Cognitive dissonance
Jan. 1st, 2007 02:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuAlthough I oppose capital punishment in most cases, I do believe that certain criminals and certain crimes reach a level where the criminal has forfeited his or her life, and the state is the entity which possestses he right and the mechanism for justly establishing and acting on such forfeiture.
Saddam Hussein was such a criminal.
Yet the way in which his life ended disgusts me. Not because he deserves pity or compassion, but because the state failed in its responsibility to maintain moral standards in executing him.
For starting a war on pretended grounds, for submitting the prisoner to a kangaroo court, for violating the Iraqi legal provisions concerning the scheduling of the execution, for the undignified manner in which the guards behaved, I believe the United States and Iraqi governments abdicated their position of just and lawful governance and the right that inheres in the state to condemn and execute a human being under extraordinary circumstances.
Saddam Hussein was such a criminal.
Yet the way in which his life ended disgusts me. Not because he deserves pity or compassion, but because the state failed in its responsibility to maintain moral standards in executing him.
For starting a war on pretended grounds, for submitting the prisoner to a kangaroo court, for violating the Iraqi legal provisions concerning the scheduling of the execution, for the undignified manner in which the guards behaved, I believe the United States and Iraqi governments abdicated their position of just and lawful governance and the right that inheres in the state to condemn and execute a human being under extraordinary circumstances.