Who Says Saddam Hussein Is Dead?
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Saddam Hussein was hanged by the neck until dead on Saturday, December 30, 2006. He was executed after he was found guilty in a contentious trial of various crimes against humanity. Here is one press account of the Iraqi strongman's execution:
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi dictator who spent his last years in captivity after his ruthless regime was toppled by the U.S.-led coalition in 2003, was hanged before dawn Saturday for crimes committed in a brutal crackdown during his reign.
The execution took place shortly after 6 a.m. (10 p.m. Friday ET), Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, told Iraqi television.
"This dark page has been turned over," Rubaie said. "Saddam is gone. Today Iraq is an Iraq for all the Iraqis, and all the Iraqis are looking forward. ... The [Hussein] era has gone forever."
Al-Iraqiya state television aired videotape of Hussein's last moments several hours after the execution.
The video showed Hussein, dressed in a black overcoat, being led into a room by three masked guards.
The broadcast only showed the execution to the point where the noose was placed over Hussein's head and tightened around his neck. No audio was heard.
Rubaie, who witnessed the execution, said the former leader was "strangely submissive" to the process.
"He was a broken man," he said. "He was afraid. You could see fear in his face."
Rubaie said that Hussein carried with him a copy of the Quran and asked that it be given to "a certain person." Rubaie did not identify that person.
On Al-Arabiya television, Rubaie said the execution took place at the 5th Division intelligence office in Qadhimiya. He said Hussein refused to wear a black hood over his head before execution and told him "don't be afraid." (Hussein executed with 'fear in his face.)
Although exact numbers vary, it has been estimated that somewhere around 1.5 million people were killed during the twenty-four year period of Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship of Iraq between 1979 and 2003. Saddam Hussein issued orders to torture many more hundreds of thousands of people, imprisoning political dissidents arbitrarily, maintaining his rule by means of an elaborate informant system that relied upon relatives and friends informing on each other (sort of sounds like a few of our traditionalist bishops, doesn't it?). Saddam Hussein was certainly a thug.
Thug though he was to his own people, however, Saddam Hussein and his regime posed no real, legitimate threat to the national security interests of the United States of America. As has been demonstrated in a number of articles over the years, including in
Longer Than World War II a month ago today, there was no moral, economic, military-geopolitical reason to justify an invasion and occupation of Iraq that has resulted in the deaths of nearly five thousand American service personnel and (as estimates vary) somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, some of whom were shot and killed at American checkpoints in their own country by members of the armed forces of the United States of America who were nervous about anything considered to be "unfamiliar." The financial costs of the war have been absolutely staggering: one estimate places American taxpayer costs at close to three quarters of a trillion dollars (see The Cost of War). That's a piece of change.
The pretext for the American invasion was to prevent Saddam Hussein from using his nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction" and to effect "regime change" in Iraq to stop the torture and the killing caused by Hussein's government and to protect "America's only ally" in the Middle East, the State of Israel, which is thoroughly capable of defending itself without American assistance as its amoral Israel Defense Force has shown itself to be capable of visiting death and destruction upon anyone, guilty or not, who is even associated with a perceived enemy of the Talmudic state.
What has "regime change" brought Iraq. Guess what? Simply a change of the identity of the indigenous torturers, that's what. Instead of Sunni Mohammedans torturing Shiites and others, especially the ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq, Shiite Mohammedans have been busy torturing Sunni Mohammedans. Who says Saddam Hussein is dead?
Hundreds of Sunni men disappeared for months into a secret Baghdad prison under the jurisdiction of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's military office, where many were routinely tortured until the country's Human Rights Ministry gained access to the facility, Iraqi officials say.
The men were detained by the Iraqi army in October in sweeps targeting Sunni groups in Nineveh province, a stronghold of the group Al Qaeda in Iraq and other militants in the north. The provincial governor alleged at the time that ordinary citizens had been detained as well, often without a warrant.
Worried that courts would order the detainees' release, security forces obtained a court order and transferred them to Baghdad, where they were held in isolation. Human rights officials learned of the facility in March from family members searching for missing relatives.
Revelation of the secret prison could worsen tensions at a highly sensitive moment in Iraq. As U.S. troops are withdrawing, Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, and other political officials are negotiating the formation of a new government. Including minority Sunni Arabs is considered by many to be key to preventing a return of widespread sectarian violence. Already there has been an increase in attacks by Al Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni extremist group.
The alleged brutal treatment of prisoners at the facility raised concerns that the country could drift back to its authoritarian past.
Commanders initially resisted efforts to inspect the prison but relented and allowed visits by two teams of inspectors, including Human Rights Minister Wijdan Salim. Inspectors said they found that the 431 prisoners had been subjected to appalling conditions and quoted prisoners as saying that one of them, a former colonel in President Saddam Hussein's army, had died in January as a result of torture.
"More than 100 were tortured. There were a lot of marks on their bodies," said an Iraqi official familiar with the inspections. "They beat people, they used electricity. They suffocated them with plastic bags, and different methods."
An internal U.S. Embassy report quotes Salim as saying that prisoners had told her they were handcuffed for three to four hours at a time in stress positions or sodomized.
"One prisoner told her that he had been raped on a daily basis, another showed her his undergarments, which were entirely bloodstained," the memo reads.
Some described guards extorting as much as $1,000 from prisoners who wanted to phone their families, the memo said.
Maliki vowed to shut down the prison and ordered the arrest of the officers working there after Salim presented him with a report this month. Since then, 75 detainees have been freed and an additional 275 transferred to regular jails, Iraqi officials said. Maliki said in an interview that he had been unaware of the abuses. He said the prisoners had been sent to Baghdad because of concerns about corruption in Mosul.
"The prime minister cannot be responsible for all the behavior of his soldiers and staff," said Salim, praising Maliki's willingness to root out abuses. Salim, a Chaldean Christian, ran for parliament in last month's elections on Maliki's Shiite-dominated list.
Maliki defended his use of special prisons and an elite military force that answers only to him; his supporters say he has had no choice because of Iraq's precarious security situation. Maliki told The Times that he was committed to stamping out torture -- which he blamed on his enemies.
"Our reforms continue, and we have the Human Rights Ministry to monitor this," he said. "We will hold accountable anybody who was proven involved in such acts."
But Maliki's critics say the network of special military units with their own investigative judges and interrogators are a threat to Iraq's fragile democracy. They question how Maliki could not have known what was going on at the facility, and say that regardless, he is responsible for what happened there.
"The prison is Maliki's because it's not under the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Justice or Ministry of Interior officially," said one Iraqi security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.
The revelations echoed those at the beginning of Iraq's sectarian war. In late 2005, the U.S. military found a secret prison in an Interior Ministry bunker where Sunnis rounded up in police sweeps were held.
The latest episode, the U.S. Embassy report warns, could exacerbate tensions between Iraq's Shiite majority and Sunnis even with the facility closed.
U.S. troops already have pulled out of Iraq's cities, and Iraqi officials say U.S. influence is diminishing as the Americans focus on ending their military presence. The number of U.S. troops in Iraq is scheduled to drop by about half, to 50,000, by the end of August.
The embassy report cautions that "disclosure of a secret prison in which Sunni Arabs were systematically tortured would not only become an international embarrassment, but would also likely compromise the prime minister's ability to put together a viable government coalition with him at the helm."
Maliki's main political rival, Iyad Allawi, narrowly defeated him in parliamentary elections last month. Allawi, a secular Shiite, drew on dissatisfaction in Sunni regions around central Iraq. In the interview, Maliki invited Allawi to join him in forming a new government. But news of a secret prison that falls under the jurisdiction of the prime minister's military office could make it difficult for him to gain any Sunni partners.
The controversy over the secret prison, located at the Old Muthanna airport in west Baghdad, has also pushed Maliki to begin relinquishing control of two other detention facilities at Camp Honor, a base in Baghdad's Green Zone. The base belongs to the Baghdad Brigade and the Counter-Terrorism Force, elite units that report to the prime minister and are responsible for holding high-level suspects.
Families and lawyers say they find it nearly impossible to visit the Camp Honor facilities. The Justice Ministry is now assuming supervision of the Green Zone jails, although Maliki's offices will continue to command directly the military units.
The 431 detainees brought down from Nineveh were initially held at Camp Honor. Interrogations began after they were transferred to the prison at the Old Muthanna airport.
According to the U.S. Embassy report and interviews with Iraqi officials, two separate investigative committees questioned the detainees and abused them. During the day, there were interrogators from the Iraqi judiciary. In the late afternoon they came from the Baghdad Brigade.
The embassy report says that at least four of the investigators from the Baghdad Brigade are believed to have been indicted for torture in 2006. The charges against them at the time included selling Sunni Arab detainees held at a national police facility to Shiite militias to be killed.
In December, the Human Rights Ministry asked the judiciary to investigate Baghdad Brigade interrogators over allegations of torture at Camp Honor, but hasn't received an answer, Iraqi officials said.
With the secret facility at the old airport being shut down, and both Maliki and Salim, the human rights minister, hailing what they regard as progress, some Iraqis with knowledge of the security apparatus say they are worried that nothing will really change.
One former lawmaker with great knowledge of the prime minister's security offices called for radical change in the next government. "This is the beginning. We have to hold people accountable," the former lawmaker said. "It's a coverup of torture." (Secret prison revealed in Baghdad.)
