SHOULD BUSH BE HUNG TOO?

It looks like when you wake up tomorrow morning Bush will have had Saddam Hussein executed, hung. Brutal revenge? Primitive? Barbaric? Yeah. But I'm not crying over Saddam's carcass. The poor and the powerless and their innocent children get killed everyday as a result of decisions made by the wealthy and powerful. It's nice when ruthless political leaders take it in the neck. It happens far too rarely; it should happen far more often. I would hope Saddam's fate would put some fear into the Putins and Bushes of the world. It won't though. The question the members of the DWT team have been debating all day is whether or not Bush should also be hung. No one doubts that Bush deserves severe punishment for his gross crimes. Those who don't believe in the death penalty, however, oppose Bush ever facing execution.

Me, I've always been a big death penalty fan. Even when I was a kid I was all for it. I was so "liberal" on everything else, but I just loved that death penalty. In high school I even won a small scholarship from the UN for debating that point of view. The catch for me is that I feel our Justice system is so utterly imperfect that it is incapable of making a fair and certain decision meriting the death penalty. So I oppose it in practice as strongly as I encourage it in theory. In the case of Bush and his accomplices, though, I'd make an exception. I don't think anyone else at DWT would. Mags mentioned to me that she would rather see a long drawn out life of torment and humiliation. Along similar lines Ken said Bush should be forced to earn an honest living for the rest of his life with no assistance from any of his family's friends.

Looks like the Brits and the rest of the Europeans aren't too pleased with Bush's execution-happy-demeanor in regard to Saddam.

I pointed out that I might be convinced to be satisfied with the long-drawn out torment-- if I could make sure the person supervising was a practiced and venal torturer. But that is so uncivilized. I used to go target shooting, although I haven't in a couple of years. I enjoyed it. I bet there are a lot of people who would pay a lot of money to be on a firing squad if Bush, a huge death penalty fan like me, were tried and found guilty and sentenced to death.

But I'm jumping so far ahead of myself. Let's see Henry Waxman and John Conyers get started with the investigations in the next few weeks before we start figuring out the proper method of execution.


UPDATE: ONE TYRANT DOWN, MANY TO GO-- OH, AND BY THE WAY, WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BIN-LADEN?


CNN, al-Hurra, al-Arabiya, Fox "News" (but they're so ideologically tainted that they're not even remotely reliable for reality-based news), Reuters, and both the Washington and Huffington Post are all reporting that it happened. Yes, Saddam is rotting in that special ring of hell reserved for politicians-- and the New York Times reports the great debate among TV news execs about how graphic the pictures they show of the execution should be. Martin Lewis at HuffPo has the best explanation for why Bush did it.


UPDATE: AND NOW NEITHER RUMSFELD, CHENEY NOR EITHER BUSH WILL EVER HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT SADDAM STANDING UP AT A TRIAL-- ONE OF THEIRS-- AND SPILLING THE BEANS


Bob Scheer, no Saddam Hussein fan, doesn't have a very sanguine view of the circumstances of Saddam's trial to begin with. "It is a very frightening precedent that the United States can invade a country on false pretenses, depose its leader and summarily execute him without an international trial or appeals process. This is about vengeance, not justice, for if it were the latter the existing international norms would have been observed. The trial should have been overseen by the World Court, in a country that could have guaranteed the safety of defense lawyers, who, in this case, were killed or otherwise intimidated."

But, aside from the usual perceptiveness and brilliance with which Sheer essays tends to be imbued, there is something more here that needs further thought-- how they've now managed to shut Saddam up... permanently. "The irony here is that the crimes for which Saddam Hussein was convicted occurred before the United States, in the form of Donald Rumsfeld, embraced him.  Those crimes were well known to have occurred 15 months before Rumsfeld visited Iraq to usher in an alliance between the United States and Saddam to defeat Iran. The fact is that Saddam Hussein knew a great deal about the United States’ role in Iraq, including deals made with Bush’s father. This rush to execute him had the feel of a gangster silencing the key witness to a crime."


THE LAST UPDATE: DEAD DICTATORS TELL NO TALES

Today historian Robert Fisk published a story in Britain's Independent, "Saddam takes his secrets to the grave. Our complicity dies with him. (The subtitle is "How the West armed Saddam, fed him intelligence on his 'enemies', equipped him for atrocities-- and then made sure he wouldn't squeal.")

We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning, Washington's secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert military support which the United States-- and Britain-- gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support-- given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since the Second World War-- is dead.