Saddam Defiant To The End
Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging before dawn Saturday in Iraq, which was just before 10 p.m. Friday EST. This final chapter in Saddam's life followed three years spent in U.S. custody.
Hours after Saddam faced the same fate he was accused of inflicting on countless thousands during a quarter-century of ruthless power, Iraqi state television showed grainy video of what it said was his body, the head uncovered and the neck twisted at a sharp angle.
Arab satellite television channels said Saddam's body had been returned to Tikrit for burial Sunday next to his sons Odai and Qusai in the main cemetery in the nearby town of Ouja, where Saddam was born. The sons and a grandson were killed in a gunbattle with the Americans in Mosul in July 2003.
State-run Al-Iraqiya television later confirmed the body had been handed to the Salahuddin province governor and the leader of Saddam's Albu-Nassir clan.
Saddam struggled briefly after American military guards handed him over to Iraqi executioners. CBS News correspondent Randall Pinskton reports that he was shouting, 'long live Islam' and 'down with the West' and he showed no remorse.
But as his final moments approached, he grew calm. He clutched a Quran as he was led to the gallows. In one final moment of defiance, he refused to have a hood pulled over his head.
CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that until being turned over to Iraqi control, Saddam remained in a jail cell in U.S. custody. The U.S. military had been prepared since early Friday morning to hand over Saddam to the Iraqi government, which wanted to execute the deposed dictator as soon as possible.Watch: Saddam's Last Minutes
Photos: Saddam At The Gallows
On his last night alive, Saddam sat alone on death row with his Quran, the Muslim holy book, Pinskton reports. As his time waned, Saddam received two of his half brothers in his cell and was said to have given them his personal belongings and a copy of his will.
Pinkston added that he was told that Saddam's daughters watched the execution on television from Jordan where they live. They reportedly said they were pleased their father went to the gallows showing no sign of fear and they were proud of him.
A man whose testimony helped lead to Saddam's conviction and execution before sunrise said he was shown the body because "everybody wanted to make sure that he was really executed."
"Now, he is in the garbage of history," said Jawad Abdul-Aziz, who lost his father, three brothers and 22 cousins in the reprisal killings that followed a botched 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in the Shiite town of Dujail.
The execution came 56 days after a court convicted Saddam and sentenced him to death for his role in the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims from Dujail.
"Clearly there has to be visual proof at a minimum," senior Brookings Institution fellow Michael O'Hanlon told the The Saturday Early Show. "The Iraqis know there have been many doubles for Saddam over the years… They know that Saddam is a person who always, in his own mind, at least, seemed to defy death and overcome the odds. So I think a lot of Iraqis were still believing he would somehow find a way out of this one, too."
In Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City, hundreds of people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate. The government did not impose a round-the-clock curfew as it did last month when Saddam was convicted to thwart any surge in retaliatory violence.
It was a grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three U.S. presidents. Despite his ouster, Washington, its allies and the new Iraqi leaders remain mired in a fight to quell a stubborn insurgency by Saddam loyalists and a vicious sectarian conflict.
The downfall of a dictator
The execution took place during the year's deadliest month for U.S. troops, with the toll reaching 108.
President Bush said in a statement issued from his ranch in Texas that bringing Saddam to justice "is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain and defend itself, and be an ally in the war on terror."
He said that the execution marks the "end of a difficult year for the Iraqi people and for our troops" and cautioned that Saddam's death will not halt the violence in Iraq.
Martin reports the president had already gone to bed by the time Saddam was executed.
Within hours of Saddam's execution, a bomb planted aboard a minibus exploded in a fish market south of Baghdad, killing 31 people. At least 58 others were wounded in the explosion in Kufa, a Shiite town 100 miles south of the Iraqi capital, said Issa Mohammed, director of the morgue in the neighboring town of Najaf.
Within Baghdad, a parked car bomb killed 37 civilians and wounded 25 others in northwest Baghdad on Saturday, police said. The blast occurred in Hurriyah, a mixed neighborhood of the Iraqi capital, at around 3:30 p.m. local time
The Pentagon said that U.S. fighting forces in Iraq are ready for any escalation of violence there.
Ali Hamza, a 30-year-old university professor, said he went outside to shoot his gun into the air after he learned of Saddam's death.
"Now all the victims' families will be happy because Saddam got his just sentence," said Hamza, who lives in Diwaniyah, a Shiite town 80 miles south of Baghdad.
But people in the Sunni-dominated city of Tikrit, once a power base of Saddam, lamented his death.
"The president, the leader Saddam Hussein is a martyr and God will put him along with other martyrs. Do not be sad nor complain because he has died the death of a holy warrior," said Sheik Yahya al-Attawi, a cleric at the Saddam Big Mosque.
