thanks

Well no, if we go back, instead of Hitler killing himself, and instead, locking him up in jail, we would still have Jews, he instigated the movement, and was responsible for many deaths, as is Saddam, but killing him would not stop future murders, nor would it stop those of the past. Imagine all the things we could have learned if he was still alive, maybe we could have found more concentration camps sooner, saving lives, maybe he would become like Stanley Tookie Williams III, one of the founders of the Crips, Tookie was convicted of several cold blooded murders, and was placed in jail on death row, he eventually fixed his ways, he became an outspoken opponent of violence and started writing children’s books, he has been nominated for 5 Nobel peace prizes. Hitler could have also reformed, or been an outspoken proponent of violence, we don’t know. However, if he was in jail, for the rest of his life, he could no longer hurt anyone ever again.

The sad thing is this is not about saddam, the insurgents are not fighting us because of saddam; they are fighting us because we are in their country.

And if you don’t respect her point of view, how do you intend to change it. Change comes through debate, or through force. Since you are apposed to force, debate is the only other way. If you are not willing to have a civil discussion where can we go from here, things will not change if we don’t try to change them. Lady Sage joined my group hug, come on Ch’I.

Mr. Dilbert. There are many ways of making a ham sandwich. There are many ways of dealing with a problem as well.

I accept that you do not agree with my celebration and I respect that.
In turn I shall respectfully agree to disagree with you.

Shall we have a nice diet pepsi and ham sandwich to celebrate our group hug? :)

How about a mineral water with a bit of cranberry juice in it and an organic salad? Some of us have new year's resolutions. :thumbsup:

. . . . . . . . . .

pfft diet Pepsi, now I don’t respect you... ;)

I used to be pro death penalty, and I have no problem with killing someone who is a threat. If Saddam came out shooting, drop him. However, I am adamantly apposed to the death penalty because of prosecutorial misconduct, innocent people are placed on death row, and one day we will know for a fact we have executed an innocent person, on that day we are all murderers. Saddam, was guilty as sin though, but I just don’t think more death solves anything.

i agree with what host said above and find that i have little to add to it.

the range of responses in this thread is interesting: i have not been particularly shocked by any of it, chocking it up to difficulties that accompany anyone's efforts to look at fiasco squarely.

if you exclude any coherent pretense to justice having been served here--justice being a function of proper procedures having been followed in a context generally understood to be legitimate--none of which applies in this case, no matter what you think about saddam hussein--the remaining considerations are political. this article from today's guardian is fairly eloquent:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1980909,00.html

what most sunnis find the most offensive is the fact that he was hung on one of the holiest days on the islamic calender, Eid al-Adha. its like putting a war criminal like bush or milosovic to hang on christmas day.

justice to all the victims.

That's a really good point (and something that probably should have occoured to me....good catch!). I think this was meant as a way to break the spirit of some of the fighters because the idiots in Washington think that the insurgency was pro-Saddam.

What happened to military intellegence?

Ahh the greatest oxymoron of all time. :D

I have some leftover ham.

I guess, to be honest, I'm shocked at the speed at which it happened. However, I think there are a lot of good questions about the way, time, etc that it was carried out on that need to be answered.

My personal opinion? Not entirely sure. I haven't decided how I feel about the death penalty, especially the death penalty in another country where I don't know how they carry about with their trials/processes. I can say though, that I don't agree with it in the US, so I doubt it would make any sense for me to agree with it anywhere else.

A friend of mine who is a conspiracy theorist speculates that the video was staged and edited, and that Saddam is not really dead. The camera shot is lowered, then the video edited with pictures of a dummy corpse.

I think he's a nutcase myself.

I have seen the video, and I felt uncomfortable watching it the whole way through. It was disturbing knowing that I was watching a man about to die, and then watching the actual moment.

he is guilty of gassing the Kurds with chemical weapons

fact

that makes him a murderer

in his country, under his laws, he is liable to be hanged

and this is what has happened

a fitting end for him, I say

yes he is a murderer, I have no doubt in my mind, and yes it does fit with the laws of the countries (although I’m sure there is a clause that says dictators are above the law...) it is their country and they have a right to dispatch justice how they see fit, however, I still disagree with the death penalty in general. However, things start to get gray, the Kurds were killed under Iraqi law, legally, how do we punish someone who obeyed the laws of the land; are we more moral then they are (I think we are) but this does not answer the question, we applied our law to him, and he was found guilty of breaking our laws. He is a murderer under our standards, and was punished by his law.

