Madam, - For sheer barbarism and obscenity it would be hard to beat the execution of Saddam Hussein. Moreover, the man couldn't possibly have hoped to get a fair trial and the outcome was preordained.
Let's be quite clear about one thing: capital punishment is cold-blooded, premeditated murder. We all know precisely where President Bush stands on the issue. He refused appeals for mercy in Texas to over 150 people who were about to be executed. The British government is in a different position, however. It claims to be against the death penalty but did absolutely nothing to prevent the execution. Margaret Beckett's words afterwards were simply sickening.
All the talk about Iraq being a sovereign country with a sovereign, independent government is utter nonsense. There are more than 200,000 foreign troops propping it up. The government there is a puppet of America, no more sovereign than the Vichy government in wartime France.
Why was Saddam Hussein not handed over to the Permanent International Tribunal at The Hague? The answer is quite clear. It is because that tribunal does not allow for the death penalty. Instead he was tried by a tribunal of the winners. There was a particular obscenity about his hooded, cowardly attendants mocking him in his last moments. It only goes to prove just what a sectarian regime is in power in Iraq. As he went with courage to his barbaric death, President Bush, we are told, slept through it all. Just think of the suffering Bush has caused to Iraq and its unfortunate people.
The media coverage of the execution was grotesque and utterly inhuman. Listening to the commentary on Sky News, one would have thought they were describing a football match. The photographs in the press of the moments before and after Saddam's death were truly awful. Any schoolchild could walk into a newsagents and see these on the front pages of newspapers. The effect is to cheapen and devalue the sacredness of human life.
I am reminded of the words of Malcolm Muggeridge on television and the media: "It is a fantasy world coarsened by the camera's insensitive eye prying into scenes of cruelty, violence and death from which our human senses otherwise shrink. Thus we have the filming of public assassinations and executions . . . What is this but a form of visual blasphemy?"
Yes, Saddam Hussein was a cruel tyrant and a dictator, but the so-called democracy which the US has brought to his country is worthless. After all the talk about human rights and freedom, which America and Britain claimed to be bringing to Iraq, surely Saddam had a right to expect better. His trial, the cruel manner of his death, the sheer indifference of the so-called free world to capital punishment and the grotesque, immoral and sensational media coverage demonstrate one thing - we have lost all sense of compassion and morality. Reason has, indeed, fled to brutish beasts. - Yours, etc,
ANTHONY REDMOND, North Great George's Street, Dublin 1.