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Downfall.

Article Excerpt
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

Albert Camus

On 5 November 2006, a trial that had held the nation of Iraq in its grip like a macabre soap opera since October 2005 came to its predictable end, with a verdict of guilty and a sentence of death. Saddam Hussein, the Baathist president who ruled his country with an iron fist, was sentenced to hang for the killing of 148 people in the village of al-Dujail, an atrocity of reprisal for an attempted assassination in 1982. On 30 December, after the verdict was ratified by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, the world watched with grisly fascination as the ex-dictator made his final walk to the gallows.

Of course the gruesome spectacle was choreographed to perfection. Garbed in black, the deposed dictator, looking every one of his 69 years of age, was led to the gallows, the very same gallows from which his feared secret police had mercilessly dispatched those deemed subversive. The 'butcher...

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