(UPDATE: Saddam executed) Saddam to be hanged by Sunday

"First it was weapons of mass destruction. Then when there were none, it was that we had to find Saddam. We did that, but then it was that we had to put him on trial," said Spc. Thomas Sheck, 25, who is on his second tour in Iraq. "So now, what will be the next story they tell us to keep us over here?"

link

 

Cannot hail for a public murder by invaders.





Congratulations, Bush and all your terrorism actions.

RIP, the justice and the peace of the world.

 

I thought the Iraqis actually carried out the sentence?

 

imo, there are very bad people running the government. you dont think there is "real money" to be made by being in public office? why do people spend hundreds of millions of dollars campaigning for a job that pays less than 200K? i heard that it might cost a billion dollars to campaign for president in 2008.

look no further than the current regime. these criminals in the bush administration are the textbook definition of war profiteering.

bush sr. and jr. both sat on the board of directors of the carlyle group. bush sr. remains a "senior advisor". the actions of the bush/cheney administraion have greatly benefited c.g., as they are basically a buyer and seller of defense contractors and such. carlyle made alot of money off 9/11 and iraq as the value of all their companies shot thru the roof.

dick cheney was ceo of haliburton, which coincidentally is doing quite well in iraq right now.

lynne cheney sat on the board of directors of lockhead martin.

how about rummy and tamiflu, a company which he used to be chairman of and is still a major shareholder of? the government exagerrated the threat of birdflu and tamiflu's stock shot thru the roof. the pentagon spent millions buying it for the troops, than turns out they didnt need it. do you see a conflict of interest here?
http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/31/news/newsmakers/fortune_rumsfeld/
The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, but it's proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu, the influenza remedy that's now the most-sought after drug in the world.

Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)'s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.

The forms don't reveal the exact number of shares Rumsfeld owns, but in the past six months fears of a pandemic and the ensuing scramble for Tamiflu have sent Gilead's stock from $35 to $47. That's made the Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush cabinet, at least $1 million richer.

Rumsfeld isn't the only political heavyweight benefiting from demand for Tamiflu, which is manufactured and marketed by Swiss pharma giant Roche. (Gilead receives a royalty from Roche equaling about 10% of sales.) Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is on Gilead's board, has sold more than $7 million worth of Gilead since the beginning of 2005.

Another board member is the wife of former California Gov. Pete Wilson.

"I don't know of any biotech company that's so politically well-connected," says analyst Andrew McDonald of Think Equity Partners in San Francisco.

What's more, the federal government is emerging as one of the world's biggest customers for Tamiflu. In July, the Pentagon ordered $58 million worth of the treatment for U.S. troops around the world, and Congress is considering a multi-billion dollar purchase. Roche expects 2005 sales for Tamiflu to be about $1 billion, compared with $258 million in 2004.

certian companies that have pretty strong ties to the bush administraion are benefiting quite nicely from civil war.

so you are a "coincidence theorist"? just look at the facts - who has benefited most from invading iraq and all the ensuing chaos? smart people can do stupid things from time to time, but do smart people do stupid things ALL the time? again, its only one of two things - they are either incompetent or criminal, and either way they have no buisness being in any kind of position of leadership.

 

There's nothing respectful about the way you disagree when you call this a public assassination.

 

yeah i'm gonna guess that you're against the death penalty....

and from this post, you also seem to be against removing saddam from power.

 

The end of a fairly sad chapter for Iraq and the World. I hate to say this guy deserved it but he brought a lot pain and misery to the Iraqis and others. He had the chance to make Iraq into a great country, a modern and progressive Arab nation, instead his megolomania and desire for war ruined them.

I still don't support the invasion of Iraq but I'm not sad to see the man go. Hopefully things will end up better for the Iraqis but everyone knew this was coming and I don't think Saddam's death at this point changes much.

 

It's messed up they killed him so close to Eid.

Also though he was a bad man is Iraq in a better state now then it was when he was in control? Though he was brutal at least the country was somewhat stable.

 

Hey Guys,

I am in India right now. It is nuts. the city I am in was completley shut down becuase of protests by the muslim residents. The sentiment here is very pro Iraq and pro Sadam. It is odd, there are people around the clock on TV saying how terrible it is he was put to death but no one will ever comment on what the man did. They just comment on Bush and how the war is terrible and he is desrtreoying the region.

Our hotel manager said we should stay in our hotel until 6 when the protests end.

Peace out from the other side of the world.

 

Be careful India is really the 3rd world.

Also, this really has nothing to do with anything, but do you guys think Halal meat (I guess maybe Kosher too) is a form of torture because they refuse to stun the animal before slicing the throat and having it bleed to death? Just a thought...

 

^ I believe the point of slitting the animal's throat is that it is less cruel than lopping its head off or clubbing it. When the Halal and Kosher rules were written they didn't have the technology to stun. Slitting throats was considered the fastest and least painful way of killing.

 

Excellent point, but now since they have the technology, should a change be implemented? I guess it's like a grandfather clause in a way; the Muslims/Jews would probably get extremely offended if they were asked to change their ancient slaughtering method.

