Oooh this justice game is fun. Lets find the people who sold Saddam his weapons and supported his invasion of Iran and give them a trial with the same accusations as Saddam got. That way the US/UK establishment will be hung and Iraq will no longer be occupied. There's justice.

With US Democracy so completely corrupted by the Bushes and Diebold what hope was there for a sound Democracy being established in Iraq? When Bush's UK Poodle has transformed all the UK Socialist votes into votes to build Global Fascism, Democracy has been destroyed. Any Labour politician supporting Blair has become a Class Traitor. It is strange that the Quisling Government in Iraq is showing what should be done, .

Blair did not even extract funding from the US for the UK pulling The US out of trouble in Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain has only just cleared the debts imposed by the USA for while we fought and bled against Hitler. Where is the blood money for the families of British soldiers Blair has now sent to be butchered ? - it seems that Blair is benefitting with a free holiday in Florida USA. Downing Street are still liars.

I'm sure Saddam has left copious documentation with trusted people. But I doubt it'll make any difference whatsoever since Western politicians and their backers are above the law.

For goodness sake Tony  http://bilderberg.org/ is the biggest collection of loony garbage I have seen in a long time.

This stuff was particularly amusing:  http://bilderberg.org/trib.htm since it is widely acknowledged that revelations was an anti-Roman tract written in code and referring to contemporaneous events- in other words it was never intended to be a 'prophecy'.

As for Saddam's 'soul', I couldn't care less. Did you cry for Pinochet too?

Saddam's murder is surely the most expensive "hit" in the history of political assassinations, and the cost of the contract keeps growing.

"Yes he was a bad man in many ways"


Bad? BAD?!?!

Winner of the "Blinkered Understatement Award" 2006 goes to the original poster.

Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a “great day” for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi “government”, but on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.

But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers - what about the other guilty men?

No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don’t gas our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn’t invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.

In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam’s shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.

Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam’s weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.

And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our “bunker buster” bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our “victory” - our “mission accomplished” - who will be found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect will come, no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in comfortable and wealthy retirement.

Hours before Saddam’s death sentence, his family - his first wife, Sajida, and Saddam’s daughter and their other relatives - had given up hope.

“Whatever could be done has been done - we can only wait for time to take its course,” one of them said last night. But Saddam knew, and had already announced his own “martyrdom”: he was still the president of Iraq and he would die for Iraq. All condemned men face a decision: to die with a last, grovelling plea for mercy or to die with whatever dignity they can wrap around themselves in their last hours on earth. His last trial appearance - that wan smile that spread over the mass-murderer’s face - showed us which path Saddam intended to walk to the noose.

I have catalogued his monstrous crimes over the years. I have talked to the Kurdish survivors of Halabja and the Shia who rose up against the dictator at our request in 1991 and who were betrayed by us - and whose comrades, in their tens of thousands, along with their wives, were hanged like thrushes by Saddam’s executioners.

I have walked round the execution chamber of Abu Ghraib - only months, it later transpired, after we had been using the same prison for a few tortures and killings of our own - and I have watched Iraqis pull thousands of their dead relatives from the mass graves of Hilla. One of them has a newly-inserted artificial hip and a medical identification number on his arm. He had been taken directly from hospital to his place of execution. Like Donald Rumsfeld, I have even shaken the dictator’s soft, damp hand. Yet the old war criminal finished his days in power writing romantic novels.

It was my colleague, Tom Friedman - now a messianic columnist for The New York Times - who perfectly caught Saddam’s character just before the 2003 invasion: Saddam was, he wrote, “part Don Corleone, part Donald Duck”. And, in this unique definition, Friedman caught the horror of all dictators; their sadistic attraction and the grotesque, unbelievable nature of their barbarity.

But that is not how the Arab world will see him. At first, those who suffered from Saddam’s cruelty will welcome his execution. Hundreds wanted to pull the hangman’s lever. So will many other Kurds and Shia outside Iraq welcome his end. But they - and millions of other Muslims - will remember how he was informed of his death sentence at the dawn of the Eid al-Adha feast, which recalls the would-be sacrifice by Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which even the ghastly Saddam cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners from his jails. “Handed over to the Iraqi authorities,” he may have been before his death. But his execution will go down - correctly - as an American affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this - that the West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington, that, for all his wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible get-out for Arab historians, this shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a “martyr” to the will of the new “Crusaders”.

