Saddam Hussein and hypocrisy.

[[Enlightenment]]

The bastard really did deserve to die!!! How many lifes did he take, remind me again someone................
The guy showed no remorse what so ever, he carried on talking bull shit even before they hung him, what a [censored]. (Sorry for the bad language kids)

Bring back Capital Punishment to the UK!!!

[[Enlightenment]]

I'm not saying he didn't deserve it. I'm highlighting the hypocrisy of capital punishment.

Who has the right to decide whether another human being lives or dies? Whether they deserve to or not is another matter. Which of us has the right to decide?

I don't know but someone obviously does, it will always be that way and it's for the best. If no one had the "right" to do so then these murdering bastards would still be here on Earth. Where is the Justice in that?
If everyone thought like that i.e. "who has the right to decide who lives or dies", then this World would be in an even worse state than it already is. We need someone to make the decision and I'm glad we have these people.

I think this topic is pointless IMO.

Storm, no offence to you hun, we all have our own opinions, but stuff like this kinda pisses me off.

Blessings!

[[ForestWitch]]

Storm, I agree with you. The biggest problem with the capital punishment, as I see it, is what it does to the society that practices it. That Saddam was a horrible monster is not in question, but what I saw in that execution video does not encourage me to feel my country is supporting a tremendously superior regime. This is not anything I want to see our young men and women die for. And while we're talking about hypocrisy, it should be remembered that the United States helped bring Saddam to power in the first place and supported him in the Iraq-Iran war and while, technically, the United States didn't put him to death, I don't believe this execution would have ever happened without our assistance.

I don't see it as a matter of who has the right. Clearly Saddam didn't have the right to practice genocide against his own people, but I don't see it as justice to put him to death in a highly degrading manner; I see it as nothing more than revenge. I see it as meeting him on his own level.

[Sobek]

" I see it as nothing more than revenge. I see it as meeting him on his own level."

thats exactly what it is, do unto others as you would have others do unto you. i dont know where the hell i heard that but it fits. they could've dressed him like a clown and hung like a pinata for all i care. if he lived many many more people would have died at his hand. would you not slay a form of evil to save countless others? if not you indirectly condemn those unknown faces to death.

[[ForestWitch]]

Yes, but I think Saddam could have been prevented from perpetrating any more atrocities without anyone having lowered themselves to the viciousness of his execution.

[Storm]

Bring back Capital Punishment to the UK!!!

I sincerely hope that never happens. Otherwise innocent people would die (remember the Birmingham 6?). Also, quite simply, it is just barbaric. If we're going to be bring back capital punishment, why not all the other delights of the middle ages? Torture, the rack, the burning of women the thumbscrews, the scold's bridle. Hell - why not?

[[Enlightenment]]

Have you actually seen how long (actually that should be how little) murders, rapists, etc, etc, etc. get in prison over here in the UK? Few of them get a "life" sentence, you here it all the time on the news, radio, etc. "murderer gets 12 years, rapists gets 6" and then they normal get out sooner, it's sick! How can they call it a "life" sentence when it's nothing of the sort (how can 20 years or whatever be a life sentence, and very few actually get that). At least in the US, these scum actually get a life sentence or put on death row. If they did that over here I'm sure they'd think twice. We'd still have those who commit these horrific crimes but it would cut numbers down.
Do you really think drug dealers would carry on dealing heroin and crack if they chopped one or two of their fingers off instead of putting them in prison for 3 years? Sounds harsh but it would work and this country wouldn't be in such a state as it is today.

As for innocent people, well that's life. Sometimes stuff like that has to happen to make better of the world we live in. As sad as it may be.

Blessings!

[[Enlightenment]]

They could've dressed him like a clown and hung like a pinata for all i care.

