Tense Exchange In Saddam's Final Moments

(CBS/AP)  Thousands of Iraqis flocked to Saddam Hussein's hometown of Ouja on Sunday, where the deposed leader was buried in a religious compound 24 hours after his execution.

Dozens of relatives and other mourners, some of them crying and moaning, attended the interment shortly before dawn near Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad. A few knelt before his flag-draped grave. A large framed photograph of Saddam was propped up on a chair nearby.

"I condemn the way he was executed and I consider it a crime," said 45-year-old Salam Hassan al-Nasseri, one of Saddam's clansmen who attended the interment.

Iraqis awoke Saturday to television images of a noose being slipped over Saddam Hussein's neck and his white-shrouded body, the pre-dawn work of black-hooded hangmen. They went to bed as new video emerged showing Saddam exchanging taunts with onlookers before the gallows floor dropped away and the former dictator swung from the rope.

In areas of Iraq where Saddam had persecuted victims, there was celebration, reports CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston.

In Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, victims of his three decades of autocratic rule took to the streets to celebrate, dancing, beating drums and hanging Saddam in effigy. Celebratory gunfire erupted across other Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad and other predominantly Shiite regions of the country.

Saddam was buried shortly before sunrise Sunday in a family plot next to the graves of his two sons in the town of his birth north of Baghdad, witnesses said.

Those who saw the ceremony said only a few people were present for the burial in Ouja, a small town outside Tikrit, Saddam's power base 80 miles north of Baghdad.

There was no sign of a feared Sunni uprising in retaliation for the execution, and the bloodshed from civil warfare was not far off the daily average — 92 from bombings and death squads.

Outside the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, west of the capital, loyalists marched with Saddam pictures and waved Iraqi flags. Defying curfews, hundreds took to the streets vowing revenge in Samarra, north of Baghdad, and gunmen paraded and fired into the air in support of Saddam in Tikrit, his hometown.

Still, authorities imposed curfews sparingly in contrast to the several-day lockdown put in place after Saddam was sentenced to death Nov. 5.

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Watch: Saddam's Last Minutes

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Photos: Saddam At The Gallows

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By several accounts, Saddam was calm but scornful of his captors, engaging in a give-and-take with the crowd gathered to watch him die and insisting he was Iraq's savior, not its tyrant and scourge.

"He said we are going to heaven and our enemies will rot in hell and he also called for forgiveness and love among Iraqis but also stressed that the Iraqis should fight the Americans and the Persians," Munir Haddad, an appeals court judge who witnessed the hanging, told the British Broadcasting Corp.

Another witness, national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, told The New York Times that one of the guards shouted at Saddam: "You have destroyed us. You have killed us. You have made us live in destitution."

"I have saved you from destitution and misery and destroyed your enemies, the Persian and Americans," Saddam responded, al-Rubaie told the Times.

"God damn you," the guard said.

"God damn you," responded Saddam.

New video, first broadcast by Al-Jazeera satellite television early Sunday, had sound of someone in the group praising the founder of the Shiite Dawa Party, who was executed in 1980 along with his sister by Saddam.

Saddam appeared to smile at those taunting him from below the gallows. He said they were not showing manhood.

Then Saddam began reciting the "Shahada," a Muslim prayer that says there is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger, according to an unabridged copy of the same tape, apparently shot with a camera phone and posted on a Web site.

Saddam made it to midway through his second recitation of the verse. His last word was Muhammad.

The floor dropped out of the gallows.

"The tyrant has fallen," someone in the group of onlookers shouted. The video showed a close-up of Saddam's face as he swung from the rope.

Then came another voice: "Let him swing for three minutes."

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[gaye5]

mcdazz, and if you read some of the other things that I have said, I have said that Bush is a fool, that he is putting the world in great danger especially because of his lack of knowledge of islam... I have written of his stupidity on many things.. no man in his right mind would take the word of the enemy as he does with Muslims, who are allowed to lie to the infidels,, even with non-stop world wide muslim violence, he still insists that Islam is a peaceful religion, and that it is hijacked by extreemists, what a fool. All he has to do is read the last three quarters of the quran and others of their holy books to see that they are full of death to the infidel for the cause of allah, it is a death cult, death for us and for the muslims who step out of line one tiny bit..

