Saddam is dead. Executed.
First, I’m opposed to capital punishment. Period.
Second, just what Iraq needs: A high-profile martyr to rally around and provide reason for an even more massive explosion of violence than we’ve already seen.
PAD
Saddam is dead. Executed.
First, I’m opposed to capital punishment. Period.
Second, just what Iraq needs: A high-profile martyr to rally around and provide reason for an even more massive explosion of violence than we’ve already seen.
PAD
• 
“And I can point to many examples of guns used in accidental shootings. Yet I daresay those who favor unfettered gun ownership would be unimpressed by it.”
“Good dodge of my point, it’s pretty much what I’ve come to expect from the anti death penalty crowd.”
It was actually precisely on target, a fact that you yourself have dodged, which is pretty much what I’ve come to expect from the gun loving crowd. The point is that no system is perfect, but if the choice is taking the risk that, in an aberration, convicted criminals might escape, as opposed to systematic application of the death sentence to people of color who might well be innocent, I’ll err on the side of not sentencing innocent people to death. Just how many death-row inmates need to be freed upon the revelation, via DNA testing, that they’re innocent, does one require to make the point?
In other words, if the notion that killing someone is wrong is insufficient, certainly the notion that killing someone who did nothing to deserve it must carry SOME weight.
PAD
“Alive, he gives motive and power to the Baath for many years. Dead, while a martyre, I expect his influence will still be shorter lived.”
Funny. In the TV drama “I, Claudius,” a Roman senator dismissively says much the same thing to Claudius about an executed Jew names Joshua Bar Joseph, or “Jesus” to his followers. When Claudius says, “So he DOES have followers,” the Senator says, “Oh yes, yes…it’s a cult. There are ALWAYS cults.”
Obviously Saddam isn’t Jesus. But never underestimate the rallying power of the dead.
PAD
I don’t think he mattered much either way; that’s why I think his killing was more about us than it was about him.
Saddam being executed is not something I would have gone with. He got away with a lot of stuff for years because it was expedient for ‘us’ to let him get away with it, we put him out of business and it’s not like he was about to re-offend any time soon. On t’other hand, it does send a clear message to other dictators that we will get our hands really dirty if we have to.
Death penalties… my ten cents worth, if you’re going to have a death penalty then the jury have to ask for it, and they all have to push a button before the current flows. If the people tasked with determining guilt are certain enough to do the deed themselves it should reduce the ‘what if he’s innocent’ ratio and still have a real deterrent factor if criminals knew they could be executed.
For some crimes though, a sentence of life imprisonment should mean life, and a bit more emphasis should go on protecting citizen safety than on the rights of people who have deliberately chosen to opt out of social behaviour.
The latest figure I just Googled in Scotland shows a 60% re-offending rate for violent crimes. Prisons over here are either at or close to capacity and many cases are being shuffled through the system with an agenda driven by a need to avoid imposing jail sentences.
If we need more prisons, and need more “cost-effective” prisons we should bite the bullet and address that need. Hëll, if worse comes to worse, dump ’em on one of our islands and leave ’em to it…
Cheers.
“Obviously Saddam isn’t Jesus. But never underestimate the rallying power of the dead.”
Agreed. Of course, I don’t expect Sadam to rise from his grave on Sunday…
While I’ll grant your point, I think history lends us more examples of people having more influence alive, than dead. If we too quickly accept the power of Matyredom, then we better be careful about dropping bombs in Afganistan, for fear of accidently killing Osama and making him a Martyr.
>>Given how many people have been executed in Iraq over the last few decades, one more really isn’t exactly taking the low road.
>Starwolf, if you’re saying we’re not as bad as Saddam was…that’s not saying very much, pal
No, but remember: we didn’t kill him. His own peoples’ tribunal found him guilty, assigned and executed the penalty. (At least that’s the impression I got from the cursory reading I had time to do while dealing with a family illness at this end.)
>Sorry, but Hussein did NOT have his own son executed. … Saddam did have his wife’s BROTHER (and childhood friend), Adnan Tuffah, executed,
Ah, my mistake. But still, not much of an improvement.
> I don’t doubt it. But murder is murder is murder. I’m not convinced that becoming that which we despise is morally or ethically a good thing.
