Saddam’s Execution Imminent

According to reports, Saddam will be executed before the Muslim holiday Eid Al-Adha, which begins this Sunday. Saddam will hanged, although he has expressed a preference for a firing squad. The Iraqi government’s decision echoes the Nuremberg trial, where the IMT deliberately denied the condemned defendants a firing squad, the preferred method of execution for soldiers. Indeed, Goering claimed in his suicide note that he would have allowed himself to be shot.

The Cassation Panel’s decision to uphold Saddam’s death sentence, along with the death sentences of his two co-defendants, comes as no surprise. But it’s a shame that so little attention has been paid to the fact that the Panel overturned former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan’s life sentence and sent his case back to the IHT with instructions to sentence him to death. As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, the Iraqi government not only pressured the Cassation Panel to order Ramadan’s execution, one of the IHT prosecutors predicted that the Panel would do exactly that. Pending release of the appellate decision, it is impossible to know whether the Cassation Panel succumbed to the government’s pressure. At first blush, however, it seems that it did.

Reaction to Saddam’s imminent execution has been predictable. Germany, France, and the UK all reiterated their opposition to the death penalty, but stressed that they respected Iraq’s sovereign right to impose it. The only categorical rejection of the execution has come from the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department. But there is no reason to take the Vatican seriously — after all, the Pope also opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Finally, the award for the most revolting attempt to capitalize on Saddam’s execution goes to the Game Show Network, which has released “Saddam Hussein’s Hangman” game on its website. According to MSNBC, “[t]he game features an animated Mr. Hussein who fires back phrases such as ‘Americans can’t spell’ or ‘I laugh at your letters’ as users input letters to guess the missing word or phrase.”