Before he is put to death, Saddam Hussein will be allowed one last phone call. He will be given a glass of water, a moment to pray and an opportunity to make a statement about his life and crimes. The entire event will be recorded on video to be stored in the Iraqi government archives. Then his neck will be slipped into the noose of a 2-in.-thick hemp rope. A few moments later, his life will end.
That's how recent executions have proceeded in Iraq--at least when the equipment works. Since the Iraqi government reintroduced capital punishment in 2004, several executions have been beset by glitches and logistical snafus. At first, executioners used an old rope left over from Saddam's regime that stretched too much to break the condemned's neck; it sometimes took as long as eight minutes for the hanged to die. New ropes brought in for later executions jerked harder on the convicted person's spine, but executioners soon noticed the cords fraying on the bend of the reinforced steel installed in the cement ceiling of the gallows. During a recent round of executions, on Sept. 6, the rope snapped after 12 hangings, sending a condemned man plummeting 15 ft. through the trap door onto the hard concrete floor below. Miraculously, he survived. "Allah saved me!" he shouted. "Allah saved me!" For 40 minutes, prison guards, officials and witnesses engaged in heated arguments over whether or not to interpret the broken rope as divine intervention.
It may not be an efficient process, but the death penalty is back in vogue in Iraq. After the U.S. invasion, capital punishment was suspended by L. Paul Bremer, head of the now-defunct Coalition Provisional Authority, but interim Prime Minster Iyad Allawi reinstated it a year later. Since September 2005, when three men were hanged in the southwestern city of Kut after being convicted of running a murder-and-kidnapping ring, the Iraqi government has executed 50 prisoners convicted of murder or kidnapping, says spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh. An adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says the government plans to execute "two or three more batches of 14 or 15 each" in the coming months. Al-Maliki told the BBC last week that Saddam too could be hanged "before the end of the year." For the beleaguered Iraqi government, the practice of executions plays a political role as well as a legal one: amid the inescapable violence on Iraq's streets, the death penalty plays well with Iraqis tired of seeing gangs commit murder with impunity. "From the Iraqi point of view," says al-Maliki's adviser, "they don't like to see a lot of people get killed every day and have a low number of executions."
And yet an examination of the way the death penalty is administered in Iraq casts doubt on the government's candor about the frequency of executions, and that raises questions about whether justice is being flouted in Iraq's rush to execute. According to an Iraqi official involved in coordinating executions, the hanging rope has been used more extensively than has been publicly acknowledged by the Iraqi government. Three days of secret executions took place between December 2005 and March 2006, says the official, who attended all three sets of hangings. When the additional executions are taken into account, according to an official in the Prime Minister's office who declined to give an exact number, approximately 90 have been executed, almost double the officially declared tally.