What The Hell?

by digby

Iraq hanged two aides to Saddam Hussein before dawn on Monday but government efforts to avoid a repeat of uproar over the ousted leader’s rowdy execution were thwarted when his half-brother’s head was severed by the noose.

Many of the government’s Shi’ite Muslim supporters rejoiced at the death of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam’s once feared intelligence chief who was accused of sending people to death in a meat grinder. But voices in Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority saw the decapitation as a deliberate sectarian act of revenge.

Government spokesmen said the severing of Barzan’s head was a rare hangman’s blunder. Critics said it may have been partly a result of Barzan’s illness with cancer.

Officials showed journalists film of Barzan and former judge Awad Hamed al-Bander standing side by side in orange jumpsuits on the scaffold, appearing pale and trembling with fear as the hangmen placed black hoods over their heads.

As the two trap doors swung open, the force of the rope jerked Bander’s head off. The head fell to the floor next to his body in a pool of blood as Bander’s corpse swung above it.

Not that I really need to know the details, but I can’t help but wonder how in the hell something like this happens? (And how convenient that he is “accidentally” beheaded, the preferred method of jihadist psychopaths.)

Needless to say, this isn’t going over well among the Sunni (and even some Shi’ites):

One official, Bassam al-Husseini, called the decapitation “an act of God.”

Barzan’s son-in-law hurled a sectarian insult at the government on Al Jazeera television. “As for ripping off his head, this is the grudge of the Safavids,” he said — a historical term referring to Shi’ite ties to non-Arab Iran.

Poor Shi’ites celebrated in Baghdad’s Sadr City slum. Moussa Jabor said: “(Barzan) should have been handed over to the people. Execution is a blessing for him.”

In Awja, where Barzan and Bander were buried close to Saddam, provincial governor Abdullah al-Juabra said: “People resent the way that Barzan has been executed.”

In Cairo, the Arab Organization for Human Rights called for an international medical investigation. The Moroccan Human Rights Association said the hangings were a “criminal political assassination masterminded by American imperialism.”

Some Shi’ites were appalled too. Ali Abbas Ridha, a 27-year-old in the northern city of Mosul, said: “What they’ve done incites people to sectarianism even more. Whether they were executed or not, what’s the use?”

Meanwhile:

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, told reporters the hanging of the two men was “an Iraqi decision, an Iraqi execution.”

Right. And who believes that?

What a travesty.

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