When he was captured in November of 2003, the insurgency against American troops increased in ferocity. After his death, it will redouble in intensity again. Freed from the remotest possibility of Saddam’s return by his execution, the West’s enemies in Iraq have no reason to fear the return of his Baathist regime. Osama bin Laden will certainly rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And there’s a thought. So many crimes avenged.

But we will have got away with it.

Saddam Hussein, who is being held in American custody, has been tried by an American-appointed court which has ensured that all evidence pertaining to the massive Anglo-American support given to Saddam during the worst years of his savage reign has been completely supressed. The crimes for which he has been sentenced to death were carried out while Donald Rumsfeld was shaking his hand and Ronald Reagan was supplying him with moolah, diplomatic support and direct military intelligence to target his poison gas attacks on Iranian forces and aid his bombing of Iranian cities. The crimes for which he is currently on trial — gassing the Kurds — were not only countenanced by George Herbert Walker Bush and his administration (which included Dick Cheney and Colin Powell in key positions), but Bush went on to reward Saddam with showers of money (much of it funneled through secret bank accounts), military hardware — including dual use technology for WMD — and agricultural credits, which allowed Saddam to use his hard currency reserves for more weaponry.

Further charges — moot now — would doubtless have included Saddam’s brutal suppression of the Shiite revolt following the Gulf War: a revolt openly fomented by Bush I who then betrayed the Iraqi rebels, specifically allowing Saddam to break the rules of the post-war armistice and use his attack helicopters on the Shiites, and also using the American forces still in place there to prevent Shiite rebels from reaching buried arms caches. Many of the mass graves over which American officials — like the unctuous Colin Powell — have publicly shed salt tears were, again, the result of direct collusion with Saddam by American officials, many of them now in power once more.

(For more background see Scar Tissue: How the Bushes Brought Bedlam to Iraq and Prelude to a Quagmire.)

The decades-long record of American collusion in the crimes of Saddam Hussein is clear and overwhelming — and has been documented not only by news organizations like the Los Angeles Times but also by investigations of the United States Congress. Yet not a word of this is breathed in the media or Congress today; it is as if it never existed. And now the American-formed, American-backed government is about to take Saddam from American custody and hang him on an American-built gallows. It’s like Al Capone throwing the switch with Frank Nitti in the chair.

Few will mourn Saddam — a thug enthroned with the help of the CIA and sustained in power for years by the Bush Faction which is now about to kill him. The falling out of thieves ends ever thus. But far more disturbing is the way that the memory of even very recent, very public events can be manipulated and erased for sinister ends: in this case, to justify the mass murder of more than 600,000 innocent people. In the fever dreams of dominance and divine favor that pollute the minds of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, the idea has taken hold that the blood of Saddam Hussein will somehow wash the clotted viscera of dead children from their hands.

It will not. It will lead only to more blood. But this is nothing now to such men. They are each, like Saddam, like Macbeth, “in blood stepp’d so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er. Strange things I have in head, that will to hand.”

Strange things indeed are in their heads, and we have yet to sup full of the horrors they are willing into being.

UPDATE: But while we in the West jaw over Saddam’s fate, what do actual Iraqis think about the impending execution? Burhan al-Chalabi, former chairman of the British Iraqi Foundation, gives his view in the Guardian: The Trials of Occupation. Excerpts:

The imminent execution of Saddam Hussein is nothing but a smokescreen - a diversion in a series of diversions that will do nothing to address the price of the occupation of Iraq. If the Bush administration truly wanted to curb the cycle of bloodshed, it would come clean and share with the US public, the Iraqi people, and the international community the real goals of this disastrous neoconservative adventure.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq was an act of US imperialism, marketed as a war of liberation. Iraq was chosen ahead of Iran or Syria because it had been weakened by 13 years of sanctions. It provided the opportunity to station US bases in the Middle East, and a vantage point to monitor Iran. Control of the massive oil reserves was not to be sniffed at, either. It was assumed that Iraqis’ distaste for Saddam would somehow make occupation acceptable.