Police blocked the entrances to Tikrit and said nobody was allowed to leave or enter the city for four days. Despite the security precaution, gunmen took to the streets of Tikrit, carrying pictures of Saddam, shooting into the air, and calling for vengeance.
Security forces also set up roadblocks at the entrance to another Sunni stronghold, Samarra, and a curfew was imposed after about 500 people took to the streets protesting the execution of Saddam.
A couple hundred people also protested the execution just outside the Anbar capital of Ramadi, and more than 2,000 people demonstrated in Adwar, the village south of Tikrit where Saddam was captured by U.S. troops hiding in an underground bunker.
In a statement, Saddam's lawyers said that in the aftermath of his death, "the world will know that Saddam Hussein lived honestly, died honestly, and maintained his principles."
"He did not lie when he declared his trial null," they said.
Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, were not hanged along with their former leader as originally planned. Officials wanted to reserve the occasion for Saddam alone.
"We wanted him to be executed on a special day," National Security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie told state-run al-Iraqiya television.
Saddam was clad in a black suit, hat and shoes, rather than prison garb. His hat was removed and his hands tied shortly before the noose was slipped around his neck.
Saddam repeated a prayer after a Sunni Muslim cleric who was present.
"Saddam later was taken to the gallows and refused to have his head covered with a hood," said Sami al-Askari, the political adviser of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. "Before the rope was put around his neck, Saddam shouted: 'God is great. The nation will be victorious and Palestine is Arab.'"
Iraqi state television showed footage of guards in ski masks placing a noose around Saddam's neck. Saddam appeared calm as he stood on the metal framework of the gallows. The footage cuts off just before the execution.
Saddam was executed at a former military intelligence headquarters in Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah, al-Askari said. During his regime, Saddam had numerous dissidents executed in the facility, located in a neighborhood that is home to the Iraqi capital's most important Shiite shine — the Imam Kazim shrine.
The Iraqi prime minister's office released a statement that said Saddam's execution was a "strong lesson" to ruthless leaders who commit crimes against their own people.
"We strongly reject considering Saddam as a representative of any sect in Iraq because the tyrant only represented his evil soul," the statement said. "The door is still open for those whose hands are not tainted with the blood of innocent people to take part in the political process and work on rebuilding Iraq."
A U.S. judge on Friday refused to stop Saddam's execution, rejecting a last-minute court challenge.
Najeeb al-Nauimi, a member of Saddam's legal team, said U.S. authorities maintained physical custody of Saddam until the execution to prevent him being humiliated publicly or his corpse being mutilated, as has happened to previous Iraqi leaders deposed by force. He said they didn't want anything to happen to further inflame Sunni Arabs.
Saddam was born in 1937 in a village near Tikrit. As a teenager he was fashionably anti-British and anti-Western. He joined the Baath party but fled when his part in a plot to kill the prime minister, Abdel Karim Qassem, was discovered.
The ruthless Saddam gained a position on the ruling Revolutionary Command Council and for years he was the power behind the president, Ahmed Hassan Bakr.
During the 1970s oil boom, Saddam's Baath Party envisioned a country ruled by Arab socialism.
As deputy chairman of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council, Saddam headed an economic planning council that oversaw the building of vast industrial plants, huge housing projects, eight-lane highways, bridges, airports, universities and communication systems.
By 1979 Saddam had achieved his ambition. He became president and set the tone of his rule immediately by putting to death dozens of his rivals. Even outsiders who met him were quickly aware of the "Saddam fear factor" and its effects, CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey reports.
"I think its fair to say that the intimidation, the fear that he caused reached into the inner circle of his regime and that deprived him of contradictory points of view," said former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy.
Under Saddam, imprisonment or summary execution of political foes was common. Political parties, unions and civic groups not controlled by Baathists were banned. Traditional bonds were reshaped to support a one-party state.
Millions of Iraqis, though, were able for the first time in their lives to wear designer clothes and vacation in London, Madrid or Paris. Others started tasting imported foods and driving Japanese, German or French cars — all at government subsidized prices.
Within a year he made the first of several major miscalculations: A lightning attack to seize a waterway turned into the Iran-Iraq war, an 8-year bloodbath.
His 1980 invasion of Iran, portrayed as a fight against the Persians on behalf of all Arabs, set off an eight-year war that drained Iraq's economy and killed hundreds of thousands on both sides.
In 1990 Iraq's invasion of Kuwait would turn out to be another miscalculation, but in the months before the Gulf War of 1991, Saddam's stock in the Arab world rose considerably. Many Arabs saw Saddam as a man willing to stand up to the U.S., Israel and the West.
As years of sanctions ground down his people, Saddam refused to comply with weapons inspectors and remained the arrogant dictator, loved and hated in equal measure, isolated from his people and reality. Even he may not have known that he did not possess the weapons of mass destruction that were the pretext for the U.S.-led invasion, Pizzey reports.