It’s fair to say, I think, that the freedom we fought for was evident in our view of the last moments of Saddam Hussein. He was free to wear a hood, and chose not to. He was free to speak to his captors, but we were not free to hear what he said. He was free I suppose to make a mighty speech, but we were not free to hear it. His black-hooded executioners were free to conceal their identities, but he, in the last five minutes of his life, was allowed no similar privacy.
We did not see him drop, his neck break, his neat suit fecally stained, nor the vengeful witnesses dance around his body, spitting on it if they did, kicking it if they did.
So what Iraq’s new ‘freedom’ gave us this time round was the censored version of the killing of a man, a man still on trial for other crimes, a man who in almost any other jurisdiction would not have been killed at all; certainly not on the holiest day of the Sunni calendar, the equivalent of breaking George Bush’s neck in Washington on Christmas morning.
Very, very rarely do we witness, with warning, the last moments of a life. These were pretty surprising. No rage, no railing, no sermonising, no physical struggle. A courteous, mild exchange about the black scarf he must wear. An accompanied walk to the drop, with the posture of a professor approaching a lectern in another town. And then, of course, what we in our freedom were not allowed to see.
These images will either change world history or they will not. It depends a bit on how many Americans watch them over and over and how many watch, instead, the funeral of President Ford. But those who do will imagine, surely, how George Bush might have behaved on a similar gallows, and the physical struggle, hortatory tears and loud pleadings while his captors held him down.
They may ask, too, a fairly simple, arithmetical question, and it’s this: If a Head of State can hang by the neck until he is dead for having ordered, or countenanced, or signed off on, or not punished, or failed to countermand the torture and killing of 148 Iraqis guiltless of any great crime, what will happen to the generals, bureaucrats, Prime Ministers and Heads of State who ordered, or countenanced, or signed off on, or did not punish, or did not countermand, the killing of 150,000 Iraqis guiltless of any great crime (this is now the official Iraqi government estimate of the dead) and the torture of ten thousand more of them in Abu Ghraib? And how many Americans – Bremmer, Abizaid, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Bush – should on this precedent be charged and hanged?
They may also ask, as many legal experts have across the world, how much was fair about a trial in which three of the defence lawyers were shot dead and those that survived forbidden to see the prosecution’s written testimony before it was unveiled in court, and only those parts of the proceedings the government liked were telecast – lest Saddam ‘grandstand’ his cause and gain followers. And how wrong it was this trial was not aborted, and another trial begun in The Hague.
They may ask as well why Saddam died so soon. Something to do, perhaps, with his coming genocide trials, and the complicity of Germany, France, the US and the UK in the manufacture of his nerve gas, anthrax, cluster bombs and helicopter gunships, and his amiable business relationships with Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush Senior, once Head of the CIA, in past decades, and how his genocidal methods back then did not greatly annoy them, not so long as he paid his bills.
And these are the freedoms we fought for. The freedom to ask, and not be told – lest we ‘encourage terrorists’ – what really happened, and who was in the loop when it happened. Such were freedoms Nixon encouraged in Chile when he helped Augusto Pinochet to censor, torture and kill those inconvenient to the many, many secrets America wanted to keep.
These are the freedoms we fought for, and will now defend in Iraq for decades if Bush and Howard, brothers-in-arms for ‘freedom’, get their way.
In Saddam’s hanging we saw them all at once.
Name:
Obvious enough Bob : The ones who get hanged are the ones on the losing side. Whether it was the plotters against Caesar, the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, Saddam Hussein or Ghaddafi, the one clear thread is that they were on the side that ultimately lost the war.
Of course, sometimes criminal acts on the winning side are so criminal that the perpetrators are punished, but mainly as a symbol to the ex-enemy, “we are serious about reconciliation : here is the proof”. But the ones punished are never the real leaders, usually the likes of Breaker Morant or William Calley.
And so it goes; so it always goes.
The West is supposed to have a functioning justice system, that is what it bases its moral authority on. They did it in WW2. The Nazis got a fair trial.
Ultimately, as Chairman Mao said, political power comes from the barrel of a gun.
Or, if you prefer, as in “el Condor Pasa” : I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.
I must be in a cynical mood :
Justice is revenge taken by those who have power;
Terrorism is revenge taken by those who do not.
I think that is original; do you agree, Bob?
Perfect Doug Quixote.
Simply perfect.
For a system to have any pretence to functionality, it needs to be applied consistently across the board. As soon as there are exceptions, the slippery slope drags the whole operation down.
OK Elizabeth; or am I a generation out?
The thing is that each nation is sovereign, and each has its own laws and its own take on the rule of law. Who are we to judge them by our standards, and condemn them when they are found wanting? Unless that is we have conquered them – as with Nuremberg – and are temporarily sovereign over them as well.