 

http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ZmRiZDQ1MmUwNzQxNDY2ZTBhN2JhZmE4OGRiNmNmZTM=

[rquoter]Justice Executed

By The Editors

Death on a scaffold is the fitting ending for Saddam Hussein. His was a carefully conceived career of mass murder and terror, and an Iraqi court, with Iraqi judges and Iraqi lawyers, has sat in judgment on it. True, they passed sentence on only a small portion of his crimes, and much of the evidence was still to be heard of the genocide he ordered for the Shiites and the Kurds. However, legalistic quibbles or conscientious objections are particularly misplaced. Iraq has long been a failed state, its true condition concealed by a run of dictators, each more brutal than the last.

Nothing can be said for Saddam except that he knew no better than the rule of the gun under which he had always lived. He was to make the most of the opportunities for crime open in the circumstances to anyone of vicious character like him. He was barely adult when revolutionary nationalists staged a coup, and killed virtually all the members of the family hitherto ruling Iraq. At that same time, Saddam declared himself a revolutionary nationalist, but in reality he too was a glorified hit man like the others. In due course, purposefully, he murdered his way to absolute power. As he went to his death, he may have recalled the 22 colleagues and rivals whom he accused of conspiracy with “U.S. imperialism” and whose hanging he one day personally supervised.

Arab despotism is a fearsome phenomenon, renewing itself from within each and every time yet another glorified hit man sets out on his bloody career. In the spirit of pure self-aggrandizement, Saddam invaded Iran and Kuwait, fired missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, decimated his own population and in the process resorted to poison gas, manipulated the great powers, and made a special mockery of the United Nations. And perhaps none of that matched in vileness the way that he deceived the husbands of two daughters of his into returning from exile under safe conduct, only to send a squad of gunmen under his son Uday to kill these fathers of his own grandchildren.

With such brutes, entreaty, diplomacy, conferences are exercises in self-deception. Regime change imposed by superior force was the only realistic way to ensure Saddam’s fall. This is what occurred in March 2003, and it is a historic marker. The collapse of his dictatorship has created a social and political void, and a variety of hit men, as usual, are trying to make careers out of it. The only way to prevent their doing so is to introduce the rule of law and impose enough security that it has a chance to take. Saddam’s trial, for all its flaws, was an exercise in the rule of law. Justice is never perfect, especially when carrying an element of retribution. Much more important, though, this case is exemplary. Saddam’s trial and execution could yet be the building block of a future with hope in it for an Iraqi society and state at last free from his tyranny.[/rquoter]

 

This does not change anything IMO. We are still stuck in Iraq and the war was still a huge mistage. Bush has been, still is, and will forever be, a monkey.

 

In terms of strategy going into iraq may have been the smartest thing to do, Saudi Arabia isn’t exactly going to produce at capacity for too much long, demand for oil is going up and their reserves are drying up, and once that happens that country is going to be in political turmoil… people are going to be asking them what they did with all that money, they don’t have much to show for it at this point.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/world/2004-05-10-saudi-oil_x.htm

Can we count on Saudi reserve estimates?

Simmons argues that the giant Saudi fields have peaked. The kingdom has only been able to maintain output by drilling new wells and using expensive technology to get at hard-to-reach oil. Aramco has inflated the kingdom's proven reserves for political reasons and overestimated what it can recover by making faulty technical assumptions, Simmons says. Simmons' analysis shows the kingdom headed for a steep output decline. "You could say, wow, they're headed for a collapse." That could be a rude shock for a world that is expected to slurp up 50% more oil by 2025.

Even experts who don't question the Saudi figures say the kingdom must embark on a massive expansion program and find new oil if it is to satisfy demand.

Michael R. Smith, technical director at research firm EnergyFiles in London, says, "Saudi Arabia can produce much more than it is now, but it will be called upon to produce more than it can sustain."
Not everyone is convinced.

"We don't really believe Saudi reserves are exaggerated," says Manouchehr Takin, senior analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies in London. "But the scale of projects is huge, the requirements and cost are enormous, and the logistics are a challenge."


Saudi Arabia is in big trouble, once that country starts to fade the political scene is going to get messy, therefore Iraq becomes all the more important.



http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/fellows/luft20030512.htm

Now that Iraq's oil has been secured by coalition forces and hopefully will soon be brought back on stream, it is time to solve a potentially important mystery: how much Iraqi oil is actually there?

If true, this would mean that Iraq has roughly a quarter of all of the world's oil. These assessments have been repeatedly cited in news articles, conferences, think tank briefings, congressional testimonies, and academic works because they raise the prospect that America's energy security could significantly improve if Iraq were able to challenge Saudi Arabia's position as the world's preeminent oil producer.

It's all about strategy… if it leads to a better future for you and me, do you really care? Think about it.

 

whats the picture suppose to be? looks like a manatee wrapped in a sheet. ?

 

Yeah, it's going to be easy drilling oil in Iraq...

 

now the neocons have a snuff film they can masterbate to.

 

lol, the safest places in Iraq are probably be the oil fields. they aren’t located in the city, it's the urban places that are dangerous, the open grounds are easy to guard.

 

The process... how this went down... gives me a quesy feeling of foreboding. I'm not defending Saddam and certainly if you favor a death penalty, this is a man who deserved it, yet at the same time I have some serious doubts about the trial and execution. Stuff like this doesn't help...

vs.

(via TPM)