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South Park Creators Given Signed Photo of Saddam Hussein
Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park, were given a very special gift by US marines: a signed photo of Saddam Hussein. During his captivity, the marines forced Saddam to repeatedly watch the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, which shows him as the boyfriend of Satan. Stone said, "We're very proud of our signed Saddam picture and what it means. It's one of our biggest highlights."
Watch his execution. Oh and if you had any lingering respect for the law. Read up on Saddam's trial. If he weren't so famous saddam would have gotten about 1000mistrials.... before he was hung. Yeah... hung, something you think we'd have given up a loong time ago. But I guess the rules don't apply if you REALLY don't like the guy.
You have no idea how true that is.
Frankly, I believe the US chose to have him tried by Iraqis precisely because they could have him convicted and executed for more expediently there than in the US.
It wasn't a US trial they were most fearful of, it was a UN trial. The case against Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia was comparatively more clean-cut than the one against Saddam, yet, Milosevic put up an extremely good defence. Had he not died while on trial, there's every chance he would have either left the court a free man or found guilty on only relatively minor charges.
In addition to that, Saddam knew where all the American bones were buried: It was the US who sold him those WMD in the 1980s, and he was hand-shaking chums with Rumsfeld and other bigwigs at the time. All of this would have been thrown into the open in a fair trial and made George W Bush's top brass directly complicit to the commission of war crimes were he found guilty. Far better for the US to have Saddam's trial over and done quickly with a kangaroo court.
It's not really adult behaviour is it, and certainly not the behavior of a country that likes to think they are a world leader.
;-)
Too right.
There are an increasing number of cultural messages, and messengers, in US media the subtext of which is "it is OK and even desirable to act like you are ten years old all of the time", the framing of Howard Stern as a folk hero being the canonical example.
I don't think anyone faults the fans of South Park, Howard Stern, etc. for finding them amusing. The problem is that immaturity is increasingly finding a place in public life. Apparently these soldiers think it's OK to act like ten year olds while acting in an official capacity, such that they don't see anything wrong with bragging about it to the media. It will be interesting to see whether their superiors think so too.
And, while this particular incident hardly qualifies as "torture", there does seem to be an immaturity continuum on the part of US actors and decision makers in the Iraq war that starts here, runs through Abu Ghraib, and all the way up to the White House, where apparently torture was not only planned and condoned, but micromanaged, with high level participants apparently doing so at least in part to gain personal satisfaction from the act. There's no credible evidence that any of it was effective, and plenty of evidence that it was counterproductive, but apparently, in times of crisis, the appropriate response is not to act like adults and address the problem effectively, but to act like ten year olds and pull the wings off of flies because we can.
And, while there has certainly been a fair bit of outrage over all of this (underreported) in the US, there are plenty of people who thinks that it is all right and good. It would be interesting to know the correlation between South Park/shock jock/reality show fandom and the condoning of torture among the American public.
But don't get too cocky in your own country. One of America's biggest exports is its media. It's like I tell my kids: what we are, you will be.
#!
Actually, the most ironic thing is that watching Saddam's hanging gave you respect for the man. The shiit thugs killing him were shouting and making fun of a man that was about to die, but Saddam answered them calmly and with more courage than I expect Bush or any of the other people behind the Iraq war would have knowing they are about to die in a minute.
(I remember watching Wolfowitz scared shitless trying to keep it together in front of the cameras after his hotel had been hit by mortar fire in Baghdad. What contrast to the arrogant self-assurance Wolfy had when orchestring a war on false pretenses, a war that he should have known would cause thousand of innocent people and US soldiers to die.)
Then Saddam is hanged before he is able to finish his last prayer to God, a perfect ending to an execution that encouraged Saddam loyalist and ensured that the brutal dictator was transformed into an Iraqi martyr. And again, the beautiful irony that Saddam finally manages to create a picture of himself as a religious leader, after having problems saying the muslem prayers correctly in propaganda shots earlier in his career. Even Saddam's mortal enemy bin Laden must have been proud of the propaganda value of that last prayer cut short.
The thing many people in the US have a problem to understand is the shear stupidity that lies at the bottom of many of the Bush gangs decitions. Bush supporters think "Saddam hanged, yeah!" and consider it done in a manly way. But the fact is because of the incompetence shown in how the trial is performed and how Saddam's life is ended (like so many of the other "manly" things Bush wanted to do) US is instead shown as weak and the opposite message and result of what was wished for is achieved.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
you need just the right amount of torque to snap a persons neck by hanging, which takes a bit of math to determine how long the rope and how high the fall needs to be for a certain weight and height of a person.
if the rope is too short, the executee will end up being strangled.
if the rope is too long, the head of the executee will pop off like the head of a champagne bottle.
as someone mentions below this post, popping the head off and breaking the spinal cord essentially leads to death in the same way (oxygenated blood cannot reach the brain / heart stops beating).
hanging is easier on the eyes, but imho decapitation by guillotine might be a better way, as hanging can be botched up easily.
fun fact:
it can take up to a minute to lose consciousness after the brain isn't supplied with oxygenated blood anymore, although somewhere around 5-20 seconds is more common. so if you ever get your block chopped off, take a minute to savour the view.
after that, brain death takes around 6 minutes.
It's not about fate, it's about character.
there be no shelter here, the frontline is everywhere!
No, they're the "borrow and spend" party. Because borrowing is so much nicer. "Don't take all that money from me, take it from my kids, their kids, their kids kids, etc".
Bush: "I find it very interesting that when the heat got on, you dug yourself a hole, and you crawled in it."
A couple years earlier, a small group of murderers with a handful of commercial jets had managed to immediately drive Cheney into a hole^H^H^H^H^H undisclosed location and Bush into underground shelter. A couple years later, it just took a single report of an off-course plane to send Bush underground again. Was it so tactically unreasonable to expect Saddam to hide from a hundred thousand men armed with the best military technology in the world?
Even if this was propaganda for the Iraqis' benefit, it seems like condescending propaganda. Go for the root of the problem, and persuade people that a strongman ruler is illegitimate if he isn't democratically supported and/or if he violates human rights. Don't just cop out and try to paint yourself as the stronger man.
Go for the root of the problem, and persuade people that a strongman ruler is illegitimate if he isn't democratically supported and/or if he violates human rights. Don't just cop out and try to paint yourself as the stronger man.
You mean, use arguments that work in the west, based on western culture, to convince Iraqis it is a bad idea to back Saddam and his Baath party?
In Arab culture a ruler is not rendered legitimate by being elected, but by being so strong nobody could topple him. To tell Iraqis that Saddam is an unelected strongman would be as effective as telling people in the US that they should no longer listen to President Obama because he lost the Mandate of Heaven.
Showing that the US is stronger than Saddam was a necessary first step in giving the democratically elected government the legitimacy it needs to rule. The second was handing Saddam over to an Iraqi court to be tried under Iraqi law and be executed by an Iraqi executioner.
-- Support a free market in the field of government