The Executioner-In-Chief

Claudius Seidl has a good editorial in Sunday’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Saddam’s execution. Seidl is glad that the cell phone video surfaced since it gives the world the unvarnished truth of what was nothing more than a revenge murder. Seidl believes that,if anything, this video will galvanize worldwide opposition to capital punishment"

"Es gibt kein besseres Argument gegen die Todesstrafe, als wenn jemand Zeuge einer Hinrichtung wird." (There is no better argument against the death penalty, than if one is witness to an execution).

Seidl refers to Albert Camus brilliant essay Réfléxions sur la guillotine which is perhaps the most powerful refutation of capital punishment.  In Reflections on the Guillotine Camus recalls an episode in his own life that forever changed his understanding of capital punishment. Camus’ father returned from witnessing his first execution by guillotine, an event the elder Camus had been eagerly anticipating. He came home trembling and as pale as the grave. He vomited, then fell on his bed shaking, then vomited some more. It took him days to recover from the experience. He refused to ever speak of what he had seen and heard. Camus, who adored his father, knew from that moment that the question of administrative murder was one that would become one of the basic issues of his life.

In today’s Boston Globe, James Carroll, author of House of War, reminds us that the lynching of Saddam Hussein was nothing more than a continuation of George W. Bush’s policies:

"Let’s remember who this man is. As governor of Texas, he presided over the executions of 152 people, including the first woman put to death in Texas in a century. Her name was Karla Faye Tucker. Bush’s response to the world-wide plea raised in her behalf was an astounding display of cruelty, a mocking imitation of the woman begging not to be killed."

"Bush rejected appeals for clemency in every death penalty case that came before him. The Texas death chamber, with its lethal injection gurney, is a place of decorum. And savagery. That executions defined the main public distinction that Bush brought to the US presidency sums up the national disgrace, while suggesting also how little surprise there should be that America is presided over now by an executioner-in-chief."

Let us not forget the death warrants for each one of those executions in Texas were prepared by Alberto "Abu" Gonzales – now the Attorney General of the United States and the architect of the Bush administrations torture policy.  But Carroll sees the lynching of Saddam and the executions in Texas as a metaphor for the Bush administration’s disasterous Iraq War:

"Bush is the impresario of unnecessary violence. America has followed him into the death chamber of this war, and now he wants us to believe that the way out is through more death.

Iraqi loss of life remains mostly unimagined, but every evening on the television news, Americans see the sweet faces of young soldiers who have died in Bush’s war. They were heroes, not criminals, yet Bush dragged each one of them up onto a gallows. He positioned them on the trap door, hardly wincing as they then fell through. And now, in perhaps the greatest outrage of all, Bush claims that the way to justify the unnecessary deaths he has caused is to add to them. Escalation is his way of saying, go to hell."