It has, of course, proved to be anything but acceptable. It has proven unacceptable to the people of Iraq, the Middle East, and the world over. Today, a country is occupied and its sovereignty violated. The UN’s legal and moral authority has been undermined. Iraq’s cultural heritage is in tatters, its natural resources squandered, its infrastructure destroyed.

Safety, security and the rule of law are nonexistent. terrorism is on the rise. This is borne out even in Washington’s own reports. More than 3 million Iraqis have fled their homes. More than 600,000 civilians have been killed.

Officials of the former regime are judged and punished - sometimes with death sentences as in Saddam Hussein’s case. Regardless of the nature of the crimes, it is only right that allegations should be tested by a properly constituted court of law that meets the basic requirements of justice, fairness and independence. These qualities could not be found in the court in Iraq, established by US viceroy Paul Bremer, who appointed its judges in direct contravention of international law…

The US presents the Iraqi people with this phoney act of accountability, but no one has been held accountable for invading and occupying Iraq or the mass human rights abuses carried out in the process…The occupying forces continue to peddle the nonsense that they cannot withdraw immediately - that this would only spark civil war. I am convinced that the opposite is true: when the occupiers leave, the prevailing civil war will subside. Ordinary Iraqis will have to choose between killing each other or rebuilding the country - which they can only do in an independent, sovereign Iraq.

"The US presents the Iraqi people with this phoney act of accountability"

Actually, I think the trial and execution was more for US consumption. I think the average Iraqi is more aware of the situation than you give credit for.

"The occupying forces continue to peddle the nonsense that they cannot withdraw immediately - that this would only spark civil war."

Well there has been a civil war raging for years in Iraq. The Coalition just don't want to admit to it publically. Everything every skeptical analyst predicted would go wrong has.

Do you think an immediate withdrawal would be positive? Just pack up and leave the various militias to wage war on each and every ethnic group?

The Coalition is failing to protect the Iraqi people in any meaningful way, but you haven't offered any alternative scenario whatsoever.

For the UN to step in with a peacekeeping force, you would need there to be some official acknowledgement of the civil war and its participants and terms of ceasefire negotiated and agreed. I fail to see how that is going to happen when you have a government implicated in organised crime and deathsquads and a Sunni minority that doesn't a chance in the long run, unless Saudi gets openly involved which is unlikely.

The US have unleashed complete mayhem and hell and sectarian divisions that did not have the opportunity to get serious under the Baathist regime.

The only positive things to have come out of Shock & Awe is that the US has had its arse kicked in Afghanistan and Iraq. I seriously doubt that full-scale attacks on Syria & Iran are imminent. The proxy war against Lebanon failed spectacularly too.

The latest shenanigans in Palestine & Lebanon show that the US/UK haven't learned anything at all in terms of interefering in the Middle East.

Things in the region will get no better until the UN is reformed with stronger powers to prosecute offenders and totally incongruous Security Council and its vetoes is disbanded in favour of the General Assembly brokering mediation and resolution.

The West should be spending trillions on the urgent need for replaceable carbon fuels and not smashing and grabbing the last of what the planet has got. Oh yeah, and not deposing democratic moderate regimes and replacing them with dictatorships would help too.

Saddam Hussein died in march 2003 in the first bombings at the start of the Iraq war as reported at the time  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,81847,00.html
But this has conveniently been forgotten. The man who was "captured" by american forces is one of Saddams many look-alike stand-ins (he had about 20) he is a cousin that is why the DNA test was close enough. If you compare photos there are differences and also why has he not shaved his beard? He disappeared from public view soon after capture and was brainwashed into thinking he was Saddam by the CIA

 http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/12/1666748.php

 http://www.share-international.org/media/dec2003.htm

Good bloody grief, what has IMC turned into. Why is shit like this no longer hidden?

