Saddam Execution: Frantic Quest for "Legal Workarounds" in Sectarian Hanging?

Many developments from Iraq today, including a whole lot of fallout from the Saddam execution.

From Reuters:

The Iraqi government launched an inquiry on Monday into how guards filmed and taunted Saddam Hussein on the gallows, turning his execution into a televised spectacle that has inflamed sectarian anger.

A senior Iraqi official told Reuters the U.S. ambassador tried to persuade Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki not to rush into hanging the former president just four days after his appeal was turned down, urging the government two wait another two weeks.

News of the ousted strongman's death on Saturday and of his treatment by officials of the Shi'ite-led government was blamed by one witness for sparking a prison riot among mainly Sunni Arab inmates at a jail near the northern city of Mosul.

An adviser to Maliki, Sami al-Askari, told Reuters: "There were a few guards who shouted slogans that were inappropriate and that's now the subject of a government investigation."

After a weekend of digesting (and subsequent viewing of the gruesome cellphone video of the Saddam execution that has gone viral on the internet), I am better able to articulate the unease I felt in advance of this execution.

This was a blatantly sectarian execution. It was conducted under a cloak of legitimacy lent by U.S. support for the current Iraqi regime and facilitated by the voluntary American handover of Saddam to Shiites for hanging.

As a matter of law and practicality, Saddam was executed solely for his crimes against Shiites. To his captors, judges and executioners, this was apparently enough.

His regime's atrocities against Kurds, Sunni dissenters and Jews were reduced to irrelevance in the rush to the gallows, even as trials were ongoing or pending.

As this L.A. Times report notes, many secrets have gone to the grave with Saddam, and questions remain unanswered:

Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish legislator, said he had hoped Hussein would be questioned about the Anfal campaign, a brutal military operation that killed as many as tens of thousands of Kurds by gunfire and poison gas. Hussein was the chief defendant in the ongoing Anfal genocide trial, and Othman said he was worried that the ex-dictator's execution would undermine those proceedings and other planned cases.

Othman said Hussein should have been forced to testify about his involvement in poison gas attacks in the Kurdish town of Halabja, where 5,000 are believed to have died; his brutal crackdown on southern towns after a 1991 Shiite uprising; his destruction of the southern marshlands and the homes of the Marsh Arab tribes and his alleged assassination orders against political opponents.

"Had these cases been brought to trial, a lot of information would have been revealed … about the bad policies of the old regime," said Othman, who believed that so many terrible revelations would have undermined support for the Sunni Arab-led insurgency in Iraq.

"No one could have defended the things we would have brought out in these trials," Othman said. "Shedding light on all that has happened is more important than the execution of one man."

The embarrassing details of the execution itself included onlookers with cellphone cameras chanting the name of Moktada Al-Sadr.

In U.S. Questioned Iraq on the Rush to Hang Hussein, the New York Times reports:

Iraqi and American officials who have discussed the intrigue and confusion that preceded the decision late on Friday to rush Mr. Hussein to the gallows have said that it was the Americans who questioned the political wisdom — and justice — of expediting the execution, in ways that required Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to override constitutional and religious precepts that might have assured Mr. Hussein a more dignified passage to his end.

The Americans’ concerns seem certain to have been heightened by what happened at the hanging, as evidenced in video recordings made just before Mr. Hussein fell through the gallows trapdoor at 6:10 a.m. on Saturday. A new video that appeared on the Internet late Saturday, apparently made by a witness with a camera cellphone, underscored the unruly, mocking atmosphere in the execution chamber.

This continued, on the video, through the actual hanging itself, with a shout of “The tyrant has fallen! May God curse him!” as Mr. Hussein hung lifeless, his neck snapped back and his glassy eyes open.

The cacophony from those gathered before the gallows included a shout of “Go to hell!” as the former ruler stood with the noose around his neck in the final moments, and his riposte, barely audible above the bedlam, which included the words “gallows of shame.” It continued despite appeals from an official-sounding voice, possibly Munir Haddad, the judge who presided at the hanging, saying, “Please no! The man is about to die.”

The Shiites who predominated at the hanging began a refrain at one point of “Moktada! Moktada! Moktada!”— the name of a volatile cleric whose private militia has spawned death squads that have made an indiscriminate industry of killing Sunnis — appending it to a Muslim imprecation for blessings on the Prophet Muhammad. “Moktada,” Mr. Hussein replied, smiling contemptuously. “Is this how real men behave?”

