Saddam Hussein Executed
Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging after three years in U.S. custody, CBS News has confirmed. He died before dawn Saturday in Iraq, which was just before 10 p.m. Friday EST.
Saddam was convicted of murder in the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims from an Iraqi town where assassins tried to kill Saddam in 1982.
Clutching a Quran and refusing a hood, Saddam Hussein went to the gallows before sunrise, executed by vengeful countrymen after a quarter-century of remorseless brutality that killed countless thousands and led Iraq into disastrous wars against the United States and Iran.
In Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City, people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate the former dictator's death. The government did not impose a round-the-clock curfew as it did last month when Saddam was convicted to thwart any surge in retaliatory violence.
Ali Hamza, a 30-year-old university professor, said he went outside to shoot his gun into the air after he heard the news.
"Now all the victims' families will be happy because Saddam got his just sentence," said Hamza, who lives in Diwaniyah, a Shiite town 80 miles south of Baghdad.
"We are looking for a new page of history despite the tragedy of the past," said Saif Ibrahim, a 26-year-old Baghdad resident.
But people in the Sunni-dominated city of Tikrit, once a power base of Saddam, lamented his death.
"The president, the leader Saddam Hussein is a martyr and God will put him along with other martyrs. Do not be sad nor complain because he has died the death of a holy warrior," said Sheik Yahya al-Attawi, a cleric at the Saddam Big Mosque.
It was a grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three U.S. presidents. Despite his ouster, Washington, its allies and the new Iraqi leaders remain mired in a fight to quell a stubborn insurgency by Saddam loyalists and a vicious sectarian conflict.
CBS News correspondent Randall Pinskton confirmed Saddam's death from his defense attorney. It had been reported by Arab television stations in Iraq.
On his last night alive, Saddam sat alone on death row with his Koran, the Muslim holy book, Pinkston reports. As his time waned, Saddam received two of his half brothers in his cell and was said to have given them his personal belongings and a copy of his will.
The execution took place during the year's deadliest month for U.S. troops, with the toll reaching 108.
State-run Iraqiya television initially reported that Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, also were hanged. However, three officials later said only Saddam was executed.
"We wanted him to be executed on a special day," National Security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie told state-run Iraqiyah.
The Pentagon said that U.S. fighting forces in Iraq are ready for any escalation of violence there.
"U.S. forces in Iraq are obviously at a high state of alert anytime because of the environment that they operate in and because of the current security situation," said spokesman Bryan Whitman.
A statement from President Bush issued by the White House Friday night acknowledged Saddam's execution, calling it "the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime."
"Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq, but it is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself, and be an ally in the War on Terror," the statement said.
CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that until being turned over to Iraqi control, Saddam remained in a jail cell in U.S. custody. The U.S. military had been prepared since early Friday morning to hand over Saddam to the Iraqi government, which wanted to execute the deposed dictator as soon as possible.
Anticipation built around Saddam's hanging after an advisor to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said it would happen some time before 6:00 a.m. Baghdad time. Official witnesses to the execution gathered in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone in final preparation for his hanging, as state television broadcast footage of his regime's atrocities.
The downfall of a dictator
Lara Logan reports on Saddam's legacyThe Iraqi government had readied all the necessary documents, including a "red card" — an execution order introduced during Saddam's dictatorship.
Saddam had been in U.S. custody since he was captured in December 2003.
A member of Saddam's legal team said U.S. authorities were maintaining physical custody of Saddam to prevent him from being humiliated before his execution. He said the Americans also want to prevent the mutilation of his corpse, something that has happened to other deposed Iraqi leaders.
"The Americans want him to be hanged respectfully," al-Nueimi said. "If Saddam is humiliated publicly or his corpse ill-treated," it could cause an uprising and the Americans would be blamed, he said.
Mariam al-Rayes, a legal expert and a former member of the Shiite bloc in parliament, told Iraqiya television that the execution "was filmed and God willing it will be shown. There was one camera present, and a doctor was also present there."
Al-Rayes, an ally of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, did not attend the execution. She said Al-Maliki did not attend but was represented by an aide.
Najeeb al-Nueimi, a member of Saddam's legal team in Qatar said he had requested a final meeting with the deposed Iraqi leader. "His daughter in Amman was crying, she said, 'Take me with you,'" al-Nueimi said late Friday.
Leading up to the execution, there was a religious issue that complicated the timing. The Muslim holy period of Eid begins this weekend, and there is some question whether Iraqi law permits a Muslim to be executed on a holy day. Martin reports that the Iraqi government reportedly consulted Muslim clerics.
Munir Haddad, a judge on the appeals court that upheld Saddam's death sentence, said he was ready to attend the hanging and that all the paperwork was in order, including the red card.
