| Presented without commentary; the man fisks himself. |
“It was a squalid little lynching in the end,” Galloway, a member of parliament who formed his own Respect Party after being expelled from the governing Labour Party, told the radio station Talksport.
Saddam, whom Galloway met before he was ousted in the 2003 US-led invasion, “managed quite predictably, if you knew anything about him, to show rather more dignity in these circumstances than those who were hanging him.”
The fiery politician claimed that the US government had acted illegally under international law by transferring a prisoner of war to his enemies for execution. “The Americans had entirely illegally under the rules of war handed over their prisoner of war to the puppet regime in Baghdad. This was immediately denied by the puppets in Baghdad,” Galloway said.
Galloway added that the filming of the execution “must rank as the biggest political blunder” since Latin American revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara was executed in Bolivia with US help in 1967. Pictures of Guevara’s corpse, Galloway said, helped turn “a man who was in global terms a thorn in side of the United States into a sword” that grew in force over the decades since his death.
“I promise you this,” Galloway warned the call-in chat show. ”The film of the execution of Saddam Hussein this morning will live in infamy and will haunt those who directed it for the remainder of their lives.”
“The response will be, already has been swift and terrible,” he said, referring to a simultaneous surge in violence.
Mocking US President George W. Bush who hailed Hussein’s execution as “an important milestone,” Galloway said: “It’s a milestone already on the road through the gates of hell.” He said Saddam has achieved what eluded him in life — “the status of martyr and Arab hero.”