Can’t entirely agree there. We put down rabid dogs because they are an ongoing menace. Why shouldn’t the same apply to a rabid/pshycho human? To my mind, not guilty by reason of insanity is a tricky proposition. They are a greater threat because a sane individual might be reformed, might be argued with. An insane one probably can’t.
>A funny thing about giving a government the right to do something in very, very limited circumstances: Over time, they will expand the right to do it in more and more circumstances.
Well, yes. That’s something I keep telling people. That new law they propose sounds harmless enough, but what would happen if it was expanded to include … or altered to go to this extreme…? And people keep saying I exaggerate. Sure. But I’m not usually wrong. History has shown this. Give them an inch and so forth.
>Image after image after image of births, birthday parties, graduations, weddings, over and over and over, with the volume turned way up, so they can experience every laugh, every cry, every moment of celebration.
I do have a problem with that. I could see that driving someone insane, and thus making them an even worse threat. Especially in a volatile place such as Iraq where the individual still has lots of supporters who’d have loved to get him out of jail. This may be why they opted to finish it fast before a plan to save Hussein could have been completed and successfully executed.
Who benefits? The neocons who hopefully can get their own intimate associations with Saddam pushed further out of the light; the madmen who hope to help unite the warring parties in Iraq against the U.S., and to rally anti-Americanism (and anti-Israelism) everywhere; and the Christian religious fanatics who are hoping to spark the end of the world through their actions in Iraq.
That’s who benefits from Saddam’s death. Not a good guy among them, but that’s to be expected: Evil acts (and capital punishment is one) bear evil fruits.
“15 years ago, the reported cost to execute a convict was $9 million. The annual cost to jail him was less than $30,000. “
Thanks to liberals that wanted to add stipulation upon stipulation. It sure didn’t cost $9 million to execute Hussein, did it?
If you are going to execute someone, you better make dámņ sure that you’re killing the right person and the appeals process reduces that likelihood. The “stipulation upon stipulation” help prevent the possibility that another injustice is not committed by executing a man innocent of the crime. Statistically , I understand that the system has almost certainly commited that injustice more than once.
The attitude of “shoot ’em in the back of the head as soon as they’ve been found guilty” isn’t one worthy of a society that claims itself civilized.
“What are you going to do, put them in prison for life? I refer you to the case of the Texas Seven, where men that were in prison for life managed to escape and murder a policeman on Christmas Eve.”
“And I can point to many examples of guns used in accidental shootings. Yet I daresay those who favor unfettered gun ownership would be unimpressed by it.”
“Good dodge of my point, it’s pretty much what I’ve come to expect from the anti death penalty crowd. “
Well, I’m FOR the death penalty and found your original point to be… well… pointless. Seven guys were in prison for life and escaped to cause mayhem. Ok, $**t happens.
In 1984, James and Linwood Briley, Lem Tuggle, Earl Clanton, Derick Peterson and Willie Jones escaped from Mecklenburg Correctional Center. If you don’t know Virginia history, that was the 1984 escape from death row. Guess what that means? They weren’t in prison for life. They were waiting to die when they escaped. And lots of fun was had by all until they were recaptured.
It’s such a nice memory. I was thirteen at the time and got to be told that I was an “at risk” individual. My father was one of the Petersburg officers that helped to put some of those animals away. They, and several others involved in their crimes but were not part of the escape, swore in court that they would escape and kill the families of the people that put them behind bars.
Escapes happen. One day, another big escape will happen. It means exactly squat other someone at a prison got sloppy. It also adds nothing to a debate on the death penalty.
Anybody who wants to know what those animals were…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briley_Brothers
A couple thoughts:
1) If this is how we treat our “great ally”, is it any wonder our nation has fewer friends than ever before?
2) If this is the punishment for killing 148 of your own citizens, then what is the punishment for killing more than 20 times that number of your own soldiers (according to the official Pentagon count)?
3) Can that punishment be applied as quickly as Saddam’s was?
“I was once called upon to define “evil,” and I came up with “one who deliberately and without remorse harms another sentient being.””
That’s a pretty broad definition, one that includes soldiers in war, boxers, rape victims who fight back, pretty much anyone using force to defend themselves from attack, and, depending on your definition of “sentient,” hunters, slaughterhouse workers, etc. That’s a lot of evil. And are we just talking about physical harm, or does it also include emotional or psychological harm (which can often be even more harmful than the merely physical)?
