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Saddam boosted fitness training for hanging: lawyer Tue Jan 9, 11:48 AM By Suleiman al-Khalidi

AMMAN (Reuters) - Less than 48 hours before he was hanged, Saddam Hussein said he had doubled the workout on his treadmill to be in good shape when he faced the gallows, according to his Iraqi lawyer.

Wadood Fawzi Shams Deen, who met the ousted leader at a U.S. military camp in one of his former palaces on December 28, says Saddam told him and another lawyer that he had done 35 minutes of exercise in the previous two days.

"I am making extra effort to prove to them that an Arab dies with honor and dignity defending honorable principles," Shams Deen quoted Saddam as saying.

Saddam's hanging, secretly recorded in footage distributed on the Internet, has turned him into a martyr in parts of the Arab world, overshadowing memories of his often brutal and bloody rule and of his conviction for crimes against humanity.

Pictures of his composed conduct and erect bearing in the face of taunting at a shambolic execution has helped the supporters who have already begun burnishing his image as a hero -- even as the court still trying Saddam's associates shows pictures of thousands of Iraqi Kurds killed in chemical attacks.

The value of posterity was not lost on Saddam. "The execution will turn Saddam Hussein into a symbol for another hundred years," he said, according to the lawyers, who took extensive notes of their last conversation with him.

Saddam, smoking a Cuban Cohiba cigar and wearing the same black overcoat he wore when he was hanged on December 30, told the lawyers he had turned down an offer of tranquilizers from a U.S. doctor when the appeals court upheld his death sentence.

"I told him that God has given me enough faith to do without them," Shams Deen said Saddam told him and Bander Awad al-Bander, the lawyer son of one of Saddam's co-defendants.

"I will face my creator with a brave heart and clean hands."

Offering cigars to his visitors and a nearby U.S. guard, Saddam said he had been crossing the Tigris River in broad daylight, swimming part of the way and using a small fisherman's boat for the rest, only days before his arrest in a tiny farmhouse cellar near his hometown, Tikrit, in December 2003.

POEMS

Saddam recited poems about chivalry, endurance, heroism and holy war (jihad), saying poetry had helped him deal with his years in U.S. captivity, much of it in solitary confinement, Shams Deen said.

"We have humbled the long nights and it has not broken our will," he quoted Saddam as saying. "Poetry was my window to the world."

Saddam said he had read the Koran, the Muslim holy book, eight times over during the holy fasting month of Ramadan.

Other titles he requested and got were poetry by the eminent Arab poet Al-Mutanabi and a copy of the U.N. human rights declaration.

Saddam said he had predicted to a senior American interrogator a week after his arrest in December 2003 that Iraq would be a magnet for all the groups that "hated America":

"They will fight America in Iraq, all in their own way and with their own agenda. It is better that you leave sooner rather than later."

Iraq would be a "bigger quagmire than Vietnam for the United States," Shams Deen quoted Saddam as saying, and by early 2007 U.S. troops would have been "driven out of Iraq in humiliation."

"They have reached a point of powerlessness," Saddam said, adding that the insurgency had gained strength throughout his detention.

"Maybe in the first three months they were in need of Saddam. But the resistance now doesn't need Saddam Hussein ... and will, God willing, defeat the occupiers of great Iraq," he said, according to the lawyers.

As he said farewell to his visitors, Saddam said he would leave his people "content that the moment of America's end in Iraq is fast approaching."

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Saddam aides hanged, film shows brother beheaded Mon Jan 15, 10:55 AM

By Mariam Karouny and Alastair Macdonald

ADVERTISEMENT BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Two of Saddam Hussein's aides were hanged before dawn on Monday, the Iraqi government said.

But despite its efforts to avoid the uproar that marred the execution of the former president two weeks ago, news that the noose ripped the head from Saddam's cancer-stricken half-brother as he plunged from the gallows appalled international critics of the process and fueled fury among Saddam's fellow Sunni Arabs.

On the defensive after Shi'ite sectarian taunts were heard in illicit film of Saddam's execution, a spokesman for the Shi'ite-led government insisted there was "no violation of procedure" during the executions of his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and former judge Awad Hamed al-Bander.

But defense lawyers and politicians from the once dominant Sunni Arab minority expressed anger at the fate of Barzan, Saddam's once feared intelligence chief, and there was also skepticism and condemnation of Iraq's Shi'ite-dominated leadership across the mostly Sunni-ruled Arab world.

Government officials showed journalists film of the two men standing side by side in orange jumpsuits on the scaffold, looking fearful before they were hooded and the nooses placed around their necks. There was no disturbance in the execution chamber -- apparently the same one where Saddam died on December 30.

Bander muttered the prayer: "There is no god but God."

Barzan, 55, a vocal presence during the year-long trial for crimes against humanity, appeared to tremble quietly. As the bodies plunged through the traps, Barzan's hooded head flew off and came to rest beside his body in a pool of blood below the empty noose under the gallows. Bander swung dead on his rope.

Officials said they would not release the film publicly.

Government adviser Bassam al-Husseini said the damage to the body was "an act of God." During his trial for crimes against humanity over the killings of 148 Shi'ites from Dujail, a witness said Barzan's agents put people in a meat grinder.

Hangmen gauge the length of rope needed to snap the neck of the condemned but not to create enough force to sever the head.

Saleem al-Jibouri, a senior Sunni Arab lawmaker, said Barzan may have been weakened by the cancer he was suffering.

SECTARIAN INSULT

Barzan's son-in-law hurled a sectarian insult at the government on pan-Arab Al Jazeera television: "As for ripping off his head, this is the grudge of the Safavids," he said -- a historical term referring to Shi'ite ties to non-Arab Iran.

