[Marxism] The gang that couldn't hang straight

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have to admit this is a piece of good journalism by the ineffable Burns,
even though his main goal is to advance the Times campaign to place primary
blame on the Shia-based occupation government for the crimes of the US
invasion and occupation, crimes that will grow much worse in coming months
if all goes as planned.  Note the constant hints that the US may be a
potential savior of the beleaguered Sunni population (from the beleaguered
Shia population).

But this piece should become a basic piece of anti-capital-punishment
literature worldwide.  Have attempts at "humane" and "dignified" executions
have ever come out any other way? I don't know whether anyone has been
accidentally decapitated by lethal injection, but at this point, that would
not surprise me at all.

The Iraqi government's line about his head becoming "separated" from his
body appealed to my grisly sense of humor.  This reminded me of the line
from the old movie "The Mummy," where an explorer says after the mummy gets
out of its coffin and leaves the premises: "It went for a little walk!"
Fred Feldman


January 16, 2007
Second Iraq Hanging Also Went Awry 
By JOHN F. BURNS
BAGHDAD, Jan. 15 ? Iraq?s turbulent effort to reckon with the violence of
its past took another macabre turn on Monday when the execution of Saddam
Hussein?s half brother ended with the hangman?s noose decapitating him after
he dropped through the gallows trapdoor. 

An official video played to a small group of Iraqi and Western reporters
more than 13 hours after the hanging showed Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti,
former head of Mr. Hussein?s secret police, standing nervously on the
trapdoor in a flame-orange jumpsuit of the kind used at the American
detention center at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, his head and mustache shaved. 

Beside him, praying feverishly in identical garb, stood the other condemned
man, Awad Hamad al-Bandar, the former chief judge of Mr. Hussein?s
revolutionary court.
After executioners in full-face balaclavas pulled black hoods over the two
men?s heads, tightened nooses around their necks and pulled the lever
opening the trapdoors, both fell like weights. But the hangmen?s
calculations of weight, gravity and the momentum needed to snap their necks
? a grim science that has produced detailed ?drop charts? used for decades
in hangings around the world ? appeared, in Mr. Ibrahim?s case, to have gone
seriously awry. 

Iraqi officials said their execution procedures had been exhaustively
reviewed after the Hussein execution on Dec. 30, which culminated with the
former dictator facing a volley of verbal abuse from members of the
execution party as he waited with the noose around his neck. The officials
said that their goal was to prevent a recurrence of those scenes, which were
sectarian in nature and set off a storm of protest around the world, and
that they had consulted with Western ?humanitarian organizations? to get the
procedures right.
Under pressure from American officials, the hanging of Mr. Ibrahim and Mr.
Bandar, who were sentenced in November for their roles in the torture and
execution of scores of Shiites in the town of Dujail after an alleged
assassination attempt against Mr. Hussein in 1982, had been delayed for more
than two weeks while the Maliki government drew up new guidelines for
executions.

American and Iraqi officials said the aim was to prevent a recurrence of the
scenes that turned Mr. Hussein, a mass murderer in the eyes of many Iraqis,
into something of a sympathetic figure at his death and, across the Arab
world, into an icon of dignity and courage.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had assured the Americans that instead
of having 25 witnesses, as at the Hussein hanging, only about half as many
would attend. Moreover, he pledged to exclude any known loyalists of the
Shiite militia leader Moktada al-Sadr, a polarizing figure whose name was
invoked by guards to antagonize Mr. Hussein. 

With those assurances, the Americans agreed to release the two men, and flew
them by helicopter from the American detention center at Camp Cropper to the
same execution spot used for Mr. Hussein, at the former headquarters of the
Istikhbarat, the deposed government?s military intelligence agency. 

But events at the gallows in the predawn hours of Monday had something of
the same surreal and freakish quality that enveloped the Hussein hanging.
Iraqi officials who attended the hanging said the calculation in the case of
Mr. Ibrahim, a 55-year-old of medium height and build, had allowed for a
?drop? of eight feet ? too much, according to at least one United States
Army manual ? and about that amount of thick yellow rope could be seen
coiled at Mr. Ibrahim?s feet before the hanging.