I agree. I appose capital punishment as well. Period.
A government should not have the right to take a life, mass murderer or not. Look up Optimus Prime’s saying on his toy box.
I would like to throw my 2 cents worth here… To paraphrase “With great freedoms come great responsibilities”. I believe whole heartedly that if and when you choose with those freedoms to violate the civil and human rights of others, your forfiet alot of your own.
So if someones actions lead to a place where they have violated someones human and civil rights, can we please stop behaving like the criminals have more rights than the victim.
As Peter said he should not have the right to take a mans life in vengence, and truthfully no man should have that right, but goverment is not one man. Through out history goverments purpose is to get done what individuals either can not or should not be allowed to do.
Sure I admit goverment may not always get it right but thay have a better track record than most vigilanties
all that bieng said, I will not shed a tear over saddam, other than he will now have to wait so long in hëll till he finaly gets to meet dubya!!!!
As with many important decisions in life, the decision to execute Saddam has both downsides and upsides.
For example, for those who argue Saddam’s execution will foment Saddam’s supporters into a killing spree, all I can say is, “Yeah, right.” After all, Baghdad can’t get much worse than it already is, and the same people making the threats are no doubt the people who are already killing fellow Muslims with ruthless abandon just because of a difference of opinion regarding who is and who is not the true successors of Mohammed. Thus, if you think executing Saddam will make these radicals hate “non-believers” more than they already do, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell to you real cheap.
Heck, one could just as easily argue that with the symbolic head of the past Iraqi regime gone, it might weaken the resolve of the Sunni radicals rather than strengthen it. The fact is, NO ONE knows what the long-term effect of the execution will be.
Sparing Saddam just because one dislikes capital punishment, when capital punishment is a legal recourse in Iraq, boils down to nothing more than a difference of philosophical opinion. In my opinion, at its core, capital punishment is not an act of vengence any more than removing a malignant tumor from the body is an act of vengence. It is a legal and viable option.
On a related note, I am often surprised by the number of people I meet who say they are against capital punishment, yet have absolutely no qualms about abortion (even late-term abortion) and/or state-assisted suicide. That makes no logical sense to me.
Anyone here subscribe to the “mob hit” theory?
And it’s my opinion as well, which is kind of the point. I’m a big believer in Kathleen’s concept: That the murder should be incarcerated for life in a cell while being forced to watch, 24/7, videos of the lives of those he killed. Image after image after image of births, birthday parties, graduations, weddings, over and over and over, with the volume turned way up, so they can experience every laugh, every cry, every moment of celebration. More often than not, murderers dehumanize their victims. This way they spend the rest of their natural existence faced with the inescapable fact that their victims were human beings.
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SER: Arguably, that would fall under mental torture and thus cruel and unusual punishment (c’mon, you know a clever lawyer would love to may hay of this). Also, I honestly think that this would have no effect on your more callous criminals — other than annoyance, like being forced to watch bad movies all day. It’s the MST3K punishment. The murderers would wind up creating robots to help them riff on the more tedious moments in the home videos.
Here’s where I stand on capital punishment: As an atheist, I don’t believe in a heaven or hëll, so this world is the only one there is and everyone gets only one shot. Also, philosophically, pretty much anything is better than death (granted, I do consider some of the more painful diseases and illnesses up there but we go back to cruel and unusual punishment if we were to inflict them on the murderers). I have a hard time imagining the justice in a murderer in prison for the rest of his life still able to read books, listen to music, see a sunset, when his victim never will again. There’s nothing really humane you can do to a killer that would completely remove some of the simple joys that exist is simply being alive.
That said, I don’t see how religious people justify a belief in capital punishment. Sure, they might be in a hurry to get the bad guy to hëll but I think the anticipation of what’s coming would be enough punishment.
Of course, the system is corrupt enough right now that I agree with not having a death penalty. In a perfect world, with absolute certainty of guilt and fair trials, sure, but we’re nowhere near that day.
As for Hussein, forgive me if I don’t dance for joy that we executed a 69 year old man who would probably not have been the leader of Iraq for much longer had we intervened or not. All we did was spare him a future of Depends.
