Who Was Behind the Saddam Hanging Fiasco?

Yesterday, AJ in DC posted the following on AmericaBlog re the Saddam Hussein hanging: “I committed a blunder that is, for me, exceptionally rare: I assumed that somehow this, a historic and potentially inflammatory event, would be handled with even a minimal amount of decorum and professionalism by the Bush administration and the Iraqi government. Instead, the Bush administration turned over Saddam to the Iraqi government prematurely . . . to a band of thugs-as-executioners . . . who wore not uniforms but leather jackets and ski masks . . . who shouted Shia chants, including invocations of Moqtada al-Sadr . . . all of which was illicitly videotaped and then emailed around Iraq and throughout the world . . . on, no less, one of the holiest days of the Sunni religious calendar.” The fact (and it is a fact) that the Bush administration turned over Saddam to Shia hooligans, has never been fully addressed by the mainstream media, as far as I know, until this morning’s New York Times editorial. The NYT said: “Saddam Hussein deserves no one’s pity. But as anyone who has seen the graphic cellphone video of his hanging can testify, his execution bore little resemblance to dispassionate, state-administered justice. The condemned dictator appeared to have been delivered from United States military custody into the hands of a Shiite lynch mob.” Last night on a segment of Anderson Cooper’s “360 Degrees” news program on CNN, Ryan Chilcote, a CNN correspondent reporting on the Saddam hanging, said, “The U.S. military spokesman says the U.S. would have handled it differently, but, once they handed Saddam over to the Iraqis, they lost control.” And Major General William Caldwell, the US Army Spokesman for Coalition Forces in Iraq said, “We had absolutely nothing to do with any of the procedures or any of the control mechanisms or anything from that point forward.” What could be more clear? The US military knowingly handed over Saddam Hussein to a lynch mob and then washed its hands of the whole affair. The question once again hangs in the air in Iraq: Who delivered the orders to the US military? And once again, the answer is: The orders came from the top. The orders to quickly and prematurely hand over Saddam to a hooded Shia mob came from the top. And THE TOP is not Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. In Iraq, THE TOP is the Bush administration. But the NYT is still maintaining that it was Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Malik who wanted Saddam hanged immediately. The NYT said, “Mr. Maliki ignored pleas for delay from Washington and the legal niceties of Iraq’s Constitution. He rushed to deliver Mr. Hussein’s death as a holiday gift to his hard-line Shiite constituency, especially followers of the radical cleric and militia leader Moktada al-Sadr, who were allowed to chant abuse at the condemned dictator while he stood at the gallows with the noose around his neck.” That’s total nonsense. It is the Bush administration that calls the shots in Iraq. In Iraq, the top is not Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. It is the Bush administration that pulls Maliki’s strings. And it was the Bush administration that wanted Saddam hanged on December 31. Gerald Ford died on December 26. There were five days of mourning for Ford. His state funeral was in the Rotunda of the US Capital on Saturday night, December 31. An event that George W. Bush could not be bothered to attend. Why would George W. Bush want to upstage the funeral of President Gerald Ford by hanging the former dictator of Iraq? Because he can. Oh…and there is another reason: Because George W. Bush is a delusional paranoid vengeful pissant sociopath fascist who can’t bear to be told he is wrong. And President Ford told the Washington Post's Bob Woodward that Junior Bush was wrong to attack Iraq.