"All the measures have been done," Haddad said.
In the United States, just more than an hour before Saddam was executed, a judge rejected a request by his lawyers to delay the Iraqi leader's execution.
The attorneys had sought an emergency restraining order from a federal court in Washington to block Saddam's handover to Iraqi control. Earlier, a similar request made on behalf of Saddam's former chief justice was rejected by an appeals court. An appeal of the latest ruling is possible, but it's unclear if that will happen.
Saddam's lawyers issued a statement Friday calling on "everybody to do everything to stop this unfair execution." The statement also said the former president had been at the time transferred from U.S. custody, though American and Iraqi officials later denied that.
The governments of Yemen and Libya also made eleventh hour appeals that Saddam's life be spared. Yemeni Prime Minister Abdul-Kader Bajammal wrote to the U.S. and Iraqi presidents, warning in his letter to President Bush that Saddam's execution would "increase the sectarian violence" in Iraq, according to the official Yemeni news agency Saba.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi made an indirect appeal to save Saddam, telling Al-Jazeera television that his trial was illegal and that he should be retried by an international court.
Al-Maliki said opposing Saddam's execution was an insult to his victims. His office said he made the remarks in a meeting with families of people who died during Saddam's rule.
"Our respect for human rights requires us to execute him, and there will be no review or delay in carrying out the sentence," al-Maliki said.
Dozens of Iraqi-Americans gathered late Friday at a Detroit-area mosque to celebrate reports that Saddam Hussein had been executed, cheering and crying as drivers honked horns in jubilation. Dave Alwatan wore an Iraqi flag around his shoulders and flashed a peace sign to everyone he passed at the Karbalaa Islamic Educational Center in this suburb of Detroit, a city that has one of the nation's largest concentrations of people with roots in the Middle East. "Peace," he said, grinning and laughing. "Now there will be peace for my family."
About 10 people registered to attend the hanging gathered in the Green Zone before they were to go to the execution site, the Iraqi official said.
Those who were cleared to attend the execution included a Muslim cleric, lawmakers, senior officials and relatives of victims of Saddam's brutal rule, the official said. He did not disclose the location of the gallows.
An Iraqi appeals court upheld Saddam's death sentence Tuesday for the killing of 148 people who were detained after an attempt to assassinate him in the northern Iraqi city of Dujail in 1982. The court said the hanging should take place within 30 days.
Saddam was born in 1937 in a village near Tikrit. As a teenager he was fashionably anti-British and anti-Western. He joined the Baath party but fled when his part in a plot to kill the prime minister, Abdel Karim Qassem, was discovered.
The ruthless Saddam gained a position on the ruling Revolutionary Command Council and for years he was the power behind the president, Ahmed Hassan Bakr.
During the 1970s oil boom, Saddam's Baath Party envisioned a country ruled by Arab socialism.
As deputy chairman of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council, Saddam headed an economic planning council that oversaw the building of vast industrial plants, huge housing projects, eight-lane highways, bridges, airports, universities and communication systems.
By 1979 Saddam had achieved his ambition. He became president and set the tone of his rule immediately by putting to death dozens of his rivals. Even outsiders who met him were quickly aware of the "Saddam fear factor" and its effects, CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey reports.
"I think its fair to say that the intimidation, the fear that he caused reached into the inner circle of his regime and that deprived him of contradictory points of view," said former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy.
Under Saddam, imprisonment or summary execution of political foes was common. Political parties, unions and civic groups not controlled by Baathists were banned. Traditional bonds were reshaped to support a one-party state.
Millions of Iraqis, though, were able for the first time in their lives to wear designer clothes and vacation in London, Madrid or Paris. Others started tasting imported foods and driving Japanese, German or French cars — all at government subsidized prices.
Within a year he made the first of several major miscalculations: A lightning attack to seize a waterway turned into the Iran-Iraq war, an 8-year bloodbath.
His 1980 invasion of Iran, portrayed as a fight against the Persians on behalf of all Arabs, set off an eight-year war that drained Iraq's economy and killed hundreds of thousands on both sides.
In 1990 Iraq's invasion of Kuwait would turn out to be another miscalculation, but in the months before the Gulf War of 1991, Saddam's stock in the Arab world rose considerably. Many Arabs saw Saddam as a man willing to stand up to the U.S., Israel and the West.
As years of sanctions ground down his people, Saddam refused to comply with weapons inspectors and remained the arrogant dictator, loved and hated in equal measure, isolated from his people and reality. Even he may not have known that he did not possess the weapons of mass destruction that were the pretext for the U.S.-led invasion, Pizzey reports.