Ebonius, you are full of rage, but I agree with you completely about the hypocrisy of the media. I had no lust to see Saddam die, but it's telling that so many outraged posters here conjure up sex and pornography in their rants.

The ultimate schizophrenia is to hold a belief, whether from religious upbringing or osmosis, that "Thou shalt not kill" is a law calling human beings to the best of themselves, and at the same time, support a society (a world, a penal system, a legal universe) that posits:

It's wrong to kill and if you kill someone we'll show you how wrong that was by killing you.

No mind, no conscience, can reconcile this without losing humanity.

The appropriate punishment for someone like Saddam is to be kept in a plain cell, treated decently but given no privileges whatsoever, and with nothing to view for the rest of his life but walls covered with photos of his victims.

His only visitors should be a spiritual advisor, and the relatives of his victims, who should be able to address him directly (verbally) and express their anguish and rage until they are spent.

Eventually, if this scenario were allowed to play out with all murderers (for as long as it took for every person to say to the criminal everything they had to say), most victims' families and communities would see that stopping the breath of a disordered person is no satisfaction at all, but building a compassionate, progressive culture is.

Believe me, I don't think of the US as completely innocent, and I oppose the War on Terror. But I'm quite happy to see Saddam hanging from a rope. One of the few clear-cut instances of a person getting their just desserts.

Glenda Jackson, the former Labour minister and prominent critic of the war, said ... "We've gone in there and turned that country into total, unmitigated mayhem so we could show the Middle East that there is a better way of conducting civil liberties. I don't think this is a particularly good message."

Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, by contrast had issued his own personal reaction to the execution, saying: "Saddam Hussein's death does not vindicate in any way the ill-conceived and disastrous decision to invade Iraq. His execution does not make an illegal war legal, any more than it will put an end to the violence and destruction."

To execute a murderer is hypocrisy. It's just that simple. To stoop to the level of the offender is to debase the society.

Apparently Saddam was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis. Regrettable. But now the U.S. and its "coalition" at the behest of George W Bush are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Is this not even more regrettable?

Saddam should have been tried at the Hague for crimes against humanity, just like George W Bush (along with Cheney and Rumsfeld, at least) should be tried at the Hague for crimes against humanity.

There is no sustainable argument for killing as punishment, be it logical, ethical, moral, philosophical or practical. It is a clear display of how we humans use the power of our large brains to delude ourselves using emotions and the reptilian reactive brain. It is hypocritical for starters, to kill someone because they have killed. But more so, it is bizarre that we assume death is a punishment. This is the most insane operating belief, in my opinion, we have. Without mortality, there would be no life, period. Life is the primary cause of death. This disconnection from reason and intuition is no less than amazing to me. It is also astonishing that so called "Christians" could ever support the death "penalty". Don't get me wrong, I find the unintentional irony delicious and as much a part of who we are as anything else.

As for politics, there can be no real healing for Iraq in the killing of Saddam. There can be no reverse-justification for the war by the killing of Saddam. There can be nothing but the act of killing for revenge, against every single moral code of all three Abraham-originated religious traditions on Planet Earth.

Nothing will be gained from this for anyone but Saddam. He does not suffer, or spend the balance of his life reflecting on his crimes as a captive deprived of freedom. He wins again.

Executing Saddam solved a huge problem for the US, and others, including Turkey. The trial should have been held at the Hague, where evidence linking the US, Turkey, and probably the Saudis, to Saddams crimes would have come out. Of course then Cheney, Rumsfeld, and lots of other US apparatchiks would have been indicted for crimes against humanity. The American empire cruises on enriching the few and screwing the many.

I should have added that the execution sends a clear message to other American puppets (like what happened to Noriega) that independence will not be tolerated. After the Gulf War Saddam flirted with the Russians and French. That was the kiss of death for him. Big Oil and their Saudi investors would not tolerate that.

And yet Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz walk the earth free men.

Trying, convicting and hanging him in the middle of a bloody civil war he ruthlessly kept in check would be true farce if it weren't so tragic. I actually felt sorry for the former dictator; which is amazing considering who he was, but a testimony to how bad our own "tinpot general" ruined that country.

If history is any guide, things will get far worse before they get any better. France followed the execution of its king with it's Reign of Terror, Russia had its bloody civil war, Somalia, Yugoslavia... these are histories lessons to sweeping away the old regime and leaving nothing legitimate to replace it with. When the blood and dust finally settle, I believe the Iraqis will remember who was responsible for all this, and we may well be fighting them over here, because we fought them over there.