If our rule of law is a certain way, then our rule of law needs to apply consistently for our own sense making purposes. To turn around and say “Saddam doesn’t count because…” is not the rule of law.
It’s very fine.
I wish they would keep all these guys in glass jars to be studied like insects; Hussein, Gadafi, Ceucescau, Marcos, Pinochet et al.
But like Hoover they know where all the bodies are buried.
They should have been hanged for their hubris, their cigar chewing one handed displays of shot gun blasts from the palace balconies.
They should have been hanged simply for their taste in clothes. The gold braid and false medals, the Alec Guiness white suits, the Titles they gave themselves. They should be hanged for their bastard children and their lives of privilege, they should be hanged for the body doubles they plucked from their citizens to face the dangers they didn’t have the courage to face themselves.
They hid in holes, and dressed in women’s clothes, took cyanide pills or shot themselves in the head to evade capture, while admonishing others for their lack of fight, for making cliched speeches that prolonged fighting and the agony of their countrymen while they stole away with the Billions of dollars of cash they had robbed over decades.
I’ve gotta go now Deal or No Deal is on and theirs a hundred thousand in cash up for grabs………..
“Hanged for hubris”…..
Good God!
OK, where’s the line???
Hanging for hubris and bad dress sense takes out Michael Jackson, Don Dunstan, Mareike Hardy and Al Grassby.
We shouldn’t hang anybody, not even in jest.
I’m not sure if I am joking, and I mean Hubris in the grand and ancient Greek sense of Hubris, a crime against the Gods kind of Hubris.
Put these guys on a catwalk in their favorite uniforms, and the clothes go a long way to identifying the type of guy we are dealing with here. It’s pretty blatant and a lot cheaper means of identifying homicidal and potential homicidal maniacs than funding international secret service operations, or plying them with hundreds of millions of dollars of bribes, using their country let’s say for Rendition purposes, and then compensating them with further hundreds of millions of dollars for them to keep quiet.
Sure there were people in Australia wanting to hang Don Dunstan for the Shorts and Safari Jackets, but I can’t see him being guilty of the same level of Hubris as say Gaddafi.
If they have a title such as Chairman of the Revolutionary Council or King of Kings on their passports, all due caution should be used and golden revolvers, riding crops, all female bodyguard squads, should be confiscated. Gilt laden palaces, or city street walls plastered with their images (usually from photos when they were younger, thinner, had more hair etc) are an indication of second or third stage Hubris.
If they are visited by Western dignitaries of some rank, who have in the past spoken nothing but invective against them, Senators, Prime Ministers, Presidents etc., then they have reached Hubris stage seven from which there is only exile on a billion dollar a year pension or death to look forward to.
The biggest giveaway is their inability to dance, as they have no sense of timing at all. They always hang on too long convinced of their infallibility, although now nobody is returning their calls.
I think hanging them is the cheap way out, and I would personally like to display them as living exhibits in a glass case on a street corner, preferably locked in hours at a time with a certified accountant going through their books, or listening to Tony Blair.
“their hubris” has a particular flavour, among their countrymen it is secretly ridiculed, but it is an attractor for those from the Democracies, Tony Blair likes to kiss it, Donald Rumsfeld liked to shake hands with it, Nixon and Kissinger liked to pay for it, Joerg Haider would have spread his cheeks for it, George Bush prayed for it, JFK liked to talk during it. David Cameron is made of it, Angela Merkel hates it, Sarkozy married it.
If you could trade it on Wall St I would short it.
Who would ‘scape whipping because of it.
Nicely done all thumbs………very nice
Love your work AllThumbs.
My problem is this. I oppose the death penalty and abhore the denial of justice, but on the other hand I am angered when champions of the Left (of which I yearn to be one) write poetically and passionately lamenting the tragic death of a tyrant, dictator, terrorist or Iranian nuclear scientist.
Jeff Sparrow sheds more tears for the death of the makers of nuclear weapons than for their victims; likewise while I admire Mr Ellis’ opinions, I was pleased bin Laden was killed, pleased Saddam hung, Gaddafi beated to death et cetera.
The world has changed since Israel tried Eichmann. That’s why Spielberg’s Munich was so wrong – there’s no need for conscience now. We’ve seen what they have done and frankly, fuck ‘em, they deserved a pitiless shabby ending without dignify and the rule of law to distort.
I too would have danced in the streets over Hitler’s death. Stalin too. Amin. Papa Doc and his bastard loinfruit. And so it goes ….
I take a pragmatic approach on these matters.
Consider what might have happened had Osama bin Laden been put on trial; who would care to explain to the parents of a school full of 5 year old children just why we could not release bin Laden, as one kiddie was executed each hour unless and until he was released?
The problem I see with a death sentence is that many sentenced to death have been found to have been wrongly convicted; it is difficult to compensate the convict after the sentence is carried out.
I might however be persuaded that putting down the likes of the Port Arthur killer was acceptable.