Not to say I don’t think the world is better off with him gone.

3000 of our citizens have been killed....and this is what we have to show for it.

3000 of our citizens were killed on 9/11 ......and we have....nothing to show for it.


I am somewhat dissapoined, call me strange.

Yes, Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. Ossama is still ... somewhere. The towers aren't even being rebuilt yet over 5 years later. I'd not call you strange for recognizing that our wound is still open and those that truely inflicted it are still free as birds.

All the things we can do and all of the gadets we have and we still cant find a 6'5 arab hooked to his luggage. I am definately not a happy camper about such.

Good point Mr. Will. I hope he meets a very messy and painful end in whatever way the cosmos has in mind for him.

The CIA, MI6 and Packistan's Inter-Services all paid and trained Osama bin Laden and his fellow fighters as they fought with the Afghan Mujaheddin from the 80s into the 90s in order to attack soviet republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. We made the "terrorist camps" that trained thousands of men who were for all intents and purpouses Islamic reigious zealots that we galvanized. We helped them attack Soviets. We gave them stinger missles and trained them to use them.

We did this to ourselves by being frighteningly short sighted. We brought together thousands of radical militants and used them to fight our enemy while exploiting them and we didn't see that there would be consequences? Jesus Christ. A 2-year-old could figure this stuff out.

Bottom line: if you think Osama bin Laden should be brought to justice, then you should probably group our own intelligence community in with him for being responsible for current global, islamic-radical terrorism.

"Is this the bravery of Arab men?"

Love him or hate him, you have to give the son of a bitch credit for never backing down.

Oh well, one less asshole in the world.

My own sentiment has been voiced several times over on this thread, but I'll echo those who see the impotent farce of Saddam Hussein's execution simply as one more death in Iraq.

A death made ever more insignificant by every innocent Iraqi who has died/is dying/will die because of our overzealous incursion into Iraq and inept mismanagement of its prosecution at virtually every turn. Who feels safer today with Saddam dead? How many Iraqis do you suppose feel safer?

Anyone who wants to treat this as something to celebrate doesn't earn a lot of my respect either. You are playing along with a game for fools in deliberate ignorance of what we have done...and at what price we have earned this ridiculous hanging.

There was nothing gained through executing Saddam save for one more death, and an anti-climactic sense of justice for those who sought vengeance for his crimes.

That is not justice.

To think people think I am insane by suggesting that we the people should mind our own damn business. Oh well. What does a woman know? :D

how to make ham sandwiches, apparently.

The death of Saddam will do nothing to improve the lives of the Iraqi people.

Though he committed horrible crimes, I am not a believer in "eye for an eye".

In taking his life and in such a barbaric way as hanging, the people who condemn him become no better than him.

I do not feel sorry for his death because he was likely beyond redemption and to some extent deserved to die, but deep down I felt it was wrong. I do live in a country that was one of the first in Europe to abolish the death penalty so that probably makes me biased.

I also have to say that it's shameful the way the images of Saddam's death were shown on public TV and made available on the internet in full.

I agree with you little_tippler:

I was gratefully out of touch will all media output this weekend but I was appalled to see even the very brief clip of his execution that I finally did see and even more disgusted at how it has been paraded around for us all. It seems that the world has finally abandoned grace for good. And apparently we have all decided that the terrorist indulgence of morbid voyeurism makes for good television copy.

No it isn't. I firmly believe that if the government is gonna condone an execution, they should HAVE to show it on TV. Maybe if more people saw the barbarism that is legalized murder, they'd get tired of it, and demand that we put a stop to it.

That's the same reason we absolutely SHOULD show the destroyed bodies of our dead soldiers. Sure, it's shocking and very uncomfortable to watch. But maybe if people saw that every damn day on the TV they wouldn't be so eager to support getting into another war. I'm willing to sacrifice the supposed dignity of a few dead people in order to save thousands of lives.

not to derail, it'd just be nice to have the news not be so god damned depressing all the time, yes, ok, lets report about some child abuse, a house fire, a murder, a hit and run on someone riding thier bike, oh hey, here's some f'n snow for you bastards too!

yeah, screw that. news is crap.

