Saddam Executed!

The Monster is Dead!

At approximately 6 A.M. Baghdad time (10 P.M. EST) Saddam Hussein was executed for crimes against humanity.

The death sentence was handed down by an Iraqi court on 5 November after a year-long trial over the 1982 killings of 148 Shias in the town of Dujail.

Crimes against humanity is an almost sterile phrase. It's important to remember that behind these monstrously evil acts were human victims and the survivors like little Jafar (pictured right). Jafar holds a memorial of photos of his grandfather and uncles murdered by Saddam. He'll grow up never to have the joy of knowing them.

The atrocity at Dujail is just one of the crimes perpetrated by the man some called the "Arab Stalin." Saddam's butchery created millions of Jafars throughout Iraq. Think of all the Jafars created in the Kurdish areas after Saddam butchered over 180,000 and used chemical weapons against the people of Halabja.

Father and child gassed in Halabja

The mass graves of Iraq continue to bear silent witness to the evil which Saddam unleashed on not just the Kurds, but the Shias as well. These graves litter the country with the foul stench of death and horror. In the photo at right Hekeema Nagiy cries as she searches for the bodies of her two missing sons at Hila. (more photo documentation here.)

Saddam killed men, women, children and infants. At the mass graves in Hatra children were found murdered execution style with a bullet to the back of the head. The withered remains of one small 3 or 4 year old boy was found still clutching a little red ball.

And while the reports of panty raid "torture" made headlines around the world for months, let's not forget that much worse inflicted on prisoners in Saddam's jails before they were dumped into the mass graves. Here's the account of an atrocity that was all too common:

"This is when they brought out his wife, who was five months pregnant. One of the guards said that if he refused to talk he would get 12 guards to rape his wife until she lost the baby. Amer said nothing. So they did. We were forced to watch. Whenever one of us cast down his eyes, they would beat us."

"Amer's wife didn't lose the baby. So the guard took a knife, cut her belly open and took the baby out with his hands. The woman and child died minutes later. Then the guard used the same knife to cut Amer's throat."

The catalog of Saddam's crimes is extensive. He will go down in history as one of the arch fiends of the 20th Century. A man who embodied evil. Thank God for President Bush and the brave men and women of our Armed Forces who put an end to his reign of terror.