Saddam To Be Hanged!

Happy New Year... But not for Saddam Hussein, who will be hanged by the neck until he is dead by this Sunday.

Of course, his lawyers are scraping the bottom of the legal loopholes barrell to try to stay the inevitable.

From MSNBC.com:

Earlier Thursday, Saddam’s chief lawyer implored world leaders to prevent the United States from handing over the ousted leader to Iraqi authorities for execution, saying the former dictator should enjoy protection from his enemies as a “prisoner of war.” “According to the international conventions, it is forbidden to hand a prisoner of war to his adversary,” Saddam’s lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, said in Amman, Jordan.

And it seems that Saddam himself was unsure of his own fate until very recently, when the signs became unmistakable:

Saddam met with two of his half-brothers on Thursday and passed on personal messages to his family, a lawyer said.

Badie Aref, one of Saddam's lawyers, said the rare meeting with maternal half-brothers Sabawi and Watban Ibrahim Hassanal-Tikriti, who are in U.S. custody, was at the request of the ousted Iraqi leader and took place inside his heavily guarded prison cell in Baghdad.

Aref said Saddam was in very high spirits and had sensed “something was happening relating to the sentence” when prison guards took away a small radio he had been given several months ago.

“He met Sabawi and Watban and gave them letters to his family in anticipation.... He is clearly unaware of the details of what is happening around him and prepared to give his life as a martyr to his country,” Aref told Reuters by telephone.

“He was in very high spirits and clearly readying himself,” Aref said during a visit to Dubai.

“He told them that he was happy he would meet his death at the hands of his enemies and be a martyr and not just languish in prison in oblivion.”

You know what? I'm happy he won't just sit around in prison, too.

Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.

Of course, the UN, who is slow to act on REAL human rights violations has condemned the execution:

After his sentence was given, Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, urged Iraq to ensure a fair appeals process and to refrain from executing Saddam even if the sentence is upheld.

I wonder how the UN's sudden concern makes the families of those who were found in mass graves feel, or those enduring slow genocide in Africa, for that matter?

Let's hope that for Saddam's sake, the hangman gets the eqation right... Otherwise, Saddam and Tom Ketchum might have a similar fate: