NYT: Second Iraq Hanging Also Went Awry

[gristy]

Didn't see this in LBN. Pretty gruesome.

BAGHDAD, Jan. 15 — Iraq’s turbulent effort to reckon with the violence of its past took another macabre turn on Monday when the execution of Saddam Hussein’s half brother ended with the hangman’s noose decapitating him after he dropped through the gallows trapdoor.

An official video played to a small group of Iraqi and Western reporters more than 13 hours after the hanging showed Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, former head of Mr. Hussein’s secret police, standing nervously on the trapdoor in a flame-orange jumpsuit of the kind used at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, his head and mustache shaved. Beside him, praying feverishly in identical garb, stood the other condemned man, Awad Hamad al-Bandar, the former chief judge of Mr. Hussein’s revolutionary court.

www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/world/middleeast/16hang.html?hp&ex=1169010000&en=0e3df6eb55462123&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[Pachamama]

1. I feel sick after reading this...I've never been a supporter of the death penalty, but the more I've

heard of late about these "hangings", I think it is one of the most barbaric and disgusting ways to put someone to death....

:puke:

[ender]

2. funny enough...

hanging is one of the more humane ways to kill someone /provided its done right/.

[eowyn_of_rohan]

3. Nothing humane about the waiting period before a hanging

or any other death sentence for that matter... the psychological torture is anything but humane.

[Kelvin Mace]

4. I can't think of anything humane about

an execution.