Saddam was buddies with the U.S.A
- Thread starter Gonzo
- Start date
Count the number of people killed by Suharto or Pinochet or Marcos or any of a dozen other American supported oppressive regimes.
Count the number of people slaughtered by the United States in North and South Vietnam, once again on the strength of a lie.
Count the number of people exterminated by the Americans in Cambodia or any number of nations around the world and ask yourself where the greatest propencity and preparedness to kill innocent men women and children actually exists, Iraq or the United States of America....
Count the number of people slaughtered by the United States in North and South Vietnam, once again on the strength of a lie.
Count the number of people exterminated by the Americans in Cambodia or any number of nations around the world and ask yourself where the greatest propencity and preparedness to kill innocent men women and children actually exists, Iraq or the United States of America....
I'm really choosy about where my ass is, when it is in trouble. I take responsibility for my own ass and extricate it myself.
Sorry, Gonzo, but this is silly.
Saddam murdered hundreds of thousands. His torture chambers are straight out of your most hellish nightmares. People slowly dipped in acid, dismembered bit by bit, or worse, children dismembered bit by bit as torture for their parents. He started a war in which millions died, in which he used poison gas. He built dozens of palaces with oil-for-food money, while Iraqi children died for lack of medicine. He used chemical warfare in genocidal attacks on Kurdish villages inside Iraq, killing tens of thousands of his own people. He directed a war against the Shia of the south, destroying and draining the bogland they lived on, and murdering an estimated 130,000. His dream was to establish a pan-Arab state, with himself as leader. It is no exageration to say he was an Arab Adolph Hitler.
Bush has much to answer for, but to compare him to Saddam is simply ludicrous.
And Bush doesn't torture and massacre thousands of his own civilians. To say that there isn't much difference between Bush and Saddam is a bit sick really.
When was the last time Bush used chemical weapons on his own people, in places like New York or Los Angeles, to intentionally kill them? But that's what saddam did to his own countrymen in 1988. When was the last time you saw 5000 bodies littering an American town's streets after the American Government intentionally poisoned them all?
When was the last time you saw members of the American ice hockey team or Olympics team being locked in a cell in the United States and subjected to brutal beatings and torture just becase they lost a game, as Saddam's son used to do to the Iraq soccer team whenever it lost a game?
VICTIMS OF THE 1988 HALABJA MASSACRE IN WHICH SADDAM'S MEN KILLED 5000 INNOCENT MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN
Bodies being loaded onto a lorry
And there are people on this forum who think Saddam should still be in power?
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More details of Saddam's execution....
The Sunday Times
December 31, 2006
'I watched Saddam die'
Marie Colvin
THE knock on the door came just before 6am. Saddam Hussein’s executioners were disguised with black balaclavas.
He spent his last minutes yesterday in the sordid bowels of Iraqi military intelligence headquarters, once home to his own torturers and killers.
Just as the dawn call to prayer was beginning over the city, he was led, shambling in leg irons, to the scaffold to pay the price for his crimes against the Iraqi people.
“We took him to the gallows room and he looked like he wondered what was going on,” said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi government’s national security adviser, who saw him die. “He looked at the gallows not believing what was going to happen.”
As the world reacted with mixed jubilation and condemnation to the hanging, Rubaie revealed that the deposed dictator muttered as he was taken to his death: “Do not be afraid; it is where we all go.”
Rubaie was among the 15 people in the ill-lit room that was Saddam’s last sight on earth. The former Iraqi dictator showed no remorse, said Rubaie, speaking by telephone from Baghdad.
“He was respected throughout before and after the execution. We followed rigorously international and Islamic standards.”
After the dramas of Friday night, when Iraqi officials said Saddam’s death was imminent but his lawyers tried to stay his execution with an appeal to a United States court, his fate was set early yesterday.
Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, had signed the death warrant before going to celebrate his son’s wedding, and the presidential council had endorsed it.
The American jailers who had custody of Saddam were ordered to surrender him to the Iraqi government. They offered him tranquillisers but Saddam refused. “We received physical custody of Saddam Hussein around 5.30am from the coalition forces, and we took over and he became ours,” said Rubaie.
As US troops stood guard outside, Saddam was first led to a sparse and unheated holding room in the bowels of the headquarters of Iraqi military intelligence.
It would not have been lost on him that his own security forces had tortured and killed many people in the same grim building. Saddam was left for about half an hour to contemplate his fate. Iraqi law provides that a condemned man be allowed a final cigarette and a meal before his execution.
“He was handcuffed and we took him and sat him down,” said Rubaie. “There was a judge, a deputy general, deputy minister of justice, deputy minister of interior, a couple of other ministers, myself and a doctor.” After formalities they took him through “a huge file” of documents detailing his trial for crimes against humanity.