[gaye5]

mcdazz YOU wrote, The information I posted can be easily found on the net. I have also read books in relation to Chemical Warfare which indicate that all chemical weapons (like most things) have a limited shelf life.

Like quite a few of the conservatives here, you post stuff and yet you have no understanding of the material. That makes you stupid.....
mcdazz, And yes from what I have read, most do have a short shelf life, but how many of the tens of thousands chemicals do not.....
you are right I have no doubt that there are many very intelligent people with much more knowledge than you or I...and because they are intelligent I would say that they would have learnt the art of pleasant intercourse on different subjects without having to reduce their conversations to ridicule of yours or my lack of knowledge...
You could have shown a bit of grace and intellect by simply saying that.. from your reading that ???? however it appears that you are a person who prefers to be confrontational then discuss intelligently with people who have a different view to you or who don't know as much as you THINK you know. I am happy to learn but I am not going to waste my time in discord of this kind...

[gaye5]

Hey mcdazz, what on earth do I care about Bush, I am an Australian.. and I dont like bush in the first place, but I also dont like lies from both sides of the fence.. it is becoming increasingly hard to know what to believe,, and this is their intention... A mass of opposing information makes people give up and thus people become easier to control...

Gaye5 wrote:

"mcdazz, there is no need to put someone down for what they write and instead of belittling yourself, you could just point out that chemicals don't last long. And you omit to mention that, these people will obviously be producing more chemicals, they are dirt cheap and not only are they easy to produce in a lab but they are easy to geton the black market..."

The information I posted can be easily found on the net. I have also read books in relation to Chemical Warfare which indicate that all chemical weapons (like most things) have a limited shelf life.

Like quite a few of the conservatives here, you post stuff and yet you have no understanding of the material. That makes you stupid.

When Inspections recommenced for Iraqs WMD's, Inspectors could find no proof of Saddams WMD program having been restarted.

Instead of letting them do their jobs, GW Bush decided to go to war anyway because he wanted to be a big tough man (he had something to prove after his cowardice in the National Air Guard and after his numerous drunken binges).

Yet, you don't mention that in any of your nonsense posts nor do I notice you mentioning any of the lies told to the world by GW Bush that were proven BEFORE the invasion.

Why is that Gaye5?

[gaye5]

mcdazz, there is no need to put someone down for what they write and instead of belittling yourself, you could just point out that chemicals don't last long. And you omit to mention that, these people will obviously be producing more chemicals, they are dirt cheap and not only are they easy to produce in a lab but they are easy to geton the black market...
What I put here are obviously not my words, I am only quoting from one of your media outlets,,,
If you had of read this you would have realised that it was written.
From the October 20, 2003 issue: The case for the war in Iraq, with
testimony from Bill Clinton.
by Robert Kagan & William Kristol
10/20/2003, Volume 009, Issue 06
Not my words man...no one gets anywhere by calling people stupid...and I see that you have quoted something from the net..was it from Alternet. Unfortunately there are tens of thousands of chemicals which can be used to kill. Not all are highly lethal but can cause much trouble.

More for the stupid out there (Gaye5, I'm still looking at you).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction

"The United Nations located and destroyed large quantities of Iraqi WMD throughout the 1990s in spite of persistent Iraqi obstruction. Washington withdrew weapons inspectors in 1998, resulting in Operation Desert Fox, which further degraded Iraq's WMD capability. The United States and Britain, along with many intelligence experts, asserted that Saddam Hussein still possessed large hidden stockpiles of WMD in 2003, and that he must be prevented from building any more. Inspections restarted in 2002, but hadn't turned up any evidence of ongoing programs when the United States and the "Coalition of the Willing" invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003."

