL!", then used a slimy network of surrogates to defeat an actual war veteran lest they have to touch someone who actually served in uniform, so we could keep National Guard troops over there instead of having them to use in, say, New Orleans or something? But jeez louise, you think these people would be capable of timing out the guilty verdict in a country we *control*? CYNICAL. Come on, man, the Iraqis decided that on their own. They're the ones that gave him a TRIAL. Hell, we don't even bother to do that anymore! Primitives.
But back to Saddam: death by hanging? That's idiotic. I say we kill him with all of those WMDs he had!
Bemopolis
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
That the left is opposed to democracy. The democratically elected government introduced the death penalty, and now it should not be carried out ...
No it will not bring back the dead, but it WILL do 2 things :
-> declare once and for all, and for everyone to see that killing is not allowed, which is a good thing
-> prevent anyone from helping him (kill even more), which is a good thing
-> prevent him from doing any further damage, which is a good thing
-> bring this criminal's death during a last display of public humiliation, where everybody is reminded that he was a murderer, which is a VERY good thing
-> kill this animal just as he killed his thousands of victims, which is a good thing
No, revenge is bad. But this is not revenge. This is a public, and final statement that nobody gets to kill.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"
I think Saddam deserves to be punished as much as the next guy. He is categorically evil and I find myself unable to deny him the death penalty. But this is so convenient for the United States. He has a great deal to tell the world about how we supported the rise of his regime. How we tried to play Iran and Iraq against each other by supplying both with weapons. Eliminating Saddam makes us that less likely to see accountability for our past transgressions.
Now that Saddam has had his trial, it is about time to put Donald Rumsfeld (and other now prominent neo-conservatives) on trial for providing material support to a man we knew to be a brutal dictator.
Why bother.
So Saddam is convicted of killing 148. The toll post-Saddam is 100,000 and counting (Iraqis) and 3,041 US military personnel. Beheadings don't count. If you ask me, I'd say 100,000 is not a bad number of casualties and we (GOP'ers) can justify the 3,041 Americans based on actionable intelligence that shows that Saddam Hussein was a terrorist.
We can all forget about Darfur now its obvious there could never be a more evil tyrant than Saddam.
America, we're (GOP'ers) asking you to forgive our sins, they're nothing more than political tricks by dems to sway the vote. We've brough gasoline prices down, we're bringing the troops home, we've got the largest unemployment ratio in five years. All is well. If you don't vote for us now, the dems will allow Rosary beads of mass destruction into America. They're (dems) secretly colluding with Osama, Kim Jong Il, and Idi Amin. And as God is our witness (keep in mind dems are really Satan worshipping sinners), if you don't vote for us terrible things will happen.
Infiltrated dot Net
Saddam Hussein: 148 killings of Iraqi people in the town of Dujail: Sentenced to death
G.W. Bush: 650,000 killings of Iraqi civilians. Sentence? Oh wait...
He should have been tried in The Hague at the International Court of Justice. The problem with trying him there is that the US would lose control over the proceedings and would not be able to use the trial for their own political gain.
Not to mention the rather minor point that the US broke international law by invading Iraq in the first place.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Killing to avenge a killing just makes more killers.
Ugh... would you born-again Christians just stay out of politics already!? Wait a sec....
Every day products are released, reviewed, hacked, etc.. we still post about that stuff and they are often not surprising. This is something that happened and is worthy a discussion.
I can throw a one hundred thousand pound walrus right through a brick wall.
A little monster devoured by a much larger monster.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I'm sorry, what law was that????
The law of not invading a country that is funnelling oil-for-food voucher proceeds to U.N. bigshots? Come on, spit it out! What is this law that we broke????
I had a long rebuttal typed up addressing your careless use of rhetorical devices, but decided against it about halfway through and deleted it. Frankly, posts such as yours are not insightful, interesting, funny, or informative. They're just semantic and boring.