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Chemical Ali to be executed

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  • #16
    Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
    I don't take pleasure in any man's death but I won't lose sleep tonight.
    Call me twisted but I'd have no problem spitting on his grave...or better yet, relieving myself on it.
    “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

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    • #17
      Iraqi Kurds rejoice over execution of Chemical Ali


      An AFP file photo of a Kurd showing pictures of his family before and after they were killed in the Halbja massacre.
      Iraqi Kurds have expressed joy over the execution of 'Chemical Ali' — a key player in the Baath regime's war machine, which killed thousands of Kurds.

      Ali Hassan al-Majid al-Tikritieh, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's first cousin and one of his most trusted men, nicknamed 'Chemical Ali,' was executed in Baghdad on Monday.

      The punishment was meted out for Majid's part in the 1988 chemical weapons attack on the northeastern Iraqi village of Halabja, which killed over 5,000 Kurds.

      In the attack, government warplanes showering Halabja for five hours with mustard gas and nerve agents in the most deadly chemical weapons attack on civilians in history.

      "I have heard the news of the execution [of] the criminals whose hands [are] stained with blood. This is a happy day for the Kurdish people," Reuters quoted Iraqi Kurd Saman Faruq as saying.

      Behnam Karim, another local, said, "As a Kurdish citizen I am very happy because of the decision. But I wish the decision can define Halabja's crime as a genocide."

      The verdict was issued earlier in the month, prompting jubilation in Halabja, where people were seen cheering and playing music on the streets.

      However, the former intelligence chief, who also held the interior and defense ministry portfolios, considered the massacre a feather in his cap.

      The ruling for the attack on Halabja was the fourth death sentence Majid received.

      In December 2008, he received another death sentence for war crimes committed during the 1991 Shia uprising in southern Iraq, where about 100,000 people were massacred.
      link

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      • #18
        Heres an article printed in March 1988, just after the Halabja gas attack.

        Thought it was very interesting given the perspective of the time.


        EIGHT years of carnage have not robbed the Gulf war of its capacity to shock. In the middle of March (the exact date is unclear) Iranian soldiers pushed the Iraqi army out of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in the Kurdish part of north-east Iraq. One or two days later (this date, too, is unclear), the Iraqi air force appears to have responded by bombing Halabja with some sort of poisonous gas.

        The Iraqis say it was the Iranians who bombed the town, a claim that contradicts the testimony of most survivors. The Kurds say that more than 4,000 people died, a claim difficult to verify. But western reporters and television crews, helicoptered into Halabja by the Iranians, found hundreds of corpses strewn around the town. Most were eerily unwounded, suggesting that they had been the victims of a quick-acting poison agent, possibly one of the nerve gases. Hundreds more victims, in hospitals in Tehran, had ferocious skin burns of the kind caused by mustard gas.

        If it was indeed the Iraqis who gas-bombed Halabja (the United States says that both sides stockpile chemical weapons) one result will be to deepen the hatred most Kurds of Iraq's mountainous north-east feel for the regime of President Saddam Hussein. Iraqi Kurds—armed by Iran with Katyusha rockets, mortars, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles—are undoubtedly playing a part in the current Iranian push in the north-east. An Iraqi counter-action would seem normal in the grisliness of a desperate war, were it not for the horror of the method Iraq seems to have used.

        Iraq has always said that it will, if necessary, use chemical weapons to stop an Iranian breakthrough. It has used gas before, to stop Iranian attacks on Basra, its second-biggest city. Iraq may have feared that an Iranian advance towards the provincial capital of Sulaymaniyah might eventually threaten the vital oilfields around Kirkuk. But to get there Iran's soldiers would have to fight their way through well-defended mountain passes, and then descend into open plains, where they are vulnerable to attack by Iraq's stronger air and armoured forces.

        The truth is that the new fighting in Iraq's north is no more likely to produce a decisive change in the course of the war than is the new round of attacks by both sides on ships in the Gulf, or the continuing firing of inaccurate and probably not particularly devastating missiles on to each other's cities. Yet this particularly horrible reappearance of the gas war follows the revival of both the “tanker war” and the “war of the cities”. In all three cases, it is the Iraqis who seem to have taken the initiative.

        On March 19th Iraqi aircraft struck Iran's main oil terminal at Kharg Island in the northern Gulf, setting fire to two tankers and killing 46 sailors. Iran responded with half a dozen attacks on neutral shipping. The war of the cities, meanwhile, has settled down into a dreary and dreadful routine. Iraq says it has fired around 110 missiles since the two sides started the present round of firing at the end of February. The Iraqis retaliate for attacks on their capital within minutes; the Iranians, who seem to have a smaller missile arsenal, take longer to shoot back. The Iraqis have fired as many as 11 missiles in a single day.

        None of these exchanges seems to have had a decisive effect. The drizzle of Iraqi missiles has been heavy enough to disrupt life in Tehran, but almost certainly not to destroy Iran's will to fight on. Instead, the missile war is taking on an increasingly symbolic character. Iran has been lobbing missiles into President Hussein's home town of Takrit, and Iraq has been firing on Qom, the Iranian holy city associated with Ayatollah Khomeini.

        Iraq is presumably hoping that its intensification of the war will remind the great powers of the ceasefire plan laid down in last July's United Nations Security Council Resolution 598. The Iraqis have accepted this; the Iranians have consistently ignored it. When Mr George Shultz, the American secretary of state, was in Moscow in February he thought the Russians were at last prepared to co-operate in clamping an international arms embargo on Iran. Nothing has happened since then: perhaps because Russia is bargaining for an American concession in the Afghan negotiations before it helps with Iran; maybe because Mr Gorbachev has now decided he does not want to infuriate Iran; possibly because Mr Shultz just misheard in Moscow.

        It suits the Russians to blame their inaction on Iraq's stubborn pursuit of the “war of the cities”. (Iran has accused them bitterly of providing Iraq with the missiles that thump into Tehran.) On March 7th Russia proposed a missiles-only ceasefire; the Iraqis brushed it angrily aside. Sir Geoffrey Howe, the British foreign secretary, has warned his Iraqi counterpart that the missile war has muddied the main issue, but Iraq does not seem to be listening.

        Iran, in contrast, has been showing its usual Persian subtlety. On February 28th its foreign minister wrote to the UN secretary-general, Mr Javier Perez de Cuellar, hinting at a new flexibility in the Iranian negotiating position. This was almost certainly designed to mislead; but on March 16th the Security Council was persuaded to endorse a decision by Mr Perez de Cuellar to invite the foreign ministers of both belligerents to New York for “intensive consultations”, code, on past experience, for further international ditherings.

        The Russians may in the end decide that an attempt to befriend both Iran and Iraq cannot work. They may then come off the fence and agree to an arms embargo. If the missiles Iraq has been firing at Tehran have helped Russia to delay that difficult decision, they will have prolonged a war Iraq badly wants to end.
        link

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        • #19
          I'll just restrict myself to saying it was a good day when he died, and I hope his neck didn't break
          In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.

          Leibniz

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          • #20
            Originally posted by Parihaka View Post
            I'll just restrict myself to saying it was a good day when he died, and I hope his neck didn't break

            Not a death penalty sort of guy, but I can't say I'm sad Iraqis don't agree with me on this one. And yes, I too hope the hangman executed his task poorly.
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            Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C

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            • #21
              Originally posted by Bigfella View Post
              Not a death penalty sort of guy,
              Nor am I but there is a level of mass murder where I no longer regard the perpetrator as human, nor warranting that level of care or concern that entails but instead they simply become a dangerous animal that needs to be culled to protect the rest of the species and as an example to others of similar mind. Ali Hassan al-Majid al-Tikritieh was one of those.
              In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.

              Leibniz

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              • #22
                I get sad when people die, even bad ones. That said, when I was in foster care my adopted parents took in this Kurdish girl whose parents couldn't control her. She was really messed up, you know, from all the war and stuff. Eventually they diagnosed her with some sort of traumatic stress disorder and sent her to the hospital. I'll never forget the girl. I'm not real sure how I feel about these executions. The Iraqis have to have their revenge somehow for all the suffering endured and blood spilled. I guess this is their way.

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                • #23
                  Originally posted by Parihaka View Post
                  I'll just restrict myself to saying it was a good day when he died, and I hope his neck didn't break
                  Jeez Pari , thats a bit of a choker ;)

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