Saddam Sentenced to Death
Poor guy.
Saddam Hussein and two other men were convicted and sentenced Sunday to death by hanging for war crimes in the 1982 killings of 148 people in the town of Dujail, as the former leader, trembling, shouted “God is great!”
After the verdict was read, Saddam yelled out, “Long live the people and death to their enemies. Long live the glorious nation, and death to its enemies!”
Clashes immediately broke out in north Baghdad’s heavily Sunni Azamiyah district.
Saddam’s half brother, Barzan Ibrahim, and the one-time head of Iraq’s former Revolutionary Court, Awad Hamed al-Bandar, were also sentenced to death.
Former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan was sentenced to life in prison, while former Baath Party official Mohammed Azawi Ali was acquitted and immediately freed for lack of evidence. Three other party officials, including a father and son, were sentenced to up to 15 years in prison for torture and premeditated murder.
If death is the penalty for killing 148 of your own citizens, I wonder what the penalty is for killing 3,000.
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It is remarkable that Saddam has been sentenced for a crime he committed in 1982, at a time when the USA was more than eager to provide support to Saddam Hussein’s regime and was complicit in some of his crimes. As usual, this fact has not even been mentioned by our amnesiac media. Donald Rumsfeld, the incarnation of this administration’s moral bankruptcy, went to Baghdad shaking hands with Saddam, on December 20, 1983 (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/).
At that time, Rumsfeld knew that Saddam was a dangerous dictator (contrary to 2003, when he wasn’t dangerous any more). He knew about the 1982 massacre that has now been recognized as a “crime against humanity”. Donald Rumsfeld knew that Saddam had ordered the use of chemical weapons against Iran in breach of the Geneva conventions (contrary to 2003, when Rumsfeld knew exactly that there were no chemical weapons). And he went to Baghdad in 1983, shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, offering him the support of the United States. That’s the story that will be told in the history book.