US officials questioned rush to hang Saddam

The rapid moves by Iraq’s government to execute Saddam Hussein were questioned by US officials, according to an article in today’s New York Times.

Describing “intrigue and confusion” around the former Iraqi dictator’s death sentence, John F. Burns and Marc Santora noted that US officials in Iraq had quietly voiced concerns about the political judgment and justice of the Maliki government’s efforts to expedite the hanging. But, these concerns could not be expressed publicly out of fears of aggravating the White House and undermining the authority of the current Iraqi government.

Burns and Santora proceed to describe a variety of steps undertaken by the Iraqi government to meet American-imposed legal requirements to enable the handing over of Hussein to Iraqi authority. One requirement included getting Iraqi President Jalal Talabani to acknowledge that he had no objection to the order of execution. American and Iraqi officials also tangled on whether or not the hanging could be carried out during the holiday Eid Al Adha, with the outcome being that Maliki’s staff called “officials of the marjaiya, the supreme religious body in Iraqi Shiism, composed of ayatollahs in the holy city of Najaf,” who approved of the execution.

The article also suggests US officials were displeased with the conduct of the execution itself, as well as the disposition of Hussein’s corpse. Burns and Santora describe the execution scene as having deteriorated “into a sectarian free-for-all.” Regarding Hussein’s remains, US officials also intervened after Maliki’s staff had decided “that his corpse would be kept in secret government custody until circumstances allowed interment without his grave becoming a shrine or a target.” The result was the handing of Saddam’s remains over to Hussein’s tribe.

The full registration-restricted article can be accessed at this link. An excerpt is provided below.

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American officials in Iraq have been reluctant to say much publicly about the pell-mell nature of the hanging, apparently fearful of provoking recriminations in Washington, where the Bush administration adopted a hands-off posture, saying the timing of the execution was Iraq’s to decide.

While privately incensed at the dead-of-night rush to the gallows, the Americans here have been caught in the double bind that has ensnared them over much else about the Maliki government — frustrated at what they call the government’s failure to recognize its destructive behavior, but reluctant to speak out, or sometimes to act, for fear of undermining Mr. Maliki and worsening the situation.

But a narrative assembled from accounts by various American officials, and by Iraqis present at some of the crucial meetings between the two sides, shows that it was the Americans who counseled caution in the way the Iraqis carried out the hanging. The issues uppermost in the Americans’ minds, these officials said, were a provision in Iraq’s new Constitution that required the three-man presidency council to approve hangings, and a stipulation in a longstanding Iraqi law that no executions can be carried out during the Id al-Adha holiday, which began for Iraqi Sunnis on Saturday and Shiites on Sunday.

A senior Iraqi official said the Americans staked out their ground at a meeting on Thursday, 48 hours after an appeals court had upheld the death sentence passed on Mr. Hussein and two associates. They were convicted in November of crimes against humanity for the persecution of the Shiite townspeople of Dujail, north of Baghdad, in 1982. Mr. Hussein, as president, signed a decree to hang 148 men and teenage boys.

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