[gaye5]

For in all the years after those admissions, the Iraqi government never explained, to anyone's satisfaction, what had become of the huge quantities of deadly weapons it had produced. When asked to produce credible evidence of the destruction of its weapons, the Iraqis refused. After 1996, and partly as a consequence of the documents they had discovered, weapons inspectors must have started getting closer to uncovering what the Iraqis were hiding. For at about that time, inspectors began to be systematically blocked by Saddam. The so-called "presidential palaces," were actually vast complexes of buildings and warehouses, that Saddam simply declared off-limits to inspectors.
Saddam demanded the removal of all Americans from the U.N. inspection team and an end to all U-2 flights over Iraq. Iraq at this time also began moving equipment that could be used to manufacture weapons out of the range of video cameras that had been installed by the U.N. inspection team.
The New York Times reported at the time that the U.N. weapons inspectors(not American intelligence) believed that Iraq possessed "the elements of
a deadly germ warfare arsenal, IN EARLY 1998, the Clinton administration, following this same logic, prepared for war against Iraq.
On February 17, President Clinton spoke on the steps of the Pentagon to explain to the American people why war was necessary.

And just for the stupid out there (Gaye5, I'm looking at you), who like to hold onto the lies of GW Bush for Invading Iraq.

Part 1

http://www.alternet.org/story/15854/

Strangely, the U.S. media have, with almost no exceptions, failed to mention that most bio/chemical agents have a rather limited shelf life. The few who do usually quote Scott Ritter, former UN Iraqi weapons inspector and controversial opponent of Dubya%u2019s drive to Baghdad.

According to Ritter, the chemical weapons which Iraq has been known to possess -- nerve agents like sarin and tabun -- have a shelf life of five years, VX just a bit longer. Saddam's major bio weapons are hardly any better; botulinum toxin is potent for about three years, and liquid anthrax about the same (under the right conditions). And he adds that since all chemical weapons were made in Iraq's only chemical weapons complex %u2013 the Muthanna State establishment, which was blown up during the first Gulf War in 1991 -- and all biological weapons plants and research papers were clearly destroyed by 1998, any remaining bio/chemical weapons stores are now %u201Charmless, useless goo.%u201D

Part 2

http://www.alternet.org/story/15854/

The U.S. Defense Department%u2019s %u201CMilitarily Critical Technologies List%u201D (MCTL) is %u201Ca detailed compendium of technologies" that the department advocates as %u201Ccritical to maintaining superior US military capabilities. It applies to all mission areas, especially counter-proliferation.%u201D Written in 1998, it was recently re-published with updates for 2002.

So what is the MCTL%u2019s opinion of Iraq's chemical weapons program? In making its chemical nerve agents, %u201CThe Iraqis . . . produce[d] a . . . mixture which was inherently unstable,%u201D says the report. %u201CWhen the Iraqis produced chemical munitions they appeared to adhere to a %u2018make and use%u2019 regimen. Judging by the information Iraq gave the United Nations, later verified by on-site inspections, Iraq had poor product quality for their nerve agents. This low quality was likely due to a lack of purification. They had to get the agent to the front promptly or have it degrade in the munition.%u201D

Furthermore, says this Defense Department report, %u201CThe chemical munitions found in Iraq after the [first] Gulf War contained badly deteriorated agents and a significant proportion were visibly leaking.%u201D The shelf life of these poorly made agents were said to be a few weeks at best -- hardly the stuff of vast chemical weapons stores.

[gaye5]

Here is what was known by 1998 based on Iraq's own admissions:
* That in the years immediately prior to the first Gulf War, Iraq produced at least 3.9 tons of VX, a deadly nerve gas, and acquired 805 tons of precursor ingredients for the production of more VX.
* That Iraq had produced or imported some 4,000 tons of ingredients to produce other types of poison gas.
* That Iraq had produced 8,500 liters of anthrax.
* That Iraq had produced 500 bombs fitted with parachutes for the purpose of delivering poison gas or germ payloads.
* That Iraq had produced 550 artillery shells filled with mustard gas.
* That Iraq had produced or imported 107,500 casings for chemical weapons.
* That Iraq had produced at least 157 aerial bombs filled with germ agents.
* That Iraq had produced 25 missile warheads containing germ agents (anthrax, aflatoxin, and botulinum).
Again, this list of weapons of mass destruction is not what the Iraqi government was suspected of producing. (That would be a longer list, including an Iraqi nuclear program that the German intelligence service had concluded in 2001 might produce a bomb within three years.) It was what
the Iraqis admitted producing. And it is this list of weapons--not any CIA analysis under either the Clinton or Bush administrations--that has been
at the heart of the Iraq crisis.