What has happened to investigative journalism? Most of the media don't question the information given by governments from around the world yet history shows us they feed us lies and propaganda.
This leads to much of the public believing what is said and accepting it as fact. seek and you will find the truth.

'Trawl the unending supply of conspiracy theories and cherrypick the ones you like' would be more apt!

If there is one constant in regard to the Iraq imbroglio, it is the fact that the neocons told big fat brazen lies to get the United States to invade and occupy the country and they continue to tell lies to keep us there.

It would seem that Bush and the neocons have told so many lies, engineered so many falsifications and illusions, that it is no longer considered news and many people take it for granted Bush and crew are pathological liars. Of course, this says something dreadful about the moral and mental condition of many Americans, apparently numbering in the millions, who simply shrug their shoulders and refuse indignation or even a mild emotional response when confronted with such murderous betrayal in their names.

From the caves of Afghanistan, where putative hijackers plotted to violate the very laws of physics on September 11, 2001, to the mercurial figure of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said to be both a mastermind terrorist and a slow-witted dolt verging on retardation, we are spoon-fed one lie, exaggeration, and fairy tale after another, culminating in an incessant stream of deceit many of us no longer seem to even notice.

Thus, when the corporate media tells me Saddam was executed, I am inclined to believe they are full of it, simply parroting more lies and fomenting more trickery.

Most people will likely call me a paranoid nut case—in fact, I have grown quite comfortable with such derision and wear it as a badge of honor—but considering the way Bush’s “war” is going, at least here at home (while in Iraq, it is going as planned), it makes sense to render the killing Saddam into a media sideshow, never mind the crudity of skimasked executioners and gallows harking back to the grotesquery of Gibbet Hill.

In addition to sending a message, as the supposed murder of Uday and Qusay Hussein, grossly displayed in photos for all to see, sent a message, as did the much heralded and embroidered murder of al-Zarqawi—the hype on the latter lingered disgustingly for weeks, sort of like a pervasive stench—the idea here is let the American people know donating their sons and daughters, to say nothing of squandering billions of dollars, occasionally produces palatable results.

In a way, this is like the age-old practice of feeding a Christian or two to the lions in the Roman Coliseum, never mind political corruption and the ultimate failure of Rome’s Raubwirtschaft, or plunder and loot economy, was working corrosively behind the scenes at the very social fabric as the crowds soaked up bread and circuses. Saddam’s public execution is nothing if not a big distraction.

It does not take a lot of work, or memory, to conclude that it was not Saddam who went to the gallows.

It was only a couple years ago, soon after Saddam was allegedly dragged out of his spider hole—and, as it turns out, this is, as well, a transparently designed ruse—that his wife, Sajida Heiralla Tuffah, expecting to visit her caputred husband at a military base in Qatar, came to discover the man said to be Saddam was in fact not. “This is not my husband but his double,” Sajida angrily declared. “You think I do not know my husband? I was married to the man for more than twenty-five years!” It took a Russian, Maxim Pogodin, to report this for Pravda. Naturally, the story was almost completely ignored by our wonderful corporate media here in America.

“It is also possible to assume that Saddam has simply changed since the day of his sons’ deaths, June 24 2003,” Pogodin continues. “This however is highly unlikely. In case we believe Hussein’s wife, all DNA testing of the ex-Iraqi leader should be considered a mere fake. Overall, today there remain more questions then there are answers.”

Indeed, there are a lot of questions, and none of them will be answered sufficiently. For instance, some wonder how Saddam’s dental work changed over the period of a couple years, or how it is an Iraqi Army officer saw a U.S. Air Force transport fly Saddam Hussein out of Baghdad, or why is it several intelligence agencies believe Saddam jumped on a chartered transport from Baghdad to Minsk, Belarus, a rumor so persistent it lingered in the capitol for days, especially throughout the military command and among field officers.

These are questions that will never be answered, let alone addressed.

But never mind, us conspiracy nuts are prone to ruminate, much to the irritation of the more sane around us, for instance those who believe smoldering kerosene fires melt steel and Arabs wielding box cutters were able to make NORAD stand down.

do people keep reposting this stupid conspiracy crap from Kurt Nimmo, a right-wing conspiraloon???