The video showed his head being snapped off as the rope went taut, and
ending up, still inside the hood, lying in the pit of the gallows about five
feet from his headless body.

Mr. Bandar could be seen dangling from the rope above Mr. Ibrahim, whose
body was lying on its chest on the floor of the dark, dank pit, blood
pooling beside his severed neck. The silent, three-minute video then ended
abruptly, with officials saying they would run it only once, and not show it
in public again. 

To ensure no illicit copies of the video were made with cellphone cameras,
as happened at the execution of Mr. Hussein, reporters attending the showing
had their cellphones taken away by hawk-eyed Iraqi security men.

Ali al-Dabbagh, spokesman for Mr. Maliki who supervised the details of Mr.
Hussein?s execution, said officials wanted to ensure that Mr. Ibrahim and
Mr. Bandar died instantly, and were not left dangling at the end of the
hanging rope for 15 to 20 minutes before they were asphyxiated, which he
said had been a deliberate tactic used in thousands of hangings under Mr.
Hussein. That seemed to suggest that the executioners had deliberately
allowed for a long ?drop? for the two men hanged Monday, to be sure their
necks were broken cleanly by their fall.

The Iraqis described the decapitation of Mr. Ibrahim as a ?rare incident,?
but they acknowledged that a similar thing had happened at least once before
in the score or more of hangings that have been carried out since the fall
of Mr. Hussein. They cited the case of an Egyptian man hanged in the
northern city of Mosul for offenses linked to the insurgency, who had also
had his head separated as he fell. In Mr. Hussein?s case, an illicit video
taken after the hanging showed a bloody, egg-sized gouge in his neck, below
his left ear, where the noose had cut into him as he dropped.

An Internet search for manuals on hanging suggested that Mr. Ibrahim was the
victim of an overestimate by his executioners. One of the most authoritative
manuals, the United States Army?s ?Procedure for Military Executions,?
issued under the authority of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was Army
chief of staff in 1947, gave a chart that recommended that a man of about
Mr. Ibrahim?s weight, about 185 pounds, would need a ?drop? of five feet
seven inches ? nearly two and a half feet less than the drop for Mr. Ibrahim
? to assure what the manual called ?a proper execution.? 

The manual added: ?A medical officer should be consulted to determine
whether any factors, such as age, health or muscular condition, will affect
the amount of drop necessary for a proper execution.? 

At his trial, Mr. Ibrahim, though second only to Mr. Hussein in his angry
declamations against his Iraqi and American captors, mentioned his need for
medication on a number of occasions, and complained bitterly about the
?disgusting? American cigarettes he said he was given in lots of 10 a day. 

Mr. Ibrahim?s decapitation appeared to have badly unnerved the Maliki
government. The Iraqis involved were so shaken that they waited more than
seven hours after the 3 a.m. executions to formally announce them, and then
read a statement that dwelled on the two men?s ?big crimes against humanity?
while serving as acolytes to Mr. Hussein. The statement made only a passing
reference to the severing of Mr. Ibrahim?s head. 

?In a rare incident, the head of the convict Barzan Ibrahim al-Hassan? ? his
name as it appeared on court documents ? ?was separated from his body during
the execution,? it said.

Further details were left to a news conference called six hours later, when
rumors were circulating among Sunni Arab loyalists of the former government,
and on Arabic-language television channels broadcasting across the Middle
East, that Mr. Ibrahim had been deliberately decapitated in an act of
revenge by the Maliki government and as an insult to the Sunni Muslim world.


The depth of suspicion, and the readiness among Sunni Arabs to blame the
United States for everything grim in Iraq, was reflected in interviews
conducted in neighboring countries after the hangings. ?The U.S. is 100
percent guilty,? said Turki al-Rasheed, who heads an organization promoting
democracy in Saudi Arabia. ?It means they cut Barzan?s head in the execution
chamber.? 

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in Egypt on a Middle East tour, joined
the recriminations. ?I would be the first to say that we were disappointed
that there was not greater dignity given to the accused under these
circumstances,? she said, referring to Mr. Hussein?s execution and the two
carried out Monday. ?I think that passions run high after years of turmoil,
under dictatorship, and that is apparently what happened. But it shouldn?t
have happened and I think that it did not reflect well on the Iraqi
government that it came out that way.?