I completely understand your point of view but I believe the only outcome of it would be that people would only become more enured and unaffected by images of death and less reflective about the concepts of war and execution. Anything shown often enough on television becomes something no longer of reality. It removes the watcher from real experience. Or maybe I'm just no longer convinced of mankind's innate tendency to move away from barbarism.

I think a large problem is the psychological influence of the way news is presented to us. Newcasters are taught to try to remain mostly "neutral"

They can talk about baby cannibalism for all it matters to them, and they still do it with this absurd "it's just the news" tone of voice.

If anything desensitizes people, its that. I mean you grow up listening to these people and hell, if they are so calm, everything must be ok, right?

So after listening to these people talk about war, about terrorist attacks, about economic issues, about things which are supposed to test our very moral beliefs of life and death, day in , day out, year after year, "it's just the news". I mean, you start off well enough, you might actually care about the news, but you know, one day you might just be a little withdrawn, "well theres nothing I could have done about that" and it's all downhill, apathy sets in.

THAT is what pisses me off, and it'll never change because no station will get a real personality presenting the news.
Likewise, they really can't either since it would imply that because thier newscasters feel or think a certain way, it's being imposed upon thier viewers.

meh. Ok, i'm done ranting. I'll shush now.

Well, look back at the vietnam war. People were pretty quiet about it here at home until the TV started showing the bodybags being unloaded at the airforce bases. Then the protestors started getting very loud indeed.

I agree that news is largely crap (take notes, since I work in news) but not for the reasons you say. If anything the news needs to be more depressing. There's a lot of depressing shit happening right now. We just killed our 3,000th soldier in Iraq. The economy is in the toilet (I don't care what Bush says, just go down to your local Salvation Army and ask them how much demand for the food shelf has increased). A regional war is about to break out in the middle east. Bush is threatening to embroil us in yet another war (Iran). People are dying daily because they can't afford treatments that are available and could save their lives. And those are just a few examples of the crap that's going on in the world.

Yet what do we see on the nightly news? People diving into a frozen lake for fun on January 1st, christmas lights, a pet that does some cool trick, the first baby of the year, the last baby of last year, a man-on-the-street interview about new years resolutions, kids visiting Santa at the mall, last minute christmas shopping on the 24th, the grand opening of a donut shop, and other inane bullshit that's pushing the real issues right off the broadcast. And just so you know, all of those examples are stories I worked on in the last month, and I guarantee that someone at just about every station in the country did the same thing.

News is depressing? Yep, it sure is, because a lot of it just plain isn't news anymore.

Of course the flip side of that problem is that the American people feel they have a god given right to be happy 100% of the time. If something makes them unhappy, rather than trying to change it, they often sweep it under the rug. If the news is depressing then get the hell out there and make a difference - -change that situation so we have something good to report for once. But no, that's not the American way. The American way is to blame the news for reporting things we don't like.


And yet people gave Dan Rather shit about how "unprofessional" he was because he broke into tears after 9/11 on Letterman.

Now here we can come to an agreement I think. See, I think this forced neutrality in journalism is stupid (and that's made me rather a pariah amongst many of my colleagues). In the first place, who the hell do we think we're fooling. Of course we have opinions. We're humans, not robots.

We should absolutely report all sides of an issue, but I frankly don't see anything wrong with a commentary section of the broadcast - provided you clearly label it as commentary.

People are giving Katie Couric a lot of crap for the opinion section of her newscast. Frankly I think that's just about the only thing she's done right since she took the anchor chair.

Let's not forget that it was Murrow's commentary that took down Joe McCarthy and his communist witch hunt. It was Cronkite's commentary that finally convinced the president that America was not behind the Vietnam war. He began shutting it down almost immediately. Yet today we shy away from commentary. Oh my god somebody might think we're biased! So the hell what? So we're biased. If we're biased we probably have a damn good reason for it.

Now, in order to do this right we have to move journalism back to the way it was under Murrow and Cronkite. Cronkite didn't just sit at his anchor desk pontificating on a war he'd never visited. He went over to Vietnam, several times, and the last time he traveled all over the country (not just where the military wanted him to go) to see for himself what was going on, then prepared reports on it, and THEN told us what he thought.

Today we have "embedded" journalists running around in Iraq, going only where the military wants them, seeing only what the military wants them to see. So frankly we're not qualified to give you a commentary on how the Iraq war is going. We don't see what's really happening. We need another Cronkite to come in, tour the country on his own, see what's going on, and tell us about it.

But that would cost money and news is decidedly for-profit now. We get better ratings by interviewing last night's American Idol loser and telling you about Britney Spears not wearing panties.

It all boils down to corporate ownership. We've let 5 major corporations own the majority of the media outlets in this country. GE doesn't give a crap about good journalism, all they want to see is huge profits coming in from ALL their divisions. It's a lot more expensive to send a reporter to Iraq on his own (Rather than being cared for and fed by the military) than it is to get paparazzi video of celebrities without underwear.

What's the solution? Break up the journalistic monopolies. 5 megacorporations should not be dictating what we see on the news each night. Democracy cannot survive without a feisty and independent press acting as a watchdog to government.

We do that, and stop insisting that news rake in 30% profits every year, and we'll start to see some genuinely good changes not just in journalism, but in the rest of the country as officials realize they're now being watched.

I see your point, Shauk, but if you take away neutrality with the news, then people aren't going to be cool with that either. We already feel that the media is biased, how are we going to feel if the news presenter appears more passionate about one murder victim than another? We'll decide that they are prejudiced, either by race, class, social status, etc. The only option is neutrality.

Anyway, here in England, there are people presenting the 'news' in less neutral terms - but they are seen more as political commentary and / or propaganda (either for or against mainstream media).

But I agree on the desensitization. It's horrible, makes us less human.

I am amused at the fact that with all of the valid, important things in the world to bitch about, people are spending their time complaining about the death of Saddam Hussien.

:rolleyes:

Well, if you had any talent for detecting the not-so-subtle you'd see that no one here is "complaining about the death of Saddam Hussein."

It's hardly our only complaint. The root of the complaint is in the failed war in Iraq, and I'd say that's a valid complaint considering that it's causing the deaths of tens to hundreds of thousands of people, including military forces from our home countries, and is bankrupting the US government and is creating global instability. It's kinda a big deal.

So apparently the guy who recorded it on his cell phone has been arrested.

Is that really the right guy to punish? The whole situation was chaotic, and probably deserves criticism, and as such I doubt that the rules about recording the event were made clear to all involved. I sure didn't see a "No Flash Photography" sign posted anywhere in the video.

Bah. I think if people would just think things through for all of 30 seconds, things like this could be avoided. I'm against the death penalty, but if you're going to execute someone like Saddam, at least have it be an organized, non-chaotic event.

Sorry but I have to state my point of view here. The death penalty serves a distinct purpose and it is not to torture the victim. The purpose of the death penalty is that it gets people who will not ever be a functioning part of society of the street permanently. Think of psychopathic murders here. The death penalty removes these people from society because there is no other viable way to do so. Locking someone up for the rest of their life is not cheap by any means. Think about it, all of the people in jails are being supported by the government. The death penalty serves as a cost effective, efficient way to deal with those that can never be part of society.

At least, this is how it is intended. Is it 100% fool proof? No, nothing truly is.

First of all, you took willravel's comment out of context.

Secondly, the death penalty is not the only viable option. Talk to any therapist about prevention methods, and Second Step programs.

Although I am decidedly opposed to the death penalty, largely due to a tainted judicial system, I will shed not one tear for poor Sadaam.

I will say that I believe his trial was nothing more than a sham, and that he was a "dead man" from the moment he was drug from his spider hole. The whole thing was just a huge joke.

So why should we be at all surprised to discover that his "execution" more closely resembled a public lynching than a state sponsored execution? Even if Sadaam didn't deserve anything more dignified than what he got...the rest of the world did. That was just pathetic.

If you look at the statistics, the death penalty is NOT more cost effective. In fact, studies conducted in state after state after state that practices the death penalty have determined that it costs the taxpayer millions of dollars more per year to invest in the death penalty system of jurisprudence.