“The judge took him through the conviction. He was silent until he saw a video camera, and then began shouting slogans such as ‘God is great’. He started his rhetoric: ‘Long live Islam, down with Persia’, down with this and that. He started shouting his head off.” Rubaie made a last gesture of mercy. “His handcuffs were a little bit tight, and hurt him, and I instructed the guards to loosen them.”
The formalities over, the four masked executioners stepped forward. Short, tubby and dressed in leather jackets, they looked more like Al-Qaeda killers in an amateur terrorist video than those responsible for carrying out the sentence of death on a former head of state. Even though Saddam had shrunk in stature since the days of his pomp, he towered over them. He had dressed for death in clothes sewn by his personal Turkish tailor: black trousers, shined black shoes, a starched white shirt, black pullover and a black wool overcoat that protected him against the deep chill of his remaining minutes in the execution suite. His hair was dyed his signature black, but he had heavy bags under his eyes.
In sight of a new hemp noose hanging from the ceiling, the executioners removed his handcuffs to tie his hands behind his back. As he stood close to the trapdoor one wrapped a black scarf around his neck to shield it from rope burns.
When they went to put the black hood over his head, he mumbled: “That won’t be necessary.” The noose was slipped over his head.
He stood looking almost bewildered, and an executioner awkwardly tightened the hand-coiled knot of the noose on the left side of his neck.
Even on the brink of death Saddam had not forgotten the video camera. Just before he dropped through a trapdoor on a platform surrounded by red railing, he shouted the Muslim profession of faith, “God is great and Muhammad is his prophet” and “Palestine is Arab”.
“He was standing with the rope round his neck,” said Rubaie. “The executioner started reading verses from the Koran, ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger’. He repeated it twice and [Saddam] went down in no time.” The hangman pulled a lever, and Saddam dropped silently about 3ft through a metal trapdoor. It was 6.10am. Rubaie said he died instantly. “It was so, so quick, totally painless and there was no movement after that.”
Sami al-Askari, who represented the prime minister at the hanging, said he “heard his neck snap”.
Saddam hung from the rope for about 10 minutes, watched by the audience of about 15 people who could see him dangling under the platform. A doctor checked that his heart had stopped, then one of the executioners untied him.
There was blood on the rope. The executioners put him in a white body bag and took photographs as proof for diehard loyalists that Saddam was dead. Iraqi television broadcast a still photograph of the last image of the dictator, his neck at an unnatural angle, sticking out of the white shroud.
Munir Haddad, an Iraqi appeals court judge, also witnessed the execution. He said afterwards: “One of the guards present asked Saddam Hussein whether he was afraid of dying. Saddam said, ‘Why would I? I spent my whole life fighting the infidels and the intruders.’
“Another guard asked him, ‘Why did you destroy Iraq, and destroy us? You starved us, and you allowed the Americans to occupy us’. His reply was, ‘I destroyed the invaders and . . . I destroyed the enemies of Iraq, and I turned Iraq from poverty into wealth’.
“Saddam was normal and in full control. He said, ‘This is my end. I started my life as a fighter and as a political militant. So death does not frighten me’.
“He said, ‘We’re going to heaven, and our enemies will rot in hell’.
“When he was taken to the gallows, the guards tried to put a hood on his head, but he refused. Then he recited verses from the Koran. Some of the guards started to taunt him.”
The guards chanted the name of the Shi’ite firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. “Who is Moqtada?” — Saddam sneered.
“A cleric who was present asked Saddam to recite some spiritual words,” Haddad said. “Saddam did so, but with sarcasm. These were his last words, and then the cord tightened around his neck and he dropped to his death.”
timesonline.co.uk
The Sunday Times
December 31, 2006
'I watched Saddam die'
Marie Colvin
THE knock on the door came just before 6am. Saddam Hussein’s executioners were disguised with black balaclavas.
He spent his last minutes yesterday in the sordid bowels of Iraqi military intelligence headquarters, once home to his own torturers and killers.
Just as the dawn call to prayer was beginning over the city, he was led, shambling in leg irons, to the scaffold to pay the price for his crimes against the Iraqi people.
“We took him to the gallows room and he looked like he wondered what was going on,” said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi government’s national security adviser, who saw him die. “He looked at the gallows not believing what was going to happen.”
As the world reacted with mixed jubilation and condemnation to the hanging, Rubaie revealed that the deposed dictator muttered as he was taken to his death: “Do not be afraid; it is where we all go.”
