Ugh

by digby


In the early days of the war you'll recall that there were a spate of beheadings in Iraq which were videotaped and circulated on the internet. I stupidly watched one of them and wrote:

I watched the video of Berg's beheading and it literally made me sick to my stomach. Do not watch it. It's a barbaric, horrible display of inhumanity. I wish I hadn't seen it. I'll never forget it.


I'm sure the same people who couldn't stop watching that footage --- ostensibly because they were outraged by the atrocity --- are enjoying this footage of Saddam going to his death today. They aren't all that different. There's the same sense of frenetic excitement among the executioners, the same vivid emotion, the same fear in the soon to be executed man's face. I'm hard pressed to say how that kangaroo court and this rushed, chaotic execution represents something so different. Saddam was undoubtedly a guilty man --- but the execution was done with the same symbolic purpose --- and in much the same style --- as those psychos who executed Nick Berg on camera and then ghoulishly passed around the video to make their political point.

This video illuminates what I hate about the death penalty. In my name, whether just or unjust, the state is killing another human being, not in self defense or in the process of a (just) war. It is done with the prisoner completely helpless, tied down and knowing he is about to be killed. Regardless of whether that person deserves to die or not, the state (us) becomes a pre-meditated, cold-blooded murderer when we do it. Two wrongs don't make a right and all that.

This half-assed, jailhouse execution by what appear to be a bunch of random thugs in leather jackets and black hoods milling around the prisoner, puts the final coda to our pretentions of helping the Iraqis build a civilized society.



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