In all the posts I’ve seen so far, there is a point missing. Nobody thinks about the Kurds. So I will:
Saddam was hanged for one crime only, the murder of a hundred or so villagers. However, he did worse to the Kurds, using chemical weapons to do so. A trial for that genocide was ready to go, but it will never happen now. And this is really dangerous, for two reasons.
a) By not allowing this trial to happen, the Iraki courts, and by extension, the Iraqi government (and, some would say, the US government) are sending a very bad message to the Kurds. They’re saying in effect: “Sorry, but you don’t rate. You have been victims of a genocide, but you won’t get what other victims of genocide deserved and got: a chance to see the crimes made against you being tried, a chance to see your victims being vindicated”. Now, the Kurds could well think that, if they don’t rate for the Iraqi government, they could as well secede and form their own state. And that would bring Turkey and Iran into an already stinking mess.
b) There was no trial also for the armenian genocide. So, who wants to bet that some people will start saying that the Kurd genocide never happened, the way the Turks claim that the Armenian genocide never happened?
In all the posts I’ve seen so far, there is a point missing. Nobody thinks about the Kurds. So I will:
Saddam was hanged for one crime only, the murder of a hundred or so villagers. However, he did worse to the Kurds, using chemical weapons to do so. A trial for that genocide was ready to go, but it will never happen now.
Considering that the US government sold Saddam those weapons and involved members of the current administration, such a trial would have been very, very embarrassing for the Bush Administration.
Thus the “mob hit” theory.
You’re asking for something that’s impossible: Degrees of guilt. “Yes, we find the defendant guilty, but not SO guilty that we’re sure enough to execute him. But, oh, this guy over here (dark skin, presumably, without the money for a top flight defense attorney), we’re absolutely positive that he’s definitely so guilty that HIM, we can execute.
I think you might have misconstrued my comment – it’s not a matter of “degrees of guilt” but rather “overwhelming proof of evidence” that I was calling for. I think in instances of murder and rape, the death penalty should be applied but ONLY WHEN there is undeniable evidence – DNA matches and so forth – of guilt. So I wasn’t talking so much about levels of guilt rather than levels of substantiated accusations. As rare as the death penalty is, it does have potential for errors and loopholes, i.e. in the execution of someone later posthumously exonerated through evidence. It’s happened before, but I think if stricter preventative measures are taken, then it can be used justly and fairly.
One more thing about my post above: What I think should have been done is one big trial, where Saddam would have been tried for every crime, and not one trial for each crime. That way, every one of his victims would have been vindicated. It worked at Nuremberg, right?
My beliefs on the death penalty have changed over the years. In my late teens/early twenties, I thought it was a no-brainer. If you’re put to death by the state, you must be guilty. But in my late thirties, I know this is not the case. I’m against the death penalty not because of the morality of the situation (an eye for an eye), but because of the finality of the situation. Once that person is gone, they’re gone, and if later evidence shows doubt, you can’t do a do-over. There’s should be no “Ooops!” when you put a person to death. It annoys me when death penalty advocates use the term “flaws” when talking about post-execution exonerations. That’s so cold and distant when talking about taking a human life in error from a far-removed position, not so much different from our former allies Saddam or Pinochet.
I recently caught the British film “Pierrepoint” at the Human Rights film festival held at New York’s Lincoln Center. It’s about England’s last public hangman during the 1950’s. I highly recommend it should they release it in America under the alternative title “The Last Hangman.” It shows the emotional toll taken on Albert Pierrpoint after notoriously putting hundreds of people to death in his career. On his deathbed, in the 1970’s, he recanted the use of capital punishment. Timothy Spall, the actor who plays him in the movie, did a Q&A after the film. He pretty much states how PAD, myself and a good deal of people feel: that, hëll yeah, if we had a moment alone with our loved one’s killer, who wouldn’t lash out, but that after it’s all over, it’s still wrong and belongs out of the context of personal revenge.
I’m sure that years from now there will be new techniques that will make DNA identification look kind of outdated, and that absolute certainty of the truth may be closer to attainability, but it still won’t level the playing field for everyone, in particular minorities and people from lower economic backgrounds.
I can’t remember who said it (maybe it was Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson) but I always go back to the quote of, “I would rather let 20 guilty men go free than take the life of one innocent man.” And yes, Hussein was certainly a mass murderer, but now that he’s gone, isn’t his death a hollow victory for America since we’ve spent about 3,000 plus and counting in soldiers trying to bring him down not to mention the roughly high five figures of Iraqi civilians as well?