American officials in Iraq have been reluctant to say much publicly about the pell-mell nature of the hanging, apparently fearful of provoking recriminations in Washington, where the Bush administration adopted a hands-off posture, saying the timing of the execution was Iraq’s to decide.

While privately incensed at the dead-of-night rush to the gallows, the Americans here have been caught in the double bind that has ensnared them over much else about the Maliki government — frustrated at what they call the government’s failure to recognize its destructive behavior, but reluctant to speak out, or sometimes to act, for fear of undermining Mr. Maliki and worsening the situation.

Blogger and lawyer Glen Greenwald comments:

This depressing New York Times article by John Burns and Marc Santora details the frantic, reckless manner in which Saddam Hussein was shoved into the noose in clear violation of Iraqi law. We can't even get a hanging right. With all of the world watching, we yet again were the primary authors of a violent, uncivilized, and primitive act which -- no matter how justified in some ultimate moral sense -- was carried out in the most thuggish, wretched, inept, and (we now learn) patently illegal manner.

It really is striking, and a potent sign of just how absurd is our ongoing occupation, that the "Iraqi Government" which we are fighting to empower could not even conduct this execution with a pretense of legality or concern for civilized norms -- the executioners were not wearing uniforms but leather jackets and murderers' masks, conducting themselves not as disciplined law enforcement officers but as what they are (death squad members and sectarian street thugs).

And the most revealing, and most disturbing, detail is that Saddam's executioners -- in between playground insults spat at a tied-up Saddam -- chanted their religious-like allegiance to Moktada Al Sadr, the Shiite militia leader whom we are told is the Great Enemy of the U.S., the One We Now Must Kill. This noble and just event for which we are responsible was carried out by a brutal, murderous, lawless militia. Freedom is on the march.

... The article details the "frantic quest" by the Iraqi government to concoct legal contrivances -- any at all -- to "justify" the immediate hanging despite the court's order.

They finally compiled enough pretty, signed "decrees" to secure the Bush administration's approval to carry out the hanging. But the rush to snap Saddam's neck did not allow enough time for all laws to be "workedaround." Some laws standing in the way of the hanging had to be deliberately disregarded:

Mr. Maliki had one major obstacle: the Hussein-era law proscribing executions during the Id holiday. This remained unresolved until late Friday, the Iraqi official said. He said he attended a late-night dinner at the prime minister’s office at which American officers and Mr. Maliki’s officials debated the issue.

One participant described the meeting this way: “The Iraqis seemed quite frustrated, saying, ‘Who is going to execute him, anyway, you or us?’ The Americans replied by saying that obviously, it was the Iraqis who would carry out the hanging. So the Iraqis said, ‘This is our problem and we will handle the consequences. If there is any damage done, it is we who will be damaged, not you.’ ”

Or, put another way, the Iraqi Government -- revealingly "frustrated" by the need to pretend to operate within the law -- knew that hanging Saddam in this manner was illegal, but they did it anyway because they know there will be no consequences.

And now, MSNBC reports that the predictable Sunni backlash has apparently begun:

Enraged crowds protested the hanging of Saddam Hussein across Iraq's Sunni heartland Monday, as a mob in Samara broke the locks off a bomb-damaged Shiite shrine and marched through carrying a mock coffin and photo of the dictator.

The demonstration in the Golden Dome, shattered in a bombing by Sunni extremists 10 months ago, suggests that many Sunni Arabs may now more actively support the small number of Sunni militants fighting the country's Shiite-dominated government. The Feb. 22 bombing of the shrine triggered the current cycle of retaliatory attacks between Sunnis and Shiia, in the form of daily bombings, kidnappings and murders.

Until Saddam's execution Saturday, most Sunnis sympathized with militants but avoided taking a direct role in the sectarian conflict -- despite attacks by Shiite militia that have killed thousands of Sunnis or driven them from their homes. The current Sunni protests, which appear to be building, could signal a spreading militancy.

Sunnis were not only outraged by Saddam's hurried execution, just four days after an appeals court upheld his conviction and sentence. Many were also incensed by the unruly scene in the execution chamber, captured on video, in which Saddam was taunted with chants of "Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada."

The chants referred to Muqtada al-Sadr, a firebrand Shiite cleric who runs one of Iraq's most violent religious militias. He is a major power behind the government of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

It is ever-increasingly clear that the longer the U.S. presence in Iraq remains, the dirtier (and bloodier) its hands will inevitably become.

-Garry J. Wise, Toronto

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