Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Officials said a three-man Interior Ministry committee would look into the scenes that have caused outrage and public demonstrations among Mr. Hussein’s Sunni Arab loyalists in Iraq, and widespread dismay elsewhere, especially in the Middle East. In an unofficial cellphone video recording that was broadcast around the world and posted on countless Web sites, Mr. Hussein is shown standing on the gallows platform with the noose around his neck at dawn on Saturday, facing a barrage of mockery and derision from unseen tormentors below the gallows.

As the shock of those scenes reached a new crescendo in Iraq, American officials said that they had worked until the last hours of Mr. Hussein’s life to persuade Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to delay the execution. The officials, who spoke on condition that they not be identified, said they appealed to Mr. Maliki not to execute Mr. Hussein at dawn on Saturday because of the onset of a major Islamic festival, and because of constitutional and legal questions that the Americans believed threw the legitimacy of the execution into doubt.

But when Mr. Maliki decided to go ahead with the hanging, the Americans said they made no further attempts to stop it, having concluded that they could advise the Iraqis against the execution, but not prevent it if the Iraqis persisted, out of respect for Iraqi sovereignty.

When asked if that decision had been made in the White House, the Americans refused to say, noting only that it came some time before the final exchanges on Friday night. Mr. Hussein was hanged at 6:10 a.m. on Saturday, about seven hours after what the officials said was their final attempt to postpone the hanging.

“We told the prime minister that going forward on the first day of Id would have a negative reaction in the Islamic world, and among the Iraqi people,” a senior American official said, recounting a telephone conversation with Mr. Maliki that began at 10:30 p.m. Baghdad time on Friday. The reference was to the Id al-Adha holiday, which began for Sunnis on Saturday, marking the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. “Therefore,” the official said, “we said we thought it would be better if they delayed until after Id, and use the delay to resolve the legal issues.”

The American official said that Mr. Maliki had never fully explained his urgency in carrying out the death sentence, which was upheld last Tuesday in an appeals court ruling that set off a 30-day countdown for executions to be carried out after a final appeal has been turned down. But the prime minister gave one explanation that appeared to weigh heavily on his mind, the American said, and that was his fear that Mr. Hussein might be the subject of an insurgent attempt to free him if the procedural wrangling over the execution were protracted.

With some Iraqi politicians raising fresh demands for Mr. Maliki’s dismissal, the Americans, in offering to have a senior official discuss the matter in a telephone interview with The New York Times, appeared eager to protect the Bush administration from a fresh surge of criticism for its handling of events in Iraq.

The official said that among American officials in Iraq who had tried to stop Mr. Maliki from rushing Mr. Hussein to the gallows, the reaction to the scenes of abuse had been one of dismay.

“Well, yes, when I think of the behavior of the people who were there, I’m disappointed and distressed, that’s true,” the official who spoke in the telephone interview said. He said he had been one of the Americans who intervened with Mr. Maliki on Friday night and earlier last week to try to delay the hanging.

Mr. Maliki seemed equally eager to ward off the opprobrium stirred by the execution. His aides announced that the events at the hanging would be the subject of an inquiry. A prosecutor who attended the execution, Munkith al-Faroun, said he thought one of the invited witnesses had recorded the session on a cellphone, but he could not recall his name.

The government inquiry was ordered as a groundswell of protest grew at Sunni population centers across Iraq. The protests, sporadic in the first 72 hours after the hanging, appeared to be building in intensity as Iraqi and American troops relaxed security cordons that had been thrown around centers of diehard support for Mr. Hussein, including his hometown, Tikrit, 100 miles north of Baghdad, and Awja, the village where he was born, a few miles away. The protesters carried portraits of Mr. Hussein, chanted his name, and fired weapons in the air.

Thousands of mourners flocked to Awja, where Mr. Hussein’s body has lain in a reception hall. The body, in a plain wood coffin draped in an Iraqi flag, has become a point of pilgrimage for loyalists. Many of those reaching Awja have wept as they filed past the coffin, shouting slogans of fealty of the kind that were universal in Iraq when Mr. Hussein was the country’s dictator.

