very interesting observation on Saddam hanging video at TPM...

[carpe diem]

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/011739.php

Looking at the photo the NYT is leading with on its homepage, I am struck by the motley bunch of executioners. Hooded to protect their identities, they look like a gang of toughs from a B movie--or, on further reflection, like the hooded terrorists who in the earlier days of our occupation were murdering hostages like Nick Berg, on camera, for maximum shock value.

........................
...i don't know why, but that just stood out to me...

[Cleita]

1. Are you thinking that they look a lot like al Queda operatives?

There might be a connection between al Queda, some of the Saudi Arabian royal family and the BFEE. One of these days the truth will come out.

[carpe diem]

4. ...i don't know, but something just looks weird...

...i also agree with this summation from Josh Marshall himself...

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/011729.php


This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur -- phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

___

The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren't grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the whole thing's a mess and that they're going to be remembered for it -- defined by it -- for decades and centuries. But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of this was about the president's issues with his dad and the hang-ups he had about finishing Saddam off -- so before we go, we can hang the guy as some big cosmic 'So There!'
___

Marty Peretz, with some sort of projection, calls any attempt to rain on this parade "prissy and finicky." Myself, I just find it embarrassing. This is what we're reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there's nothing else this president can get right.

[Poll_Blind]

2. I wrote something similar in GD:P this morning (link)

Right here. Someone mentioned Nick Berg in a thread last night and it got me thinking about that aspect, the visual aspect, of what was going on- as opposed to the symbolic aspect of what you're seeing.

  I agree, it's a really shabby way to run an execution if you want to convince people that some sort of due process has been served.

  I also watched it again and I was struck how white most of his "guards" are. It's difficult to tell because Saddam himself appears pretty light-skinned but the hands of the guards (except the curiously-tall guy behind Saddam and to his right) appear whiter than I'd expect.

  Still, it's not like every Arab's going to have a dark olive complexion. Since the Berg reference last night it'd been kicking around in my head.

PB

[beam me up scottie]

3. I heard a BBC reporter in Baghdad saying that Saddam accepted the noose,

stoically, perhaps in defiance of the United States.

He had been talking to Iraqis, they see things MUCH differently than we do.

We're calling him a coward, they're making a martyr.

[AnnInLa]

5. I thought Marshall's post was the best I've read on this sorry

episode. He is, at times, a very gifted writer.

Also this by Jane Hamsher at www.firedoglake.com : Murder as PR

snip

Any sympathy I might feel for Saddam's plight would find him standing at the end of a very long line of victims of this war, and it's not even an abhorrence of the death penalty that moves me today (all thouth I most certainly feel that this is nothing a civilized nation has any place engaging in). That sickened feeling in my stomach seems to mark some kind of new low to which we have fallen, murder as PR to inch the arctic approval ratings of the pathological boy king and his disastrous war incrementally upward. Codpiece justice and death-as-photo-op reigns supreme. Perhaps this is just the final, gruesome swan song of a morally bankrupt right wing as it exits center stage, the perverse final chorus it sings in its death throes.

It is nonetheless hideous to watch.

[rebel with a cause]

6. Can anyone say ............

MERCENARIES?????????? B-)