I can’t remember who said it (maybe it was Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson) but I always go back to the quote of, “I would rather let 20 guilty men go free than take the life of one innocent man.”
I’ve heard this but it really doesn’t make sense–nobody is saying “let them go or kill them”. There are otehr options.
One thing that might make the death penalty less attractive would be if getting life imprisonment really meant you spend your life in prison. I hate it when a guy gets 50 years and they add that he’s eleigoble for parole in 10. F that. Unless in 10 years his victim is somehow undead or unraped I say he serves the full monty.
Considering that the US government sold Saddam those weapons and involved members of the current administration, such a trial would have been very, very embarrassing for the Bush Administration.
The point has been made many times and hasn’t meant much. The Chinese might do some atrocity tomorrow with the money you and I send them every time we go shopping, I doubt either of us will be wearing a sackcloth. If we chose to engage with unsavory characters–and the only other option would be pretty much isolationism since that descriobes most of asia and africa and a good chunk of europe–this is what happens.
Saddam was hanged for one crime only, the murder of a hundred or so villagers. However, he did worse to the Kurds, using chemical weapons to do so. A trial for that genocide was ready to go, but it will never happen now. And this is really dangerous, for two reasons.
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SER: They tried him for one crime because they wanted to actually see him punished. Basically, if they tried him for each atrocity, he would have died in prison. Heck, given the list of crimes, that could have happened if he were 39 rather than 69.
Since the goal was to hang him, they figured they would go for the “easiest” murder charge.
While blacks are the leading victims of murder, death rows are dominated by convicts who kill whites. A rational person would oppose the death penalty because it’s a racist practice.
But would the same rational person therefore support
I think there are good reasons to oppose capital punishment, but that isn’t one of them. For one thing I think it’s philosophically and intellectually dishonest, as applied, when people claim they oppose the death penalty as it’s applied, because most of the time the person making that claim is a death penalty abolitionist who just doesn’t want to admit it. Most people in the US believe that capital punishment is appropriate in at least some circumstances, so death penalty opponents know they won’t get very far if they attack capital punishment head on; far better to erode it from the boundaries by attacking its application racially or haggling over the lethal injection process. I don’t know you from Adam so I don’t know if that’s what you’re doing; I’m just saying that most of the time that argument is a tactical use of a half-truth. (And I should know a tactical use of a half-truth when I see one– I’m a lawyer, it’s my stock-in-trade.) I also think it’s dangerous to argue over what’s essentially a math problem when that problem allows a solution you don’t like. (Ask a group of death penalty supporters if they’d be fine with putting more white murderers on death row. I suspect the answer will be yes. Problem solved!)
There are, as I said, quite convincing reasons to oppose the death penalty. PAD taps into the best of them. Arguments based on what the murderer deserves will always fail, because the Supreme Court has succeeded in narrowing the focus of the death penalty in this country to the “worst of the worst,” and of course nobody favors executing the innocent. So when we’re discussing the death penalty, realistically we’re discussing the execution of horrible criminals who deserve no mercy. The question becomes whether giving someone his “just dessert” debases us as a society. I’ve probably related this story before, but: When I was an even-more-junior-than-I-am-now prosecutor, I was assigned as a flunky during a capital trial. For much of the trial, there was only one functioning elevator in the courthouse, so there were a number of times I rode up in the same car as the defendant’s father. It was a daily reminder that I was part of an office that sought to kill his son, a reminder that however much the defendant deserved an awful fate, there were costs to our society that arose from giving him what he deserved. Those are the arguments against capital punishment that I take seriously.
Nuts. Formatting problem. The first paragraph of my post was supposed to be italicized as it is. The second paragraph was to read, “But would the same rational person therefore support the death penalty if those problems were addressed? If the system were reformed to put more white convicts on death row, and more convicts who killed minority victims, would you really be okay with capital punishment? At a minimum, you should agree that the capital case that’s coming up in my district in February, involving the serial rape and murder of two black women, presents few complications under your theory, so my boss is probably not oppressing anyone by going forward.”
The rest was inadvertently italicized. Oops.
Haven’t commented here for over a year, but I did want to weigh in on this.
I’ve thought about it a lot, and I am disappointed with us still executing people. It might come from all those Star Trek reruns, or SciFi, but I guess I feel that no matter how many atrocities someone has comitted, I always think we, as a people, are better than executing our problems, no matter how deserved it is. I’ve always thought we’ve failed a little as a society when we have to resort to execution to handle our problems.
Considering that the US government sold Saddam those weapons and involved members of the current administration, such a trial would have been very, very embarrassing for the Bush Administration.
The point has been made many times and hasn’t meant much. The Chinese might do some atrocity tomorrow with the money you and I send them every time we go shopping, I doubt either of us will be wearing a sackcloth. If we chose to engage with unsavory characters–and the only other option would be pretty much isolationism since that descriobes most of asia and africa and a good chunk of europe–this is what happens.
I’m sure you’ll agree that there are universes of difference between a). the Chinese, as a theoretical example, gassing a bunch of recalcitrent Tibetians with WMD created and paid for by the profit they make from our borrowing money from them and b). selling chemical weapons to a man, who was expected to primarily use them against a proxy enemy, who uses it to gas his own people.
What I was noting was that trying Saddam for the atrocity of gassing the Kurds, a war crime that (I suspect) many more people around the world would have recognized and have expected Saddam to have been tried for, would have been a exercise in embarassment for the Bush Administration since a number of people in his administration sold those weapons to Hussein.
Life is not a privilege simply because, if it is a privilege, it’s one given at the pleasure of mothers not the state, and even mothers cannot legally revoke life.
Strawman. “To death penalty is a racist policy” is not the same as “people who support it are being racist.”
It cost the US $½ trillion, and as many US lives as were lost on 9-11. The reports I’ve been seeing on the main news sites haven’t been estimating $2 billion a month for the war, but $2 billion every 1 or 2 weeks.
Review the bolded text. Pitiful.
Like George Bush and Ðìçk Cheney? George Bush smoked at least into his father’s presidency, and he still may be smoking cigars, and Ðìçk Cheney smoked himself to at least 4 heart attacks.
If the standards for putting down a dog should apply to executing humans, why shouldn’t the same standards be applied to dismantling corporations? Corporations have the rights of a citizen, with no criminal liability. What’s more sociopathic than that?
My understanding is that the local culture does not honor living heroes, and if I’m wrong, it’s not an extreme exaggeration.
No, removing the malignant tumor is analogous to life imprisonment. Removing the malignant tumor and paying 30,000% to microwave the tissue is analogous to capital punishment.
“Equal but separate” was a justification for segregation until the supreme court ruled against it, because “separate but equal” was not how segregation was practiced.
Considering the challenge to segregation was itself founded in the selective availability of services among ethnicities, the challenge to the death penalty over its selective application among ethnicities is no more philosophically and intellectually dishonest than the documented supreme court ruling.
On a tangent related to punishment for heads of state…. is anyone else frustrated by the lack of coverage of the revelations in Bob Woodward’s just-released interview with Ford?
“I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn’t want to see my real friend have the stigma,” Ford said in the interview.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/28/AR2006122801247_pf.html
So in other words… with everyone for years in the media going on and on about Ford’s great legacy in doing this grand and self-sacrificing gesture of “helping the nation move on” by pardoning Nixon… he did it for the most basic political reason of all; cronyism.
The President of the United States commits multiple criminal acts to intimidate and undermine his political opposition, he puts his buddy into a position where he can get him off scott free… and then said buddy is hailed as a national hero, with wall-to-wall coverage, no questions asked.
Does this trouble anyone else? Doesn’t this bode very, very badly for the future of our country? Anyone else get the feeling we might see a repeat performance of this all too soon?
Didn’t we just recently learn once again the price of not questioning the “official version”?
I guess not.
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I can’t see why any rational person would be FOR the death penalty.
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I can’t see why any rational person would be against the death penalty
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Quote:
“Now, as far as Hussein goes–I was relieved when his sons, especially Qusay, were killed. From everything I’ve heard or read, those two were MUCH more dangerous than their father.”
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Well, from everything I’ve read, there were weapons of mass destruction, Saddam was behind the airplanes destroying the World Trade Center, and Iraq was going to give us our very own mushroom cloud.
