Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Robert Fisk: The whole bloody thing was obscene

Robert Fisk: The whole bloody thing was obscene
Butchery was supposed to have been presented as a solemn execution
Published: 06 January 2007
The lynching of Saddam Hussein - for that is what we are talking about
- will turn out to be one of the determining moments in the whole
shameful crusade upon which the West embarked in March of 2003. Only
the president-governor George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara
could have devised a militia administration in Iraq so murderous and
so immoral that the most ruthless mass murderer in the Middle East
could end his days on the gallows as a figure of nobility, scalding
his hooded killers for their lack of manhood and - in his last seconds
- reminding the thug who told him to "go to hell" that the hell was
now Iraq.
"Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it," Malcolm reported
of the execution of the treacherous Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth. Or, as
a good friend of mine in Ballymena said to me on the phone a few hours
later, "The whole bloody thing was obscene." Quite so. On this
occasion, I'll go along with the voice of Protestant Ulster.
Of course, Saddam gave his victims no trial; his enemies had no
opportunity to hear the evidence against them; they were mown down
into mass graves, not handed a black scarf to prevent the hangman's
noose from burning their neck as it broke their spine. Justice was
"done", even if a trifle cruelly. But this is not the point. Regime
change was done in our name and Saddam's execution was a direct result
of our crusade for a "new" Middle East. To watch a uniformed American
general - despite the indiscipline of more and more US troops in Iraq
- wheedling and whining at a press conference that his men were very
courteous to Saddam until the very moment of handover to Muqtada
al-Sadr's killers could only be appreciated with the blackest of
humour.
Note how the best "our" Iraqi government's officials could do by way
of reply was to order an "enquiry" to find out how mobile phones were
taken into the execution room - not to identify the creatures who
bawled abuse at Saddam Hussein in his last moments. How very Blairite
of the al-Maliki government to search for the snitches rather than the
criminals who abused their power. And somehow, they got away with it;
acres of agency copy from the Green Zone reporters were expended on
the Iraqi government's consternation, as if al- Maliki did not know
what had transpired in the execution chamber. His own officials were
present - and did nothing.
That's why the "official" videotape of the hanging was silent - and
discreetly faded out - before Saddam was abused. It was cut at this
point, not for reasons of good taste but because that democratically
elected Iraqi government - whose election was such "great news for the
people of Iraq" in the words of Lord Blair - knew all too well what
the world would make of the terrible seconds that followed. Like the
lies of Bush and Blair - that everything in Iraq was getting better
when in fact it was getting worse - butchery was supposed to have been
presented as a solemn judicial execution.
Worst of all, perhaps, is that the hanging of Saddam mimicked, in
ghostly, miniature form, the manner of his own regime's bestial
executions. Saddam's own hangman at Abu Ghraib, a certain Abu Widad,
would also taunt his victims before pulling the trap door lever, a
last cruelty before extinction. Is this where Saddam's hangmen learned
their job? And just who exactly were those leather-jacketed hangmen
last week, by the way? No one, it seemed, bothered to ask this salient
question. Who chose them? Al-Maliki's militia chums? Or the Americans
who managed the whole roadshow from the start, who so organised
Saddam's trial that he was never allowed to reveal details of his
friendly relations with three US administrations - and thus took the
secrets of the murderous, decade-long Baghdad-Washington military
alliance to his grave?
I would not ask this question were it not for the sense of profound
shock I experienced when touring the Abu Ghraib prison after "Iraq's
liberation" and meeting the US-appointed senior Iraqi medical officer
at the jail. When his minders were distracted, he admitted to me he
had also been the senior "medical officer" at Abu Ghraib when Saddam's
prisoners were tortured to death there. No wonder our
enemies-become-friends are turning into our enemies again.
But this is not just about Iraq. More than 35 years ago, I was being
driven home from school by my Dad when his new-fangled car radio
broadcast a report of the dawn hanging of a man at - I think -
Wormwood Scrubs. I remember the unpleasant look of sanctity that came
over my father's face when I asked him if this was right. "It's the
law, Old Boy," he said, as if such cruelties were immutable to the
human race. Yet this was the same father who, as a young soldier in
the First World War, was threatened with court martial because he
refused to command the firing party to execute an equally young
Australian soldier.
Maybe only older men, sensing their failing powers, enjoy the
prerogatives of execution. More than 10 years ago, the now-dead
President Hrawi of Lebanon and the since-murdered prime minister Rafiq
Hariri signed the death warrants of two young Muslim men. One of them
had panicked during a domestic robbery north of Beirut and shot a
Christian man and his sister. Hrawi - in the words of one of his top
security officers at the time - "wanted to show he could hang Muslims
in a Christian area". He got his way. The two men - one of whom had
not even been present in the house during the robbery - were taken to
their public execution beside the main Beirut-Jounieh highway,
swooning with fear at the sight of their white-hooded executioners,
while the Christian glitterati, heading home from night-clubs with
their mini-skirted girlfriends, pulled up to watch the fun.
I suggested at the time, much to Hrawi's disgust, that this should
become a permanent feature of Beirut's nightlife, that regular public
hangings on the Mediterranean Corniche would bring in tens of
thousands more tourists, especially from Saudi Arabia where you could
catch the odd beheading only at Friday prayers.
No, it's not about the wickedness of the hanged man. Unlike the Thane
of Cawdor, Saddam did not "set forth a deep repentance" on the
scaffold. We merely shamed ourselves in an utterly predictable way.
Either you support the death penalty - whatever the nastiness or
innocence of the condemned. Or you don't. C'est tout.
 The Indipendent

 E tu ti sei fatto delle belle seghe
oltre a fare il porgibutt dei nazi giri pure con la caraffa in mano per
conto di tonibaruch, mosley der pincio?

 la caraffa 
Tieni, riempila: 
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smegma
Tb
-- 
[Tb] :
Il dovere di un comunista sarebbe quello di formare un cordone sanitario
attorno alla feccia nazi
[.sergio.]
No [...] se posta articoli che condivido      |     
http://snipurl.com/11s9a
--------------------------------------------------
Il mio blog: 
www.tonibaruch.blogspot.com

 Tieni, riempila: 
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smegma
vai amalric, che il papa' di benede' ha tanta sete