Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Is Saddam headed off to hell tonight?

An adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saddam would be executed before 6 a.m. Saturday, or 10 p.m. Friday EST. Also to be hanged at that time were Saddam’s half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, the adviser said.

I realize I shouldn’t be shocked by anything anymore…but I am shocked and frightened by the way this has happened. I honestly never believed the Bush administration could get away with preventing Saddam from speaking about his longtime collaboration with the U.S., which started in the late fifties. (Of course, Saddam may have had his own reasons for not, uh, emphasizing this.) And I really didn’t think they could off him with no trial for the large-scale crimes we assisted with. But apparently they can. It’s just a few steps short of an intra-mob hit.

This is a scary, scary world.

UPDATE: “Foodrule” writes in to make this important point:

From: Foodrule@…
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2006
Subject: Re: Saddam getting what he deserves: Please choke on your own tongue
To: tinyrevolution@…

Sorry to be so blunt! But on the bright side, you can add this e-mail to your self-congratulatory list of people who are responding to your self-evident moral bankruptcy. Stop breathing at your earliest convenience, dipshit.

What’s particularly wonderful here is that Foodrule’s responding to something one inch above this. The only thing that could have made it better is if he’d used “inhuman barbarism” rather than “moral bankruptcy.”

So Gerald Ford is dead. Of all the mainstream stories about him, I wonder how many will mention that he gave Indonesia a green light to invade East Timor on December 6, 1975? And that Indonesia eventually killed more than 200,000 Timorese? (Ford’s specific words to Indonesia’s ruler Suharto were: “We will understand and will not press you on the issue.”)

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess the number is zero.

However, Chris Floyd does have a non-mainstream perspective on it: “The Enduring Legacy of Gerald R. Ford.” And Dennis Perrin chimes in with “The Great American Whitewash in Action.”

Sweet:

In a letter to Chileans written to be published after his death, Gen. Augusto Pinochet said he wished he hadn’t had to stage the bloody 1973 coup that put him in power and called the abuses during his long rule inevitable…

The former dictator, who died Dec. 10 of heart failure at age 91, insisted that the military takeover avoided civil war and a Marxist dictatorship, and said his 1973-90 rule never had “an institutional plan” to abuse human rights.

“But it was necessary to act with maximum rigor to avoid a widening of the conflict,” Pinochet wrote…

“How I wish the Sept. 11, 1973, military action had not been necessary!” Pinochet wrote.

Yup:

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves.”
—William Pitt, House of Commons, November 18, 1783

1. Dennis Perrin has something he’d like to say to nice Democrats:

I hope that my liblogging buddies are finally waking up to this dreadful reality [of Iraq], but just in case they’re still dreaming sweet dreams about all the wonderful things the Dems are going to deliver in ’07, and especially in ’08, allow me to raise my voice for a moment.

ATTENTION MULES! THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS A PARTY OF WAR, DESTRUCTION AND GREED! THEY WANT TO USE YOUR KIDS AS FODDER FOR THEIR BLOODSHED! AND THERE IS NO END IN SIGHT! OBAMA WILL NOT SAVE YOU! SO WAKE THE FUCK UP, GET OFF YOUR ASS, AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

Sorry about that. Generally, I’m an easy going guy. But with a ten-year-old son, soon to turn 11, to think about, and watching these criminals plan for more chaos and agony, expecting my boy to sign on, I tend to come unhinged. And I trust this will become worse as the years drag on.

The rest.

2. The Nation has published a fantastic article by Mohamed Bazzi about the usually-overlooked ways the civil conflict in Lebanon is based in class (via Sam Husseini):

Ever since Hezbollah and its allies began an open-ended protest against the US-backed government on December 1, Beirut’s gilded downtown–built for wealthy Lebanese and foreign tourists–has become more authentically Lebanese. Where Persian Gulf sheiks once ate sushi, families now sit in abandoned parking lots, having impromptu picnics, the smell of kebabs cooked over coals wafting through the air. Young men lounge on plastic chairs, smoking apple-scented water pipes, and occasionally break out into debke, the Lebanese national dance.

3. I’ve mentioned previously the whistleblowing WMD testimony of Carne Ross, former First Secretary in Britain’s Mission to the UN. But also fascinating is a piece he wrote last year for the Financial Times; it’s one of the most sensitive and intelligent accounts I’ve ever seen of how governments deceive themselves and others.

From William Blum’s always-excellent Anti-Empire Report:

General Augusto Pinochet, who escaped earthly justice on December 10, was detained in London in 1999 awaiting a ruling by a British court on whether he would be extradited to Spain on a Spanish judge’s warrant to face charges of crimes against humanity committed during his rule in Chile from 1973 to 1990. “I tell you how I feel,” he told a London journalist at the time. “I would like to be remembered as a man who served his country, who served Chile throughout his entire life on this earth. And what he did was always done thinking about the welfare of Chile.”

P.W. Botha, former president of South Africa died November 1. He was a man who had vigorously defended the apartheid system, which led to the jailing of tens of thousands of people. He never repented or apologized for his actions, and resisted attempts to make him appear before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. At one point he declared: “I am not going to repent. I am not going to ask for forgiveness. What I did, I did for my country.”

As Pol Pot lay on his death bed in 1997, he was interviewed by a journalist, who later wrote: “Asked whether he wants to apologize for the suffering he caused, he looks genuinely confused, has the interpreter repeat the question, and answers ‘No.’…‘I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.'”

“In these three decades I have been actuated solely by love and loyalty to my people in all my thoughts, acts, and life.” Adolf Hitler, “Last Will and Testament,” written in his bunker in his final hours, April 29, 1945.

The rest.