What else can one expect from men who believe in thuggery because their souls are steeped in the ravages of Original Sin? Men whose souls are captive to the devil by means of Original Sin and their own Actual Sins will think nothing of torturing other human beings. Indeed, it must be kept in mind that the supposedly "enlightened" leaders of the "new and improved" "democratic Iraq have done nothing to curb the violence against their country's tiny Christian minority, including those who are Chaldean Rite Catholics. There is no national will in the "free," "democratic" Iraq that has been forged by yet another failed American experiment in nation-building to protect these Catholics from the murder and mayhem that they have suffered in the past seven years. Why should there be any national "will" to build a regime to the liking of the American occupiers, who have, despite their protestations of being "civilized," having sanctioned all manner of torture to "stabilize" Iraq.
Moreover, a report from four years ago indicated that torture is more widespread and uncontrolled now than it was during the years of Saddam Hussein's thuggish rule:
Torture in Iraq is worse now than it was under the regime of Saddam Hussein and "is totally out of hand", according to a United Nations investigator.
"The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein," said Manfred Nowak, a UN special investigator on torture, at a press conference in Geneva.
He said government forces, private militia and terrorist groups were all involved.
"You have terrorist groups, you have the military, you have police, you have these militias. There are so many people who are actually abducted, seriously tortured and finally killed," said Mr Nowak, an Austrian law professor.
"It's not just torture by the government. There are much more brutal methods of torture you'll find by private militias."
Mr Nowak also said that bodies were being discovered with very heavy and very serious torture marks.
He said a mission to Iraq to investigate torture was too dangerous, but he had gathered information from interviews with people in Amman, Jordan, and other sources.
Mr Nowak is in Geneva to brief the UN Human Rights council - a body that addresses human rights violations - on the situation of the United States detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.
He is one of five UN human rights investigators who in February called for the closure of the camp on the grounds it was a "torture camp". The calls were rejected by the US.
Mr Nowak's comments come a day after the human rights office of the UN assistance mission for Iraq (Unami) raised concerns about the violence gripping the country. It said that 6,599 civilians had died in July and August.
Unami cited increasing evidence of violent torture, a growth in the numbers of death squads, and a rise in the honour killings of women and girls.
"Corpses appear regularly in and around Baghdad and other areas. Most bear signs of torture and appear to be victims of extrajudicial executions," said the report. (Torture in Iraq 'worse than under Saddam'.)
For what? For what? For what has all of this carnage been permitted to take place?
Some might protest at this point that Iraqi military forces, aided in no small measure by those of the United States of America, killed two top leaders of the "Al Qaeda" in Iraq terrorist organization yesterday, signifying "progress" in the "global war against terror" (as it was named by former President George Walker Bush) and thus justifying all of the lives lost and all of the money spent and all of the horrible devastation that American bombs and corrupt contracts have caused to the infrastructure of Iraq. Nice try. Think again.
The "Al Qaeda in Iraq" organization is not connected to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization, save for bin Laden's encouragement of the Iraqi organization's acts of "justice" against Americans and those considered to be their Iraqi puppets and stooges. That that foreign nationals with some connection to bin Laden have entered Iraq to wage war on the American occupation on the "new and improved" Iraqi regime is the direct result of the destabilization of Iraq caused by the American invasion and occupation. Saddam Hussein was a xenophobic clan leader who wanted no foreign intervention in his nation (other than which he accepted from the "military advisers" sent to him by his longtime ally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). As such, therefore, Hussein ruled as a gangster who wanted to prevent rival gangs, whether foreign of domestic, from threatening his hegemony in Iraq. That there is an "Al Qaeda in Iraq" organization is the direct result of the American invasion and occupation of that country.
The devil uses all of this to his advantage. George Walker Bush's "American exceptionalism" vision of the world, fueled by the members of his Israeliphile neoconservative national security team, got the United States of America involved in the moral, economic, geopolitical disaster that has been this country's invasion and occupation of Iraq. This helped, at least in some part, to make the likes of the Marxist-trained "globalist," Barack Hussein Obama, electable two years ago.
Obama, who has bowed to one foreign leader after another, may very well make another Israeliphile neoconservative "electable" in 2012 because of his classic 1960s view of foreign policy and American military power. This would mean, of course, more wars, more wars, more wars without any just cause and without any "exit strategy" as they are premised upon peoples in other lands embracing American "liberators" with joy. Didn't work in Iraq. Isn't working in Afghanistan. It's not going to work in the future. Such, however, is the madness of a world where the Social Kingship of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has been replaced by the reign of man in association with the devil's own naturalism of Judeo-Masonry.
Obama said recently that this country that the United States of America is a military superpower "like it or not." He doesn't like this fact obviously. A true American patriot does like this fact, noting, of course, that a true patriot, one who wills the good of his nation, the ultimate expression of which is her Catholicization, wants his nation's military force to be used prudently to secure its borders (gee, what a novel concept) and to respond justly and commensurately to legitimate threats to its national security. The fact that American military might has been used in all too many unjust causes does not mean that its existence is wrong, only that the country is bereft of leaders who understand how to judge the situations of this world in light of laws of the next that govern their consciences at all times in all circumstances without any exception, reservation or qualification whatsoever.
