Saddam is dead
After a farce trial, Saddam Hussein, a violent gangster bully who was pulled frightened from a hole has been hanged. Few will mourn his passing, however this is hardly justice, the countries who backed and supported this nut case should be exposed and prosecuted for aiding a war criminal.
Saddam Hussein executed in Iraq
Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been executed by hanging at an unspecified location in Baghdad, for crimes against humanity.
Iraqi TV said the execution took place just before 0600 local time (0300GMT).
The news was confirmed to the BBC by the Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister, Labeed Abawi.
Two co-defendants, Saddam Hussein's half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and former Iraqi chief judge Awad Hamed al-Bandar, were also executed.
All three were sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on 5 November after a year-long trial over the 1982 killings of 148 Shias in the town of Dujail.
"Criminal Saddam was hanged to death," state-run Iraqiya television announced, as patriotic music and images of national monuments were broadcast.
A scrolling headline read: "Saddam's execution marks the end of a dark period of Iraq's history."
posted by Bomber @ 5:57 pm
13 comments
13 Comments:
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I find this as disgraceful as the crimes Saddam committed.
Sham trial and the best they got him on was the massacre at Dujail?
When does Bush go on trial?
Does it really matter whether Saddam's executin was justified or not? That is what most people will probably think, well to some people it would be a rejoice while to others it will be a disgrace, I don't think that is the end to war on terror, what happened to 911 in US does not make it right what happened in Baghdad. This will probably aid to more terrorism as there are still many Saddam supporters out there and will want revenge for his death. It is a cse of tit for tat or bat and ball. The killings will never stop due to religion and politics.
All hail mighty Bush, dealing fierce justice without mercy to the murdering oppressors of the Kurds. What a hero. Consistency is everything though. So when does the invasion of Turkey begin? After all, they've been kicking the shit out of their Kurds for nigh on ninety years.
Oh wait, does Turkey have oil? How much oil?
- Nobody.
On reflection,
fierce justice without mercy
should have read
popular justice, necessarily without mercy
Like Karlos said, the trial was a sham.
- Nobody.
The trial was a sham, but to say it was as discraceful as the atrocities Saddam commited?
Now that is a shameful thing to say.
History is written by the victors.
They chose to dispose of Saddam without charging him for crimes that the west was complicit in.
Anybody with an ounce of common sense knew this was going to happen.
When will Bush and Blair be held accountable?
Never.
Life is a bitch that way.
No I do not support Bush, Blair or Saddam, but I am enough of a realist to know that this was going to be the outcome.
(Optional) Peace on earth. (Selective)Goodwill toward men.
Dead lips don't sink ships!
For those who have somehow avoided indoctrination by the neo-con’s campaign to demonize Saddam I recommend the following articles:
http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/arming_iraq.php
http://www.kurdmedia.com/articles.asp?id=6281
http://www.lewrockwell.com/wanniski/wanniski6.html
http://mondediplo.com/2003/04/06collateraldamage?var_r echerche=Saddam
I have a dreadful feeling that the World will one day look back on this hasty execution as a shameful act. Ramsey Clark, one-time U.S, Attorney General has called it a "tragic assault on truth".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNA3t3guG90
Every lead I have followed in the current demonization of Ahmadinejad can be traced back to the Neo-Con think-tanks. The spin and the outright lies applied to justifying war on Iran makes me wonder to what extent this was also applied to Saddam.
The sites above indicate that there is room for speculation.
Now that the blood-lust of the mob has been sated I wonder if there will be a period of sober reflection on what has been done here.
I further wonder if, during this moment, it will occur to anyone to ask who benefits from all of the carnage that the Neo-con agenda has wrought.
Iraq isn't about oil. It wasn't about removing an evil dictator. Iraq is about the same thing that Iran will be about - the security of a predatory racist State and it's right to practice the ethnic cleansing of all territories it covets.
Those who thought the mid-term elections was a defeat for the Neo-Cons should consider this. The mission in Iraq is now complete. They don't give a rat's arse about the chaos. That was the object - the degrading of any opponent of Israel.
Let the troops be withdrawn. Get them out of the way. Get ready for Iran.
"Fool me once ah, er, shame on, er umm, shame on you. Fool me, ah um, er - ya can't get fooled again!"
-GWB
Saddam was convicted and hanged by an Iraqi court, not an American one.
...
Saddam was convicted and hanged by an Iraqi court, not an American one.
Hey everyone, excuse me - Mike makes a really valid point folks, can we please remember to refer to the Court that hanged Saddam as 'The American Puppet Regime'.
Thank you comrades
http://pandachute.com/videos/leaked_saddam_being_hung_video
I Dont agree, if it was the right method, to some he will be a martyr now.