"They have only came to Iraq for revenge," Azzam Salih Abdullah said from Yemen. "May God curse this democracy."

The hangings took place at 3 a.m. (0000 GMT) at the same former secret police base where Saddam was hanged on December 30, an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said. Officials tried to impose a media blackout for some hours but word leaked out.

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq said the executions were an entirely Iraqi affair with little U.S. involvement. Asked about the hangings, Zalmay Khalilzad told reporters: "It was an Iraqi process. It was an Iraqi decision, an Iraqi execution."

After Saddam was hanged, the United Nations urged Iraq to reconsider death sentences and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, an opponent of capital punishment, said last week he thought there should be a delay in executing the other two condemned men. Talabani left the country on Sunday to visit Syria.

The video showing Saddam being taunted, angered Sunni Arabs, embarrassed the government and the U.S. administration and raised sectarian tensions in a nation on the brink of civil war.

Shi'ites again celebrated in the streets of Baghdad's Sadr City slum, a bastion of the cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr. His name was heard being chanted at Saddam on the gallows. An unnamed guard faces legal proceedings following a government inquiry into the circumstances of Saddam's execution.

After Barzan's hanging, Moussa Jabor in Sadr City said: "This is the least he should get. He should have been handed over to the people. Execution is a blessing for him."

Barzan was a feared figure in Iraq at the head of the intelligence service in the 1980s, at a time when the Shi'ite majority was harshly oppressed, some like those from Dujail due to suspected links to Shi'ite Iran, then at war with Iraq.

Bander presided over the Revolutionary Court which sentenced 148 Shi'ite men and youths to death after an assassination attempt on Saddam in the town in 1982. With Saddam, they were convicted on November 5 and their appeals rejected on December 26.

Both are to be buried in the village of Awja, near the northern city of Tikrit, where Saddam was born and where he was buried two weeks ago, the provincial governor told Reuters.

Muslim tradition dictates they be interred within a day.

They would lie close to Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay, who were killed by U.S. troops in 2003, not in the building that has become Saddam's mausoleum, visited by thousands of mourners.

(Additional reporting by Claudia Parsons, Aseel Kami and Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad and Inal Ersan and Diala Saadeh in Dubai)

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In a ceremony attended by some of Washington's staunchest foes, Ecuador's new president — a left-leaning, U.S.-trained economist — took office on Monday, pledging to fight corruption and U.S.-inspired economic policies.

Rafael Correa, who won a run-off election against banana tycoon Alvaro Noboa in November, is the eighth president in ten years in Ecuador, a politically unstable nation of 14 million where the leading exports are oil and bananas.

Ecuador's new leader, Rafael Correa, is blessed by indigenous religious leaders during a ritual in Zumbahua, Ecuador, on Sunday.Ecuador's new leader, Rafael Correa, is blessed by indigenous religious leaders during a ritual in Zumbahua, Ecuador, on Sunday. (Fernando Llano/Associated Press)

He's one of a string of new populist leaders in Latin America.

Among those who travelled to Quito for his inauguration were Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales. Also on hand was Iran's hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, another leader who misses few chances to twist Washington's tail.

In an inauguration speech, Correa said the national constitution must be rewritten, a plan that is certain to put him in conflict with Ecuador's congress, which is dominated by his conservative opponents.

Keeping a campaign promise, he issued a decree calling for Ecuadorians to vote March 18 in a referendum on the need for a special assembly to rewrite the constitution. Continue Article

According to a statement issued by his office, he declared that "the historical moment of the nation and the whole continent demands a new constitution that prepares the country for the 21st century."

The existing political structure has collapsed, brought down partly by the "claws of corruption and political voracity," he said.

Correa, who holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, has described himself as "left-wing, not from the Marxist left but rather a Christian left."

Aims to steamroll 'over everyone': think-tank head

In the speech, he denounced "the so-called Washington consensus" on free markets and debt repayment and the "neo-liberal dogma and modelling-clay democracies that subject people, lives and societies" to market theories.

In a country where more than 60 per cent of people live in poverty, his platform attracted voters disgusted with the corruption and greed of the political elite, the Associated Press said in a report from Quito.

But some Ecuadorians worry that his real goal is to consolidate power in the presidency, as Chavez and Morales have done in Venezuela and Bolivia, AP said.

"He is leaving no room to negotiate, to reach an understanding," said Benjamin Ortiz, head of a Quito think tank. "He wants to steamroll over everyone."

Daughter, backers hold Saddam ceremony in Yemen 

SANAA (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein's daughter Raghd and several Yemeni political groups held a ceremony in the Yemeni capital to honor the former Iraqi leader on Wednesday, 40 days after his execution, in line with Islamic tradition.

"No one can ignore that he was a hero and one of the Arab nation's symbols," Raghd told Wednesday's gathering of several hundred in a Sanaa hall decorated with pictures of her father.

"He met God with a clean heart and a clear conscience," added Raghd, who arrived in the Yemeni capital on Tuesday for the ceremony, also attended by one of his lawyers.

Saddam was hanged on December 30 for crimes against humanity after U.S. troops invaded his country in 2003 and toppled his Baathist government.

On the day of his execution, a source close Saddam's family said Raghd, who lives in exile in Jordan, had asked that her father be buried in Yemen, which had urged the United States and Iraq against the hanging, saying it would fuel violence in Iraq.

But he was buried in Awja, his home village in northern Iraq near his two sons Uday and Qusay, killed by U.S. troops in 2003.

The government had initially indicated Saddam's body might be put in a secret, unmarked grave, fearing it could become a pilgrimage site for Baathist rebels.

Saddam had supporters in several Arab countries including Yemen, which angered Gulf Arab countries and lost huge financial support for perceived backing of Iraq during its 1990-1991 occupation of Kuwait.