When officials from Mr. Maliki?s office appeared at the Baghdad Convention
Center with the video of the hangings, they were at pains to offer a
minutely detailed account of their procedures. Their accounts were about
equally apologetic and assertive as they explained how Mr. Ibrahim had come
to have his head severed, and how sympathy for the condemned man and his
family should be attenuated in the light of the brutalities he had committed
when serving his half brother. 

Perhaps significantly, the video was soundless, making it impossible to
confirm the officials? assertions that the two condemned men had been spared
the verbal abuse that was directed at Mr. Hussein.

Mr. Dabbagh, the official spokesman, said all attending the Monday
executions ? all Iraqis, as was the case with Mr. Hussein ? had been
required to sign documents saying they would behave with dignity and
restraint. He held up a signed copy of one of the affidavits as another of
Mr. Maliki?s aides, Basam Ridha, summarized what he said was the air of
restraint at the executions. Mr. Ridha is an Iraqi-American who lived for
years in California before returning to Baghdad to a position on Mr.
Maliki?s staff that made him the point man for the hangings.

?The whole process was very transparent,? Mr. Ridha said, comparing the
hangings favorably with what happened to Mr. Hussein. ?No ethnics, no
chanting, everything a very smooth transaction, everyone very well behaved.?


Others in the execution party seemed somewhat more taken aback. ?When the
trapdoor opened, I realized that I was looking at the rope swinging freely,
and I asked myself, ?Where did Barzan go?? ? said Jaafar al-Moussawi, who
was chief prosecutor at the trial that ended with the death sentences for
Mr. Hussein, Mr. Ibrahim and Mr. Bandar. He added: ?I thought that somehow
he had gotten loose. So I moved forward toward the pit and looked down, and
saw the convict Barzan lying on the ground without his head.?

After Mr. Hussein?s hanging, his body was kept on the back of a police
pickup truck in the parking lot of Mr. Maliki?s office in Baghdad?s Green
Zone for 18 hours, while an argument raged over whether to hand it over to
members of his Albu-Nasir tribe for burial. That dispute was resolved by the
Americans, who insisted that the Iraqi leader hand over the body. 
After Monday?s hangings, the bodies of Mr. Ibrahim and Mr. Bandar were
handed over more swiftly, and like Mr. Hussein?s, flown by American military
helicopter for burial at Mr. Hussein?s ? and Mr. Ibrahim?s ? home village of
Awja, near the Tigris River city of Tikrit.
Officials in the office of the local governor said that Mr. Bandar?s son,
Bandar al-Bandar, a defense lawyer at his trial, had accompanied the bodies
on the flight from Baghdad, and that Mr. Ibrahim?s body had been delivered.
Abdullah Jabara, the deputy governor, said that roads between Awja and the
American airbase at Camp Speicher, outside Tikrit, had been sealed off by
the police, and that the bodies would be buried under cover of darkness on
Monday night, with a special grave for Mr. Bandar next to Mr. Hussein in a
marbled reception hall at Awja. He made no mention of a grave for Mr.
Ibrahim, who had a stormy relationship with Mr. Hussein.
?       Mr. Bandar?s fealty to his old boss, Mr. Hussein, was reflected in
his decision, said by Iraqi officials to have been written in his will, to
be buried at Tikrit, in Iraq?s Sunni heartland, and not in Basra, the
predominantly Shiite southern city where Mr. Bandar, a Sunni Arab, was born.
After the hangings were announced, Basra residents drove through the city
honking car horns and waving Iraqi flags.
?Some people noted that Barzan?s head was separated from his body during the
execution, and said that this was God?s punishment for his crimes,? an Iraqi
staff member reported from Basra. ?They said this punishment was an
expression of what a bad man he was during his life.?
Reporting was contributed by Marc Santora, Ali Adeeb, Iraqi staff members of
The New York Times in Tikrit and Basra, Hassan M. Fattah in Beirut, Lebanon,
and Thom Shanker in Luxor, Egypt.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 




________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism