The Hanging of Suddam

a friend writes:

But speaking of spectacles, wasn't the hanging of Saddam Hussein a doozy? As video of his march to the gallows appeared on the Internet, and then stopped abruptly after he was noosed, I mentioned to a friend that somebody, somehow would capture the rest of the story in moving pictures, if the price was right. And sure enough

As a news consumer and student of capital punishment, I was quite curious to see what it looked like to see a man literally come to the end of his rope. The outlaw few minutes that appeared on the Internet, although a muddled and incomplete piece of videography purported to be the rest of the story of Saddam's journey to the end, was nonetheless a grusesome tableau.

But that aside, there are other important questions from inquiring and skeptical minds that beg for answers. Was the purported cell phone video an actual account? Did someone get paid for it? By whom and how much? Was the gallows housed on property in the hands of the United States government or not? Who built the gallows, and how much did it cost?

A friend and I discussed these things at length last night in the context of gallows humor, and decided that the hanging apparatus was probably built by Haliburton or a subsidiary under a no-bid contract for an exorbitant cost to the American taxpayers.

And, in the end, the whole ordeal was a metaphor for the madness and botchery of the Iraq war. As the president of the United States himself said about Saddam's hanging, apparently with a straight face, it was not dignified.