Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Does the Times Have an Agenda? Naaaaahhhh   [Andy McCarthy]

Here is a New York Times news story from 2003, describing partial birth abortion, a grisly procedure which the Times supports:

[This is] ... a type of abortion, known medically as intact dilation and extraction, used to terminate pregnancies in the second or third trimester. Abortion opponents say the procedure typically calls for the lower part of the fetus's body to be delivered, the head to be punctured and a dead but intact fetus to be delivered. It is rarely used, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Here is a New York Times news story from this morning, describing execution of the death penalty, which the Times opposes, against Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein's half-brother and the head of his secret police (perpetrator of numerous barbaric atrocities against Iraqis), and Awad Hamad al-Bandar, the former chief judge of Saddam's revolutionary court. The punishment was death by hanging and Irahim (al-Tikriti) was inadvertently decapitated:

An official video played to a small group of Iraqi and Western reporters more than 13 hours after the hanging showed Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, former head of Mr. Hussein’s secret police, standing nervously on the trapdoor in a flame-orange jumpsuit of the kind used at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, his head and mustache shaved. Beside him, praying feverishly in identical garb, stood the other condemned man, Awad Hamad al-Bandar, the former chief judge of Mr. Hussein’s revolutionary court.

After executioners in full-face balaclavas pulled black hoods over the two men’s heads, tightened nooses around their necks and pulled the lever opening the trapdoors, both fell like weights. But the hangmen’s calculations of weight, gravity and the momentum needed to snap their necks — a grim science that has produced detailed “drop charts” used for decades in hangings around the world — appeared, in Mr. Ibrahim’s case, to have gone seriously awry....

[E]vents at the gallows in the predawn hours of Monday had something of the same surreal and freakish quality that enveloped the Hussein hanging.

Iraqi officials who attended the hanging said the calculation in the case of Mr. Ibrahim, a 55-year-old of medium height and build, had allowed for a “drop” of eight feet — too much, according to at least one United States Army manual — and about that amount of thick yellow rope could be seen coiled at Mr. Ibrahim’s feet before the hanging.

The video showed his head being snapped off as the rope went taut, and ending up, still inside the hood, lying in the pit of the gallows about five feet from his headless body.

Mr. Bandar could be seen dangling from the rope above Mr. Ibrahim, whose body was lying on its chest on the floor of the dark, dank pit, blood pooling beside his severed neck. The silent, three-minute video then ended abruptly, with officials saying they would run it only once, and not show it in public again....

01/16 08:55 AMShare