Not that I am saying his sons were altar boys, but that we have to realize that at least half of the stuff we were told was probably false.
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Quote:
“It sure didn’t cost $9 million to execute Hussein, did it?”
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So far it has cost over $200 billion.
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The world is better off with Saddam dead.
But let us get to the real reason he was executed so quickly after his conviction.
So he couldn’t testify in a higher court (such as the World Court) about the things that Cheney and Rumsfeld told him to do.
This was more than just bringing one man to justice, it was also about covering up other crimes.
To comment on the previously mentioned issue of the following:
“On a related note, I am often surprised by the number of people I meet who say they are against capital punishment, yet have absolutely no qualms about abortion (even late-term abortion) and/or state-assisted suicide. That makes no logical sense to me.”
I’m one of those people. For me, it’s a woman’s right to choose, and I view the issue of aborting a fetus and not taking the life of a child, so I don’t think they are related. And state-assisted suicide, for me, explains itself. It’s not executing someone, it’s helping someone that has chosen to end their own life.
I can’t see why any rational person would be FOR the death penalty.
I can’t see why any rational person would be against the death penalty
I know plenty of rational people who support either one or the other of these positions. You two need to meet more people 🙂
Incidentally, I suspect there are countries with far greater potential for embarrassment on the Iraq chemical weapons than us.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/cw/az120103.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
It would seem the Germans provided the majority of Iraq’s poison gas supplies…insert obvious grim joke here.
All told, 52% of Iraq’s international chemical weapon equipment was of German origin… Around 21% of Iraq’s international chemical weapon equipment was French…
Austria is said to have provided 16%, Spain 4.4%. With China, Singapore, Holland, India and Luxembourg (the hëll?) also contributing to the chemical weapons program it would seem there is little room left for us…and indeed, the worst thing I’ve been able to find was our sending biological samples to Iraq such as anthrax, West Nile virus and clostridium perfringens. Which is mind bogglingly stupid but I’m not certain any of those were used against the Kurds (though I would not doubt it).
None of which excuses us or is meant to pass the buck to our European and Middle eastern friends but the story is too often presented as though the USA just handed over every drop of chemicals Saddam ever used. The truth seems far from that (if there is evidence to the contrary please let me know).
>If the standards for putting down a dog should apply to executing humans, why shouldn’t the same standards be applied to dismantling corporations?
Because that’s a tangent which strays a bit more from the topic than usual. Else, I’d say that, to a large extent, I concur.
SER posted:
Since the goal was to hang him, they figured they would go for the “easiest” murder charge.
Well, they could have gone for the whole shebang since Saddam’s guilt was a foregone conclusion. The irony (if I’m using the term properly) in this trial is Saddam was being tried for killing people who were accused by Saddam of being complicit in an assassination attempt.
The simple fact is that this was probably the only “charge” that couldn’t have caused much (if any) embarrassment to the US government (mainly in the Reagan and Bushes I & II admins; we shouldn’t forget that pic of Smilin’ Donny Rumsfeld shaking Saddam’s hand–you gotta know, old Rummy’s sighing a very big sigh of relief now that Saddam can’t point any fingers any more).
The upside is that Hëll just got a little more crowded. Given the assumption that the previous sentence is true, therefore Hëll just got marginally more inconvenient for Saddam, Satan, and all the denizens who are dámņëd there for all eternity.
I defy anyone to find a downside in that argument. DEFY, I say!
>I can’t see why any rational person would be >against the death penalty.
I refer you to my earlier post about why previously pro-DP conservative Michael Howard changed his mind.
James Lynch Said: “(unless it’s like the end of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT and a Hussein double was executed while the main man pretends to be his own double.)”
Well, thank you for the spoiler (kidding ^_^).
While I am not against the death penalty for the most heinous[sp] of crimes [mass murderers and the like]; I also feel that killing Saddam will eventually end up making things worse. Initially, however, it doesen’t seem like they care as much as we thought (I guess they have been too busy over the past 4 years shooting at each other, and us, to hate Saddam).
