Shocked by the horror of hanging Saddam Hussein

Posted on January 3, 2007
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It’s amazing how the effect of finding others who share your outrage can change one’s mood. The facts and my opinion have not changed. I’m still horrified by the circus atmosphere in the media, as well as the super-viral spread of the video across the internet. The difference is that I’m encouraged by reading emails and comments to my words, reading dozens of bloggers who feel similarly, and seeing that the zeitgeist itself is (somewhat) horified by it’s own lust for the spectacle.

Opinon around the world expresses a feeling, at least temporarily, that the public nature of this hanging could impact how we feel about the death penalty. What a terrific irony if the hanging of this man, the “Butcher of Baghdad,” the most hangable of men, were to become a catalyst for ending all executions?

The Italian foreign minister, Massimo D’Alema, speaking in Brazil said, “This event has also reopened a legitimate debate on the death penalty.” The report, in the International Herald Tribune, goes on to say that the hanging was denounced across Italy’s fractious political spectrum.

It will be hard to argue that a man such as Saddam Hussein should not be executed on the merits of his case. On the merits alone, even this liberal might concede. That is always counterbalanced for me by the question of whether we — our governments — should be doing the killing. It’s a question of what it does to us, our humanity, even more than what it does to the convicted.

That this can be construed as a political execution or carried out because of popular “mass think” surely should have been a caution to those who carried out the sentence in such haste.

blogger Phil Nugent writes:

If it’s possible for a guilty man to be railroaded, that’s what’s happened here, and it’s possible to feel squeamish about the official mechanics of politicized “justice” without mourning the man. In a world where a Pinochet can die in his sleep, Saddam was executed with an unseemly sort of haste for the same reason we went to war in Iraq, evidence and arguments to the contrary be damned–because the Bush administration decided it wanted it…
featured in Mother Jones blog

I’m sure that right-wingers who don’t get it (or don’t want to get it), and other pro-death advocates will say the liberal blogosphere is apologizing for Saddam Hussein, ignoring his countless atrocities against human rights. That is not the case. When we can come to a consensus that the worst of the worst should not be so treated, the death penalty itself, will be dead.