What a little like this

[Exilus]

No body really likes the Idea of the death penalty, But it is truly the oly punishment that allows a murderer to get an equal punishment to his crime. Death is Punishment to ensure the monsters who commit these crimes never again harm someone. Your telling me and I want you to look at your children look at them hard, and then ask yourself how would I feel if it was their killer we were discussing, and if after you do that, you still think the death penelty is not the proper choice..... well imagine him getting on the street again which all life sentence murderers do, and him doing it again to someone elses children.

[hedge*]

It was not the Iraqi government but its American masters that chose to execute Saddam Hussein in a great rush as soon as the first sentence was confirmed, thus canceling all the other trials on far graver charges that awaited him. The current Iraqi government had nothing to hide if those trials went ahead; the United States government did.

Cast your mind back to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Washington’s pretext for war then was Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, with barely a word about bringing democracy to the downtrodden Iraqi people. But in order to persuade us that Saddam’s WMD were a threat to the whole world, we were told a lot about how wicked he was, how he had even “gassed his own people.”

Well, there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction, so now the script has been changed to say that the war was about bringing democracy to Iraq. But that still requires Saddam Hussein to be a monstrous villain (which he certainly was), and it needs some dramatic supporting stories about how he abused his own people, like his poison gas attacks on rebel Kurds in 1988. So let’s try him for the slaughter of the Kurds in 1988, and then we’ll hang him.

Fair enough, and the trial for the gassing of the Kurds actually got started a couple of months ago. Other trials, for his savage repression of the Kurdish revolt in 1988 and the Shiite revolt in 1991, were already scheduled to happen in the New Year. But none of that came to pass. All the other trials have been cancelled, and they actually hanged Saddam for the judicial murder of 144 villagers in the town of Dujail who were allegedly involved in a plot to kill him in 1982.

Dujail? Here is a man who began his career in power in the late 1960s by exterminating the entire (mostly Shia) leadership of the Communist party in Iraq, went on to launch an invasion of Iran in 1980 that cost up to half a million lives, massacred his own Kurdish population in 1987-88 when some of their leaders sided with the Iranians, invaded Kuwait in 1990, and massacred Iraqi Shiites in 1991 when they rebelled against his rule at the end of that war. And they hanged him for Dujail?

It’s as if they had taken Adolf Hitler alive in 1945, but ignored his responsibility for starting World War II and his murder of six million Jews and just put him on trial for executing people suspected of involvement in the July 1944 bomb plot. With all of Saddam’s other crimes to choose from, why on earth would you hang him for executing the people suspected of involvement in the Dujail plot?

Because the United States was not involved in that one. It was involved in the massacre of the Iraqi Communists (the US Central Intelligence Agency gave Saddam their membership lists). It was implicated up to its ears in Saddam’s war against Iran — to the point of arranging for Iraq to be supplied with the chemicals to make poison gas, providing Baghdad with satellite and AWACS intelligence data on Iranian targets, and seconding US Air Force photo interpreters to Baghdad to draw Saddam the detailed maps of Iranian trenches that let him drench them in poison gas.

The Reagan administration stopped Congress from condemning Saddam’s use of poison gas, and the US State Department tried to protect Saddam when he gassed his own Kurdish citizens in Halabja in 1988, spreading stories (which it knew to be false) that Iranian planes had dropped the gas. It was the US that finally saved Saddam’s regime by providing naval escorts for tankers carrying oil from Arab Gulf states while Iraqi planes were left free to attack tankers coming from Iranian ports. Even when one of Saddam’s planes mistakenly attacked an American destroyer in 1987, killing 37 crewmembers, Washington forgave him.

And it was George W. Bush’s father who urged Iraq’s Shiites and Kurds to rebel after Saddam was driven out of Kuwait in 1991, and then failed to use US air power to protect the Shiites from massacre when they answered his call. The US was deeply involved in all of Saddam’s major crimes, one way or another, so no trial that delved into the details of those crimes could be allowed.