“Maliki, you coward, you are an American agent,” cried one demonstrator in Tikrit, referring to the prime minister. “Iran, out, out!” another man shouted, echoing anger among Sunnis at the rise to power in Baghdad of Shiite religious groups backed by Iran, including Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party.

Prosecutor Munkith al-Faroon, who is heard appealing for order on explicit Internet video of Saturday's hanging that has inflamed sectarian passions, said on Tuesday he threatened to leave if the jeering did not stop --

and that would have halted the execution as a prosecution observer must be present by law.

"I threatened to leave," Faroon told Reuters. "They knew that if I left, the execution could not go ahead."

Many in Saddam's Sunni minority, and moderate Shi'ites and Kurds, have been angered and embarrassed by the video. In it, observers chant "Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!" for Shi'ite militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr. Saddam by contrast looks dignified on the gallows and replies: "Is this what you call manhood?"

As the Iraqi government mounted an investigation into how officials smuggled in mobile phone cameras, he also challenged the accounts of the justice minister and an adviser to the prime minister who said the film was shot by a guard -- Faroon said one of two people taking video was a senior government official.

"Two officials were holding mobile phone cameras," said Faroon, who was a deputy prosecutor in the case for which Saddam was hanged and is the chief prosecutor in a second trial that will continue against his aides for genocide against the Kurds.

"One of them I know. He's a high-ranking government official," Faroon said, declining to name the man. "The other I also know by sight, though not his name. He is also senior.

"I don't know how they got their mobiles in because the Americans took all our phones, even mine which has no camera."

Faroon said he was the only prosecutor from Saddam's trial for crimes against humanity against the people of the Shi'ite town of Dujail who was present in Baghdad. The Penal Code stipulates that one prosecutor must be present at any execution.

The Iraqi government has reportedly made an arrest in connection with the unauthorized cell-phone video of Saddam Hussein's execution.

An adviser to Iraq's prime minister says the person believed to have shot that video is under arrest. And he describes the man as "an official who supervised the execution."

Iraqi state T-V today aired an official video of Saddam's hanging, with no audio and no images of Saddam's actual death.

The inflammatory cell-phone video -- with taunts from witnesses -- appeared on Arab T-V and the Internet. And it touched off worldwide protests and demonstrations by Iraq's minority Sunnis.

An Iraqi prosecutor who was also at the execution has denied another report implicating Iraq's national security adviser in the leaked video.

On Wednesday, an Iraqi prosecutor who was also present at the execution denied a report that he had accused National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie of possible responsibility for the leaked video.

"I am not accusing Mowaffak al-Rubaie, and I did not see him taking pictures," Munqith al-Faroon, a prosecutor in the case that sent Saddam to the gallows, told The Associated Press.

"But I saw two of the government officials who were ... present during the execution taking all the video of the execution, using the lights that were there for the official taping of the execution. They used mobile phone cameras. I do not know their names, but I would remember their faces," al-Faroon said in a telephone interview.

The prosecutor said the two officials were openly taking video pictures, which are believed to be those which appeared on Al-Jazeera satellite and a Web site within hours of Saddam's execution.

The New York Times on Wednesday reported that al-Faroon told the newspaper "one of two men he had seen holding a cell phone camera aloft to make a video of Mr. Hussein's last moments up to and past the point where he fell through the trapdoor was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Mr. Maliki's national security adviser."

The Times said it had been unable to reach al-Rubaie for comment. AP also could not reach him Wednesday. His secretary said the security adviser, a close aide to al-Maliki, was in Najaf and would not return until later.

Al-Faroon said there were 14 Iraqi officials, including himself and another prosecutor, as well as three hangmen present for the execution. All the officials, he said, were flown by U.S. helicopter to the former military intelligence facility where Saddam was put to death in an execution chamber used by his own security men for years.

• Victor's vengeance
• The U.S. and Saddam, a tortured history
• Iraq's morning after
• Saddam Hussein executed in Iraq
• Martyrdom for Saddam 101

Labels: Iraq, Iraq war, Saddam, Saddam Hussein