Saddam Dead!

Sadam was hanged at 9:55 pm EST, sunrise in Iraq. this happened less than 30 minutes ago.

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Update: 4:25 a.m EST December 30th – We ended up watching CNN for hours. In fact as I sit here writing posts for the next few days I still have CNN playing on my TV. I really wasn’t watching in the hope that I would seen Saddam hanged. I would never want to watch something like that – no matter how evil a person might be.

At 4:10 a.m. CNN finally was able to show some video related to Saddam Hussein’s hanging. The video had just been aired on Iraq TV, and quickly dispersed throughout the worlds news agencies. CNN showed video of Saddam being led into the gallows, shackled and handcuffed, and wearing what appeared to be a dark suit coat. He refused the head covering that was offered to him.

The gallowmen, what do you call those people anyway?, were wearing what appeared to be ski masks and looked very much like men dressed to rob a bank or a store. One of the men placed the head gear around Husseins neck, perhaps to protect his skin, and then placed the noose over his head and tightened it around his neck. The video freezes, as it apparently did on Iraq TV as well, with Saddam standing in position on the gallows looking straight ahead.

He looked resigned to his fate – but neither brave nor defiant – just resigned.

I’m still deciding how I feel about his hanging. Certainly he was an evil man who harmed and killed many. One commentator on CNN said that he might be responsible for killing as many as 2 million of his own people. I do think he might have been hanged too soon. I would have liked to see him stand trial for his crimes against the Kurds.

When Chris and I lived in the apartment we had a very nice Kurdish couple living above us. Both of them had lost many family members to Saddam when he gassed his own people. The Iraqi couple that lived above us left the country shortly after Husseins attack on the kurds. They missed their family, living and dead, terribly but new that they needed to make a life for themselves away from their homeland. Perhaps moving from the country was the only way they could make a good life for themselves after that.

It’s for my former neighbors, and other Iraqis that I know that I wish Saddam had stood trial for the majority of the wrongs that he’d done.

How do you feel about his death?