Rubaie was among the 15 people in the ill-lit room that was Saddam’s last sight on earth. The former Iraqi dictator showed no remorse, said Rubaie, speaking by telephone from Baghdad.
“He was respected throughout before and after the execution. We followed rigorously international and Islamic standards.”
After the dramas of Friday night, when Iraqi officials said Saddam’s death was imminent but his lawyers tried to stay his execution with an appeal to a United States court, his fate was set early yesterday.
Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, had signed the death warrant before going to celebrate his son’s wedding, and the presidential council had endorsed it.
The American jailers who had custody of Saddam were ordered to surrender him to the Iraqi government. They offered him tranquillisers but Saddam refused. “We received physical custody of Saddam Hussein around 5.30am from the coalition forces, and we took over and he became ours,” said Rubaie.
As US troops stood guard outside, Saddam was first led to a sparse and unheated holding room in the bowels of the headquarters of Iraqi military intelligence.
It would not have been lost on him that his own security forces had tortured and killed many people in the same grim building. Saddam was left for about half an hour to contemplate his fate. Iraqi law provides that a condemned man be allowed a final cigarette and a meal before his execution.
“He was handcuffed and we took him and sat him down,” said Rubaie. “There was a judge, a deputy general, deputy minister of justice, deputy minister of interior, a couple of other ministers, myself and a doctor.” After formalities they took him through “a huge file” of documents detailing his trial for crimes against humanity.
“The judge took him through the conviction. He was silent until he saw a video camera, and then began shouting slogans such as ‘God is great’. He started his rhetoric: ‘Long live Islam, down with Persia’, down with this and that. He started shouting his head off.” Rubaie made a last gesture of mercy. “His handcuffs were a little bit tight, and hurt him, and I instructed the guards to loosen them.”
The formalities over, the four masked executioners stepped forward. Short, tubby and dressed in leather jackets, they looked more like Al-Qaeda killers in an amateur terrorist video than those responsible for carrying out the sentence of death on a former head of state. Even though Saddam had shrunk in stature since the days of his pomp, he towered over them. He had dressed for death in clothes sewn by his personal Turkish tailor: black trousers, shined black shoes, a starched white shirt, black pullover and a black wool overcoat that protected him against the deep chill of his remaining minutes in the execution suite. His hair was dyed his signature black, but he had heavy bags under his eyes.
In sight of a new hemp noose hanging from the ceiling, the executioners removed his handcuffs to tie his hands behind his back. As he stood close to the trapdoor one wrapped a black scarf around his neck to shield it from rope burns.
When they went to put the black hood over his head, he mumbled: “That won’t be necessary.” The noose was slipped over his head.
He stood looking almost bewildered, and an executioner awkwardly tightened the hand-coiled knot of the noose on the left side of his neck.
Even on the brink of death Saddam had not forgotten the video camera. Just before he dropped through a trapdoor on a platform surrounded by red railing, he shouted the Muslim profession of faith, “God is great and Muhammad is his prophet” and “Palestine is Arab”.
“He was standing with the rope round his neck,” said Rubaie. “The executioner started reading verses from the Koran, ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger’. He repeated it twice and [Saddam] went down in no time.” The hangman pulled a lever, and Saddam dropped silently about 3ft through a metal trapdoor. It was 6.10am. Rubaie said he died instantly. “It was so, so quick, totally painless and there was no movement after that.”
Sami al-Askari, who represented the prime minister at the hanging, said he “heard his neck snap”.
Saddam hung from the rope for about 10 minutes, watched by the audience of about 15 people who could see him dangling under the platform. A doctor checked that his heart had stopped, then one of the executioners untied him.
There was blood on the rope. The executioners put him in a white body bag and took photographs as proof for diehard loyalists that Saddam was dead. Iraqi television broadcast a still photograph of the last image of the dictator, his neck at an unnatural angle, sticking out of the white shroud.
Munir Haddad, an Iraqi appeals court judge, also witnessed the execution. He said afterwards: “One of the guards present asked Saddam Hussein whether he was afraid of dying. Saddam said, ‘Why would I? I spent my whole life fighting the infidels and the intruders.’
“Another guard asked him, ‘Why did you destroy Iraq, and destroy us? You starved us, and you allowed the Americans to occupy us’. His reply was, ‘I destroyed the invaders and . . . I destroyed the enemies of Iraq, and I turned Iraq from poverty into wealth’.
“Saddam was normal and in full control. He said, ‘This is my end. I started my life as a fighter and as a political militant. So death does not frighten me’.
“He said, ‘We’re going to heaven, and our enemies will rot in hell’.