He Takes His Secrets to the Grave. Our Complicity Dies with Him
How the West armed Saddam, fed him intelligence on his 'enemies', equipped him for atrocities - and then made sure he wouldn't squeal
by Robert Fisk
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1231-23.htm
I'm sorry to be breaking protocol and going outside story line here, but since there was nowhere in this blog that this submission fit like a glove, and this post has a widespread, and for the most part repsectable intelligent participitorial base, I felt you could use some basic info that may help you rationalise the media's role in how you are molded and labelled in their divisive way of creating a market of hate to sell their stories and political ideologies. I have often pondered this issue, but never been able to actually put my finger on how it's done. This sums it up pretty clearly, and also leaves a lot of food for further thought.
We don't know how lucky we are that we have, to some degree, escaped this form of media - journalism.
My wife and I used to talk about this back in the early 90's - how sensationalism had replaced substance and accuracy in reporting the (concrete) news. We were mistaken that it was driven by revenue earnings rather than truth based journalism. Neither of the above really apply to the degree of what the TRUE intention of the Media-Mogul's have in order to control YOU and insure that you buy fully into the ideology and politics of what they produce and support. Media has gone beyond reporting and even beyond marketing their services. Media now creates the stories and the hate base for those stories to be sold into.
I knew there were dark clouds on the horizon when I saw the announcement on Sky-TV that Fox News would be coming soon. Fox is the epitomy of hate based marketing for Political Ideologues. I hope you enjoy the article, and at the very least allow it to open your mind to how we are subjected to manipulation through the media, and how ideologies are forced on us.
The story comes courtesy of Alter-Net.com.
I don't think we are quite so affected here in NZ as this article portray's of the U.S. media, but with luck and open eyes we can avoid sinking to this level of separation in our society as has occurred in the U.S..
We throw barbs at each other from the left and right here, but do not forget for a moment that we are all brothers in arms and want the best for our country and future. Opinion and debate is how we form standards - not crush our ideological foes or demean our fellow Kiwi's because their opinions differ from our own!
Wedge politics, or media is WRONG for us all!
Keep on Hatin'
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted December 29, 2006.
"Crazy, isn't it? It just goes to show you how low our standards are." -- End-of-the-world-preaching CNN anchor Glenn Beck, on seeing his ratings jump 84 percent this year.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the supposed "demise" of Fox News, and the return of legitimate competition to an information landscape that for many years now has been dominated by the network of Bill O'Reilly and Brit Hume.
If you look closely you will find a wealth of news analysis pieces about this very phenomenon rocketing around the Internet and in the media/entertainment sections of the various major daily newspapers. This is because media critics are using the end of the year to gloat anew about the fallout from this year's election season -- now almost universally interpreted as a catastrophe not only for the Republican Party, but for Fox's much-loathed bullies of the media world, who for years looked like a threat to eventually put every milquetoast broadcast hack east of Bob Costas out of a job.
The tone of these news analyses makes me a little nervous. I get the sense that there are a great many people in our business who would like to believe that America's media consumers are somehow "tired of hate" and are moving en masse from an invective-based news paradigm back to the supposed old standards of "objectivity" and "nonpartisan reporting." At the very least, the critics of our business are rushing to interpret the rise of now-formidable Fox competitors like Murrow-esque former ESPN wiseguy Keith Olbermann and yukster apocalypse merchant Glenn Beck as something other than a case of adaptive imitation. Some say that networks like CNN have struck back by presenting the news with "personal flair" or "attitude"; others believe that the Fox ratings dip (a 21 percent decline in total viewers compared with the last quarter of 2005) is just a reflection of viewer sentiment toward a flailing White House that is closely tied in the public imagination to Rupert Murdoch's information empire. In the latter view, the recent blow to Fox is a cautionary tale about what happens when a news network ties its economic fortunes to a political ideology; that network then becomes a prisoner to the whims and policies of individual politicians, in this case the increasingly unpopular George W. Bush.
There is obviously a tremendous moral argument to be made here -- that Fox News stepped into an ethical minefield when it scored huge ratings supporting the Iraq invasion, a decision that soon after left it under enormous pressure to vindicate White House policy by sugarcoating the spiraling Iraq disaster. This is supposedly why commercial news networks are supposed to stay out of the politics business; you back the wrong horse, you end up sharing the same bottle of glue.
That is why the recent ratings reshuffle is being celebrated so loudly in the media world. In a business where ethics stopped being an important consideration for news directors 50 years ago, the blow to Fox is being seen as an overdue expression of capitalist justice, a punishment to the network that abandoned the true mission of the news business (providing objective news to consumers) and a reward to the Lou Dobbses and Anderson Coopers of the world who at least remained in the ballpark of non-partisan truth, whatever that is.
