Irak 144

De International Herald Tribune bericht

´U.S. questioned Iraq on rush to hang Saddam.

BAGHDAD: With his plain pine coffin strapped into a U.S. military helicopter for a predawn journey across the desert, Saddam Hussein, the executed dictator who built a legend with his defiance of America, completed a turbulent passage into history on Sunday.
Like the helicopter trip, just about everything in the 24 hours that began with Saddam's being taken to his execution from his cell in a U.S. military detention center in the post-midnight chill of Saturday morning had a surreal and even cinematic quality.
Part of it was that the Americans, who turned him into a pariah and drove him from power, proved to be his unlikely benefactors in the face of Iraq's new Shiite rulers, who seemed bent on turning the execution and its aftermath into a new nightmare for the Sunni minority privileged under Saddam.
The journey, 180 kilometers, or 110 miles, aboard a Black Hawk helicopter, brought Saddam's body to Camp Speicher, a U.S. military base north of Tikrit named for a U.S. Navy pilot who was lost over Iraq in the first hours of the Gulf war in 1991. From there, an Iraqi convoy carried Saddam's body to Awja, the humble town beside the Tigris River that Saddam, in the chandeliered palaces that became his habitat as ruler, spoke of as emblematic of the miseries of his lonely and impoverished youth.
The U.S. role extended beyond providing the helicopter that carried Saddam home. Iraqi and U.S. officials who have discussed the intrigue and confusion that preceded the decision late on Friday to rush Saddam to the gallows have said that it was the Americans who questioned the political wisdom — and justice — of expediting the execution, in ways that required Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to override constitutional and religious precepts that might have ensured Saddam the prospect of a more dignified passage to his end.´

Lees verder http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/01/africa/web.0101iraq.php