“When he was taken to the gallows, the guards tried to put a hood on his head, but he refused. Then he recited verses from the Koran. Some of the guards started to taunt him.”
The guards chanted the name of the Shi’ite firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. “Who is Moqtada?” — Saddam sneered.
“A cleric who was present asked Saddam to recite some spiritual words,” Haddad said. “Saddam did so, but with sarcasm. These were his last words, and then the cord tightened around his neck and he dropped to his death.”
timesonline.co.uk
Taloola
Please forgive me if I singed you (or anyone) with that posit but I'm not going to pretend and I don't believe that anyone should...that the practice of direct military incursion by the worlds wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet, independent of our major consuming warefare currently numbering two...represents only a partial perspective on the underlying genesis of conflicting consumption and wealth dynamic and other factors like disease prevention etc...
The people of North America (transplanted Europeans) haven't experienced centuries of war and the nearly complete destruction of many large city and urban centers throughout Europe and Asia. One's perspective on the brutality and evil of wholesale violence and surrender to barbarism as practiced by one group of humans against another group of humans should serve as lesson.
It has to Europeans but it fails to have a similar impact on North American cultures. In many respects that's why an organization designed and operated like the United Nations cannot work and is ultimately doomed to failure. The wealthiest have the greatest potential to inflict prosperity and stability through so many other kinds of ways than exhultant mass homicide and mass suicide. That hasn't happened.
Who could more reasonably be held accountable for perpetuating many of the conditions and circumstances that frequently erupt into violent conflict than those most well equipped to do something to address those conditions... the wealthiest biggest baddest MF'r on the block and yet when we try to hold that MF'r responsible....
Please forgive me if I singed you (or anyone) with that posit but I'm not going to pretend and I don't believe that anyone should...that the practice of direct military incursion by the worlds wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet, independent of our major consuming warefare currently numbering two...represents only a partial perspective on the underlying genesis of conflicting consumption and wealth dynamic and other factors like disease prevention etc...
The people of North America (transplanted Europeans) haven't experienced centuries of war and the nearly complete destruction of many large city and urban centers throughout Europe and Asia. One's perspective on the brutality and evil of wholesale violence and surrender to barbarism as practiced by one group of humans against another group of humans should serve as lesson.
It has to Europeans but it fails to have a similar impact on North American cultures. In many respects that's why an organization designed and operated like the United Nations cannot work and is ultimately doomed to failure. The wealthiest have the greatest potential to inflict prosperity and stability through so many other kinds of ways than exhultant mass homicide and mass suicide. That hasn't happened.
Who could more reasonably be held accountable for perpetuating many of the conditions and circumstances that frequently erupt into violent conflict than those most well equipped to do something to address those conditions... the wealthiest biggest baddest MF'r on the block and yet when we try to hold that MF'r responsible....
``And there are people on this forum who think Saddam should still be in power?``
Forums have agreed that Saddam was a worthless SOB. But we also said that his evils do not justify USA intervention. If they did, then Suharto and others deserved worse.
Forums have agreed that Saddam was a worthless SOB. But we also said that his evils do not justify USA intervention. If they did, then Suharto and others deserved worse.
It would be balanced if Blackleaf provided another photo montage of the thousands slaughtered by Suharto or Pinochet or any other of the number of oppressive regimes supported financially and militarily by the Untied States and Canada. Perhaps we could all understand the disintigration of respect for western nations if we had an accounting of how many billions of dollars have been spent on supporting treacherous governments and good allies like Pakistan while the number of poor people in Canada and the United States...to say nothing of the quality of life left to those who've displeased our greed driven national governments so we can appreciate the difference between photos of maimed and dead women and children at the hand of Saddam Hussein or Gerneral Suharto or at least be appreciative of the fact that even while committing atrocities against innocents, the government of the United States traded with and financed these brutal regimes.
There's a difference of course between killing your own people...I'm not certain the Kurd's were Saddams own people....and financing bloody dictatorships to do your killing for you...as the U.S. has done in many nations including financing both Iraq and Iran. We must of course never consider the impact that legislating protection and opportunity for the wealthy of America while stigmatizing and scorning the poor and disabled, for all intents and purposes creating and maintaining an under-class of second class citizens that while not bloodied and dead, are compelled to keep paying their wealthy masters for the lashes they recieve.
While there are drug addicted wealthy folk, since it's far easier for the wealthy to obtain controlled substances and the wealthy have a much more fluid concept of justice and law than the poor man you can haul into court who can't afford a decent attorney... the wealthy are content to blame poverty and social unrest on the poor drug addled masses they've (the wealthy) created to reinforce the lines of status and privilege while having a convenient target.
