Booman Tribune

Beheading Saddam's Half-Brother

by BooMan
Tue Jan 16th, 2007 at 02:14:48 AM EST

Most of you have probably heard that the government of Iraq executed Saddam Hussein's half-brother and a judge yesterday. You've probably also heard that they botched they hanging of Saddam's half-brother and accidentally decapitated him. I don't know. Maybe I am growing accustomed to beheadings, but if you're dead, you're dead. Who needs an attached head when you're dead? The main effect of a beheading is on the living. It's inspires terror. It also inspires closed caskets.

Iraqi officials were keen to reassure people that they did not intend to detach the head of Mr. Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti. Ibrahim was Hussein’s secret police chief, so there is a lot of suspicion. A number of people, including New York Times reporter John Burns, were allowed to watch video of the hanging. If you are not into the macabre stop reading now.

An official video played to a small group of Iraqi and Western reporters more than 13 hours after the hanging showed Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, former head of Mr. Hussein’s secret police, standing nervously on the trapdoor in a flame-orange jumpsuit of the kind used at the American detention center at Guantánamo, his head and moustache shaved...

After executioners in full-face balaclavas pulled black hoods over the two men’s heads, tightened nooses around their necks and pulled the lever opening the trapdoors, both fell like weights. But the hangmen’s calculations of weight, gravity and the momentum needed to snap their necks — a grim science that has produced detailed “drop charts” used for decades in hangings around the world — appeared, in Mr. Ibrahim’s case, to have gone seriously awry...

Iraqi officials who attended the hanging said the calculation in the case of Mr. Ibrahim , 55-year-old of medium height and build, had allowed for a “drop” of eight feet — too much, according to at least one United States Army manual — and about that amount of thick yellow rope could be seen coiled at Mr. Ibrahim’s feet before the hanging.

The video showed his head being snapped off as the rope went taut, and ending up, still inside the hood, lying in the pit of the gallows about five feet from his headless body.

Mr. Bandar could be seen dangling from the rope above Mr. Ibrahim, whose body was lying on its chest on the floor of the dark, dank pit, blood pooling beside his severed neck. The silent, three-minute video then ended abruptly, with officials saying they would run it only once, and not show it in public again.

According to Burns, under Saddam's rule the ropes were intentionally left too short so that the condemned would die slowly of asphyxiation over the course of fifteen or twenty minutes. The Iraqi government claims they were trying avoid such an outcome and overcompensated.

I don't really care. The end result is a revolting display of barbarism, horror, incompetence, farce, and public relations disaster. It's a perfect metaphor for the whole country of Iraq and for this whole war.



Display:
The end result is a revolting display of barbarism, horror, incompetence, farce, and public relations disaster.

Ms. Rice apparently agrees with you, if only on the last point:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Monday that the executions were mishandled and she hoped those responsible for the cellphone videos of Saddam's execution would be punished.
(USA Today)

This is likewise a fine metaphor -- or perhaps a fine example.

Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.

by technopolitical on Tue Jan 16th, 2007 at 02:37:55 AM EST
Your comment made me wonder how Ms. Rice weighed in on the 24/7 gleeful media extravaganza related to Hussein's assassinated sons. Yes, I know, they were murdering, rapist thugs, but that whole spectacle - among so many others - sickened me to no end.  

Barbaric seems so utterly inadequate in describing any of these U.S. sanctioned events. Wonder if Ms. Rice sleeps as soundly as her "leader". I would hope that someone in this wretched white house regime has an ounce of conscience left in them.        

 

miino biimaadizi

by Anomalous on Tue Jan 16th, 2007 at 08:51:10 AM EST
[ Parent ]
incompetent at even the simplest tasks.
by HiD on Tue Jan 16th, 2007 at 04:47:32 AM EST
Bush wanted somebody's head delivered to him in a box of ice.  He probably doesn't care whose head, so why not send him this one?  

He can keep it in a jar on his desk as a symbol of all that he has accomplished.

by hauksdottir on Tue Jan 16th, 2007 at 06:36:20 AM EST
He could skull-fuck it. He must be tired of Geronimo's.
by rom wyo on Wed Jan 17th, 2007 at 05:33:10 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Several thousand years of human history have failed to make us any less barbaric than the days during which our ancestors made cave paintings and discovered fire.  

Fear will keep the local systems in line. -Grand Moff Tarkin Survivor Left Blogistan
by boran2 (blogistan@yahoo.com) on Tue Jan 16th, 2007 at 07:00:05 AM EST
I must protest ;o)
I think there is a huge difference between us, who certainly can create magnificent art and beauty, make brilliant dicoveries and have the capacity to bring so much healing through medical endeavors, but who also seem to have a brutal need almost to inflict pain and suffering all the while fascinating ourselves with the spectacle of suffering, the mechanics of killing someone in the most disgusting ways...

and the embryonic human minds that endeavored to recreate the world they saw with colors found within the earth, creatting mythical painted alters to the spirits of the animals they shared their world with. The violence that they endured were more a natural result of the stark difficulty of their survival in that environment. It seems that as we advanc or evolve, the more we move away from the innocence and inquisitiveness of those original humans.

Other than that, you and I agree on almost everything ;o)

"green grass and high tides forever"

by supersoling (colorsplash62@optonline.net) on Tue Jan 16th, 2007 at 12:52:48 PM EST
[ Parent ]
by Oui on Tue Jan 16th, 2007 at 06:54:02 AM EST
This is sick.

It ranks with Hitler having the rest of the 1944 conspirators hanged slowly and continually with piano wire, resuscitated, and then rehung.

And it was filmed.  The films are still said to exist, but they're so horrible that they never have been broadcast along with the other black and whites.

The way Bush, Maliki and the Sadrists seem to want it, those films could be rebroadcast now with no one upchucking or becoming hysterical.

This country has gone down, that we're able to condone such killing.

An untypical Negro

by blksista (gab1954@gmail.com) on Tue Jan 16th, 2007 at 11:23:46 AM EST
what did they do, hurl him down the hatch?

put ground glass on the noose?

un.fucking.real

dead men tell no tales...

"Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich." Peter Ustinov

by melo on Tue Jan 16th, 2007 at 01:31:41 PM EST


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