Instead, the spin-doctors in the current Bush administration put the Dujail trial first and scheduled the trials for Saddam’s bigger crimes for later, knowing that they would all be canceled once the death penalty for the Dujail incident was confirmed. The dirty laundry will never have to be displayed in public.
So the politics go on and on and on.

The man was a brute there is no denying that and I for one have no problem with the fact that he was hanged, 'tis only a shame that Bush wasn't alongside him being hung at the same time.

[[ForestWitch]]

Your telling me and I want you to look at your children look at them hard, and then ask yourself how would I feel if it was their killer we were discussing, and if after you do that, you still think the death penelty is not the proper choice.....

This is how strongly I feel about the death penalty: my daughter and I have a pact that should one of us be killed in a way that would send someone to death row, we will honor the other one's memory by using that as a platform for activism AGAINST the death penalty. It might take all my willpower to keep from taking a gun and shooting the perpetrator myself, but it wouldn't change my opinion that government-sponsored murder damages the society that practices it.

Those of you who live in places that have progressed beyond the death penalty, don't wish it back. Here's a current case I've been following: a 24 year old man, who at the age of 18 was involved in the particularly gruesome killing of an acquaintance, apparently to rob him. This guy's upbringing was filled with abject poverty, violence and neglect and he was hopped up on a cocktail of drugs at the time that might have turned anyone into a monster, as it apparently did him. He recently waved all further attempts at an appeal; he knows he did it, he can't get it out of his mind, he'd rather die at this point. His execution was scheduled for a few months ago, but the governor of that state stayed it at the last minute. Now, it was certainly a terrible thing that he did, and you'd get no argument from me that he deserves a good stiff sentence, but execution? I don't believe that he's beyond rehabilitation. I don't think there's much evidence that he'd get out and do the same thing again. This is not justice, in my opinion. If he were the son of one of the wealthy ranchers out there, he'd be in a mental hospital right now and probably be out in a few years.

'tis only a shame that Bush wasn't alongside him being hung at the same time.

....although if I thought this could ever happen, I might reverse my opinion on the death penalty. This governor would have never stayed that execution in a million years. And yes, you are exactly right; Saddam was rushed to execution to avoid making public our involvement in his crimes.

[Storm]

As for innocent people, well that's life. Sometimes stuff like that has to happen to make better of the world we live in. As sad as it may be.

Blessings!

This is where I realise there is no point in me continuing to debate with you. I wonder if you would feel the same if it were you, or a member of your family who was wrongly convicted and then hung. I suspect not. I am stunned at what I have just read. Almost speechless. But not quite.

Oh, and by the way - in the USA - statistics show that - on the whole states that have the death penalty do not have fewer murders than those that don't. So much for legalised murder 'making better of the world we live in' as you put it.

Good grief.

[Storm]

Storm, no offence to you hun, we all have our own opinions, but stuff like this kinda pisses me off.

Blessings!

Exactly what kind of stuff? I have never voiced my opinion on whether he deserved to die or not. I am highlighting the ludicrousness of us ranting about how wrong it is to kill... and punishing those who kill... by killing them. Explain to me how that, in any way at all is logical.

And, luckily, we have people like me in society to 'piss people off' with our liberalism. Otherwise women would be forced to be fully veiled, burglars would have their hands chopped off and there would be public executions in the streets. Oh, but people would do as they were told, and there would be less law breaking, so it would be such a better country to live in.

[[ForestWitch]]

Oh, and by the way - in the USA - statistics show that - on the whole states that have the death penalty do not have fewer murders than those that don't. So much for legalised murder 'making better of the world we live in' as you put it.

Yes, in fact the statistics show that most death penalty states have substantially higher murder rates. There's no evidence whatsoever supporting the idea that capital punishment is an effective deterrant. You can put forth a number of arguments about why states that have the death penalty also have higher murder rates, but I firmly believe that when government actively helps to devalue human life, it creates a culture of violence.

[Storm]

I firmly believe that when government actively helps to devalue human life, it creates a culture of violence.

Precisely.