No the Canadian and American governments don't directly kill their own people, they support a system that victimizes and ostracizes many millions before they can be sent off by these governments to proscecute war in the name of the wealthy....
There's a difference of course between killing your own people...I'm not certain the Kurd's were Saddams own people....and financing bloody dictatorships to do your killing for you...as the U.S. has done in many nations including financing both Iraq and Iran. We must of course never consider the impact that legislating protection and opportunity for the wealthy of America while stigmatizing and scorning the poor and disabled, for all intents and purposes creating and maintaining an under-class of second class citizens that while not bloodied and dead, are compelled to keep paying their wealthy masters for the lashes they recieve.
While there are drug addicted wealthy folk, since it's far easier for the wealthy to obtain controlled substances and the wealthy have a much more fluid concept of justice and law than the poor man you can haul into court who can't afford a decent attorney... the wealthy are content to blame poverty and social unrest on the poor drug addled masses they've (the wealthy) created to reinforce the lines of status and privilege while having a convenient target.
No the Canadian and American governments don't directly kill their own people, they support a system that victimizes and ostracizes many millions before they can be sent off by these governments to proscecute war in the name of the wealthy....
Okay, o righteous ones, let us review.
There you sit, free and in comfort, reasonably well off one would assume, considering you have both the leisure time and the disposable income necessary to join in these debates, expressing yourselfs reasonably coherently...............but yet, I sense a small problem.
If the society we live in is so oppressive, why have you yet to hear the knock in the middle of the night? Why have you yet to be dismembered, why do you (I assume) retain all your limbs?
Even more amazingly, you consistently babble on about the evils of modern society, the unsustainibility of modern consumerism, the complete lack of value in our culture..........yet you are in it balls deep. That is obvious.
I would assume that learned ones of your depth would be ensconced at the summit of some high mountain, accessible only to the determined, living off foraged nuts and berries, thinking great thoughts.......
Failing that, I would have thought you were at least capable of volunteering for the humanitarian arms of Hamas or Hezbollah.........helping the people of Palestine free themselves from the oppressor, and hasening the inevitable failure of Evil Western Civilization.
So, I ask, with all due respect, for an explanation of your participation in all this wickedness......
Inshallah
There you sit, free and in comfort, reasonably well off one would assume, considering you have both the leisure time and the disposable income necessary to join in these debates, expressing yourselfs reasonably coherently...............but yet, I sense a small problem.
If the society we live in is so oppressive, why have you yet to hear the knock in the middle of the night? Why have you yet to be dismembered, why do you (I assume) retain all your limbs?
Even more amazingly, you consistently babble on about the evils of modern society, the unsustainibility of modern consumerism, the complete lack of value in our culture..........yet you are in it balls deep. That is obvious.
I would assume that learned ones of your depth would be ensconced at the summit of some high mountain, accessible only to the determined, living off foraged nuts and berries, thinking great thoughts.......
Failing that, I would have thought you were at least capable of volunteering for the humanitarian arms of Hamas or Hezbollah.........helping the people of Palestine free themselves from the oppressor, and hasening the inevitable failure of Evil Western Civilization.
So, I ask, with all due respect, for an explanation of your participation in all this wickedness......
Inshallah
Pretty tough to change our society from some "summit of some high mountain, accessible only to the determined". I don't know about others here, but I'm constantly writing pols, bureaucrats, press, etc. about what I think could be better and indeed even add a few of my own thoughts about what could be done to make things better. Besides that, I vote in this society so that gives me the right to bitch, IMO.
Oh, absolutely!
I was just in the mood for a little tongue-in-cheek cage rattling.
Although the point does stand that the civilization they so detest has made them richer, and as free, as any person that has ever existed on the planet...........and they seem to enjoy their wealth, and flaunt their liberty..........
I was just in the mood for a little tongue-in-cheek cage rattling.
Although the point does stand that the civilization they so detest has made them richer, and as free, as any person that has ever existed on the planet...........and they seem to enjoy their wealth, and flaunt their liberty..........
''tongue-in-cheek''
You had me fooled for a little while there, pal. I asked myself - who the heck said we live in a "oppressive" society? You certainly didn't hear that from me.
You had me fooled for a little while there, pal. I asked myself - who the heck said we live in a "oppressive" society? You certainly didn't hear that from me.
Bush and his henchmen definitely abused their authority in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo but this is not a reflection of what the USA stands for. Bush lost this past election and we patriots who oppose his abuses will never cease until he and his like are out of office so that we can re-emerge as a society that strives for universal peace and constructivism.
Saddam was "buddies" with the US but he preferred his villa in Cannes France along with every other dictator in the world. Viva La France!