Alas, American leaders in the past have considered as "just" wars that resulted in the introduction of Protestant sects and Masonic lodges in once proudly Catholic countries. Countless souls have been taken out of the true Church, the Catholic Church, as a result of the triumph of the American prototype of "religious liberty" that would prove to be an important building-block for conciliarism's apostate view of the Church-State relations and the "rights" of false religions to propagate themselves openly. American leaders of both major organized crime families of naturalism, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, have made war at home on the innocent preborn by support their chemical and surgical assassination in their mothers' wombs under cover of the civil law.
Talk about torture? The so-called "civilized" United States of America kills around a million preborn babies by surgical means every year. Every year. Over fifty million have been killed by surgical means since 1965, another 600 million have been killed by chemical means. Civilized? Not really.
No, reminding readers of this fact does mean that the leaders of the United States of America has no right to defend this nation. Not at all. A nation that commits so many terrible crimes against God and man, however, brings down upon itself more and more chastisements when it uses its military might unjustly and then participates in an occupation that has visited more torture and mayhem than exited before said occupation took place.
Although I am physically sick and tired as of the writing of this article, I will never be sick and tired of reminding the readers of this site that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order, and will never cease trying to help at least a few souls to take seriously these words of simple Catholic truth found in Pope Pius XI's first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:
There exists an institution able to safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys, too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ. She alone is adapted to do this great work, for she is not only divinely commissioned to lead mankind, but moreover, because of her very make-up and the constitution which she possesses, by reason of her age-old traditions and her great prestige, which has not been lessened but has been greatly increased since the close of the War, cannot but succeed in such a venture where others assuredly will fail.
It is apparent from these considerations that true peace, the peace of Christ, is impossible unless we are willing and ready to accept the fundamental principles of Christianity, unless we are willing to observe the teachings and obey the law of Christ, both in public and private life. If this were done, then society being placed at last on a sound foundation, the Church would be able, in the exercise of its divinely given ministry and by means of the teaching authority which results therefrom, to protect all the rights of God over men and nations.
It is possible to sum up all We have said in one word, "the Kingdom of Christ." For Jesus Christ reigns over the minds of individuals by His teachings, in their hearts by His love, in each one's life by the living according to His law and the imitating of His example. Jesus reigns over the family when it, modeled after the holy ideals of the sacrament of matrimony instituted by Christ, maintains unspotted its true character of sanctuary. In such a sanctuary of love, parental authority is fashioned after the authority of God, the Father, from Whom, as a matter of fact, it originates and after which even it is named. (Ephesians iii, 15) The obedience of the children imitates that of the Divine Child of Nazareth, and the whole family life is inspired by the sacred ideals of the Holy Family. Finally, Jesus Christ reigns over society when men recognize and reverence the sovereignty of Christ, when they accept the divine origin and control over all social forces, a recognition which is the basis of the right to command for those in authority and of the duty to obey for those who are subjects, a duty which cannot but ennoble all who live up to its demands. Christ reigns where the position in society which He Himself has assigned to His Church is recognized, for He bestowed on the Church the status and the constitution of a society which, by reason of the perfect ends which it is called upon to attain, must be held to be supreme in its own sphere; He also made her the depository and interpreter of His divine teachings, and, by consequence, the teacher and guide of every other society whatsoever, not of course in the sense that she should abstract in the least from their authority, each in its own sphere supreme, but that she should really perfect their authority, just as divine grace perfects human nature, and should give to them the assistance necessary for men to attain their true final end, eternal happiness, and by that very fact make them the more deserving and certain promoters of their happiness here below.
It is, therefore, a fact which cannot be questioned that the true peace of Christ can only exist in the Kingdom of Christ -- "the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ." It is no less unquestionable that, in doing all we can to bring about the re-establishment of Christ's kingdom, we will be working most effectively toward a lasting world peace.
Although the devil is hard at work in the counterfeit church of conciliarism and even in some traditionalist circles in seeking to discredit Our Lady's Fatima Message, we must recognize that this message, which prompted Pope Pius XII to institute the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1944. I don't think that Pope Pius XII was deceived. Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has given us His own Most Blessed Mother in this latter days to encourage all the more to make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world as the clients of her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. (See
Two Last Chances.)
We must, therefore, continue to enfold ourselves into the love of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus as we make reparation for our own many sins, which are so responsible for the worsening of the state of the Church Militant on earth and of the world-at-large, as we seek to restore all things in Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen.
Let us keep close to the Divine Redeemer's Most Sacred Heart through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother throughout this Paschaltide and until the very end of our lives as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits.
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