Hi Peter, I met you several years ago at a book signing in London, you gave me some fantastic advice, and wrote an incouragement that Stephen King once gave you. I’ve still to be published, and do not have as much time to write as I used to, but I do still have a few projects on the boil, and I am now a self-employed art consultant. I had a question for you that I have not seen an answer to elsewhere. I absolutely love your New Frontier series (I wish they’d filmed it rather than Enterprise), and I was wondering. Mackenzie is the name that M’k’n’zy adopted when he joined Starfleet, but I was wondering, how would the Xenexian name be phonetically pronounced? Was it intended to be a tetragrammaton that could not be pronounced?
Best wishes for all your future projects,
Tim
Posted by Peter David at December 30, 2006 08:42 AM
“What are you going to do, put them in prison for life? I refer you to the case of the Texas Seven, where men that were in prison for life managed to escape and murder a policeman on Christmas Eve.”
“And I can point to many examples of guns used in accidental shootings. Yet I daresay those who favor unfettered gun ownership would be unimpressed by it.”
PAD
The only way this would make sense is if,
A. The Texas 7 accidentally killed the people after escaping from prison.
B. The inanimate guns came to life, developed conscious thought and morality, and then accidentally killed people of their own volition.
C. Statistics showing the deaths of people from ladder accidents similarly don’t impress those in favor of unfettered ladder ownership.
Posted by: TallestFanEver at December 31, 2006 04:32 AM
I defy anyone to find a downside in that argument. DEFY, I say!
As was depicted on South Park, Satan and Saddam could become lovers.
All of this is moot. Hussein’s dead, yes. Executed by a puppet government under the control of the Halliburton Corporation, which effectively runs this country. Corruption all around, yes. A martyr to the Sunnis and Baathists, yes.
A guilty, evil, nasty little tinpot dictator, hëll yes. Put in power by the American government, what else is new? We’ve been propping up one crappy banana republic after another for over a century. And when they get too greedy or too aggressive, we kill them and stick some other punk in power, one who’ll do what we tell him to. And to stress our point, we’ll tell the new fish to look at what we did to his predecessor, take a good look, boy, because that’ll be you if you don’t toe the line.
Yes, the death penalty is awful. Eye for an eye would leave us all blind. Sadly, retribution is sometimes called for. When someone commits a crime for which there is no recompense, what else can we do? Lethal injection, which is pretty much the normal method of execution now, is expensive. It’s designed so that no one person has the karmic burden of knowing that he’s ended the life of another. It’s supposedly painless.
But the person being executed has caused pain to his victims and their families, and should be repaid in kind. And while being in a cell for the remainder of his life, forced to watch home movies of his victims sounds like apt punishment, I’m afraid most lawyers would call it cruel and unusual.
There are no easy answers to this. There never have been, and never will be. We can’t mindwipe these people, like Ben Reich was in The Demolished Man. All we can do is blunder on the best and worst we can. And that means more people will die, for good or ill.
As embarrassed as the Germans and French should be, George Bush led the cover-up to bury the truth.
And of course, related to the corruption of this administration, Ðìçk Cheney took $73 million from Saddam Hussein for quadrupling his oil revenues when Hussein was publicly offering bounties after Gulf War I to the families of suicide bombers.
As long as my point about the selective application of the death penalty based on the ethnicity of the victim goes unrefuted, I have no reservation against repeating where it applies.
While blacks are the leading victims of murder, death rows are dominated by convicts who kill whites. While the burden to the families of white murder victims is too severe, I guess it’s just too bad for the families of black murder victims that they’re just šhìŧ out of luck.
As embarrassed as the Germans and French should be, George Bush led the cover-up to bury the truth.
the U.S.-led Security Council censored the entire dossier,
So when the UN does something one doesn’t like it’s suddenly the US led Security Council. And since Bush leads the US it’s him doing the leading. This seems a bit slippery.
I’ve still seen nothing to support the contention that the US gave Saddam the chemical weapons used against the kurds–at best we were a small part of that, if we were any part at all. Which does not excuse it but it would behoove those who critisize us to give the whole picture, if they wish to be taken seriously.
The upside is that Hëll just got a little more crowded. Given the assumption that the previous sentence is true, therefore Hëll just got marginally more inconvenient for Saddam, Satan…
I defy anyone to find a downside in that argument. DEFY, I say!
Easy.
Remember the tag line from Romero’s famous DAWN OF THE DEAD film? “When there is no more room in Hëll, the dead will walk the Earth.”
Maybe we should start to worry? 😉