Sadly, this is bullshit, and we all know it. What happened this year was not an abatement of the Fox phenomenon. It was a super-acceleration of the Fox era. This idea that what Fox is selling is a specific policy or ideology is a myth that is going to be furthered in every corner of the media landscape. What Fox has been selling in the last 10 years is a formula for building and retaining a mass media demographic. The formula is Blame, Hate, Coalesce: You address the widest possible political demographic, blame their problems on a numerically smaller group, and then you solidify the collective identity of the first group by feeding them a regular and addictive diet of warnings and dire threats to their existence. Every FAIR-reading media-savvy lefty knows how this works; you take aim at the religious middle class, for instance, and you plaster their evening news shows with pictures of queers in bridal gowns tongue-kissing in some reviled Leninist paradise like Massachusetts or San Francisco. Surround that news story with jazzy ads for products Joe Q. Layoff can no longer afford to buy (displayed by huge-chested models he will later see on the cover of a celebrity mag arm-in-arm with someone slimmer and richer than himself) and you have a perfectly addictive media formula, a neatly profitable little cycle of fear, titillation and self-loathing that never needs to be broken.
What everyone seems to now forget is that Fox's blame game works in reverse as well. When you demonize a certain group, you not only build the collective identity of your own target market, you build a sense of collective identity among your chief demographic's enemies as well. The genius of the Murdoch method was always that his attack dogs somehow managed to paint an extremely diverse group of "outsiders" with the same demonic brush; you take even a gazillionaire arch-capitalist creature like Teresa Heinz Kerry and sell her to the public as a closet socialist pining for a Sovietization of the economy while huddling in the same tent with the ghosts of the SDS and Lev Trotsky. Or you take a Holocaust denier like Iranian president Ahmadinejad and you claim that his very existence is a symptom of the same America-hatred taught in New England high schools, where closet socialist "red diaper baby" teachers skip over America's liberation of Hitler's death camps out of sheer irrational hatred for the military (I actually heard this argument made on Michael Savage's show).
If you lived in America in the last 15 years and happened not to be a fan of Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly, you almost certainly turned on Fox News at some point and found yourself unfairly bound at the hip with some invidious America-hating villain, and denounced as an accomplice in his "treason" simply because you happened to share some particular policy opinion, like opposition to the Iraq war. And if you had any backbone at all, had even a shred of decency, your instinct was to reject this crude and vicious attempt at political labeling and come to the defense of this supposed villain, stand with him, show solidarity. After about ten years of this -- before you know it -- there is a whole diverse class of people standing now united with very similar passions, those passions mainly having to do with resenting being labeled by the likes of Hannity and O'Reilly and feeling bound to others in opposition to their tactics. Thus, after a time, a media strategy aimed at coalescing a broad middle under a paranoid umbrella against a smaller common enemy has the effect of backing said enemies into their own paranoid corner, where they in turn are ripe to be seized and eaten by some other canny media predator using exactly the same tactics.
That's what's happening now. When I go to a bookstore now, I don't see any relief from the same basic Blame, Hate, Coalesce strategy Murdoch started rolling half a generation ago. I just see it working in reverse. We had Bernie Goldberg's "100 People Who Are Screwing Up America" and now we have Keith Olbermann's "The Worst Person in the World: And 202 Strong Contenders." We had Bill O'Reilly's "Culture Warrior" and we now have "Sweet Jesus I Hate Bill O'Reilly." We had Ann Coulter's "Godless," which in turn spawned "Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter" and "Soulless: Ann Coulter and the Right-Wing Church of Hate" and even the inspired "I Hate Ann Coulter!" by Anonymous. You had Rush's "The Way Things Ought to Be" and the way things are according to Al Franken, which is that Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. For those who don't want to buy all the new liberal books, you can get it all in one volume in "The I Hate Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity. . . Reader: The Hideous Truth About America's Ugliest Conservatives," edited by Clint Willis.
Now this phenomenon is spilling into the airwaves in a successful way for the first time, where shows like Olbermann's and Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert are cutting into the Fox lead. I think all of those guys are funny, and in a far smaller way I'm sure I'm caught up in the same phenomenon. But I think it's time for all of us to admit that something extremely sinister is happening in the American media landscape. We are being split up into rigid camps and kept doped up on fear, hate and invective. At the end of 2006 we are a country without life-threatening economic or political problems whose population is utterly consumed with paranoia, divided into two insoluble groups, with each genuinely afraid of being exterminated by the other.
It is amazing to me that people can walk into a bookstore, see a pair of books whose titles begin with "I Hate...," and still believe that the two books are different, simply because the politics of one are conservative and the politics of the other are liberal. Even though it is astoundingly obvious, I'm beginning to think that the vast majority of Americans will not realize until it is too late that this is the same shit. Hating the other guy, it's the new racism. It's imposed from above, like racism, and it serves the same purpose. It keeps the population mesmerized by irrelevant passions and distracted from their natural business of tending to their own real political problems.
And it just so happens that at the beginning of 2007, this paralyzing hatred is our biggest real political problem. It has become bigger than the individual policy issues at play in the ongoing argument between liberalism and conservatism. It has corrupted our thinking and infected us with a profound spiritual sickness. And, it has inclined us all to extremist political positions that we would never take without media figures telling us that our neighbors were secretly scheming to stamp out our very existences. But we'll never figure that out, not as long as we remain focused on who's winning in the left-right battle. It doesn't matter that Fox is down and that the other team is getting a bump in the ratings. It's the split that's remained consistent, and the split is the problem.
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