Hussein

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Angry crowds in the Iraqi town of Tikrit fired weapons in the air and chanted "God is great" yesterday as they received the flag-draped bodies of two former aides to Saddam Hussein who were hanged early in the day. Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar were executed for their roles in killing scores of Shiite Muslim villagers in the 1980s. The hanging by rope ripped off the head of Ibrahim, Hussein's half brother and a fellow native of Tikrit. Ibrahim had served as leader of Iraq's feared intelligence service, while al-Bandar headed the Revolutionary Court that sentenced 148 villagers to death after a 1982 assassination attempt against the late president.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A top international human rights group yesterday called on the Iraqi government to halt the execution of two aides to Saddam Hussein as a trial against the dead dictator and his deputies resumed in Baghdad. The planned executions "highlight the Iraqi government's disturbing disregard for human rights and the rule of law," said the strongly worded statement from the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, adding to an increasingly heated debate over the killing of Hussein's and his cohorts.

WASHINGTON -- Although I oppose the death penalty, I toyed for many years with the notion that all executions should be televised. The video of Saddam Hussein's hanging that has popped up on Internet sites has disabused me of that notion. Too many viewers appear to be enjoying it too much. I found at least one video-sharing Web site that was offering the event as a download in two portable formats. Web-savvy kids can share Mr. Hussein's last moments with each other on the video iPods that Santa brought.

ARLINGTON, Va. -- In a final blasphemy, Saddam Hussein, who spent most of his life as a murdering secularist, went to his justified death holding a Quran and offering his soul to God, if God would accept it. If God does, He will have to commute the sentences of Mr. Hussein's mass-murdering predecessors, including Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. These days, not much that makes religious sense comes out of Iraq, or anywhere else in the maniacal Middle East,...

In the swirl of news coverage of the death of Saddam Hussein, the image of the former dictator with a noose around his neck was an obvious attention-getter. Many newspaper editors and television news producers ran it prominently, a fitting coda to the demise of a hubristic despot. But they stopped short of showing the execution itself, the moment when Hussein plunged through a trapdoor at his feet, the rope snapping his neck. But on the Internet, there were no such compunctions. Footage of Hussein falling to his death amid the curses of his executioners is easily found, in the same way as the far more gruesome executions of hostages in Iraq whose throats were slit on camera by hooded insurgents.

The year ended yesterday with Saddam Hussein in the grave. Alive, he wielded a personal power that defied understanding - he terrified and galvanized the Iraqi people, and he transfixed President Bush and the neoconservatives who came to see him as the devil incarnate. In the face of death he showed neither remorse nor fear, but a disturbingly fierce and self-possessed defiance. He was the conjurer who whipped up the forces that are consuming Iraq today, and that have plunged Sunnis, Shiites, jihadists, Baathists, Americans into war. A conjurer: This was a man with no ties to al Qaida or 9/11, with no weapons of mass destruction.

Baghdad -- It was a moment many Iraqis dreamed of during the Saddam Hussein era, broadcast on national television yesterday afternoon: guards in black ski masks looping a rope around the former president's neck. By afternoon, smudgy footage had been released of his slightly bruised body, head bowed, wrapped in a white sheet. Later, on the Internet, a jerky video that appeared to have been captured on a cell phone showed the dictator swinging from the bulky noose. "Thank God a bloody chapter was ended," national security adviser Mowaffak Rubaie announced on U.S.-funded Al-Hurra television.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Saddam Hussein never bowed his head, until his neck snapped. His last words were equally defiant. "Down with the traitors, the Americans, the spies and the Persians." The final hour of Iraq's former ruler began about 5 a.m. yesterday, when American troops escorted him from Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, to another American base at the heart of the city, Camp Justice. There, he was handed over to a newly trained unit of the Iraqi National Police, with whom he would later exchange curses.

Whether as president of Iraq, self-proclaimed leader of the anti-American insurgency or combative courtroom defendant, Saddam Hussein cast a large shadow over world events and the nation that he controlled for most of the past 40 years. Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging early today in Iraq - about 10 o'clock EST last night. He was 69. Though never an army officer, he frequently wore military uniforms and styled himself as a fearless strategist and warrior. The wars he started cost more than a million lives, but he never won any of them and lived in constant fear, seldom sleeping in the same palace two nights in a row and employing lookalikes to foil assassination attempts.

Many Iraqis and Americans have looked forward to the day when justice would catch up with Saddam Hussein. Yet, when it arrived, it seemed to be much less than the historic turning point once anticipated. With Iraq beset by violence and turmoil, the dictator's demise no longer appeared to signal the beginning of new order. After a trial marked by disruption and controversy, the execution seemed only another reminder that the country's divisions remain deep and seemingly insoluble nearly four years after the American invasion.