Very late hour and little free time just now to read accounts and to digest information but in light of what has transpired, a very fast whiparound of the web:

Saddam Hussein was hanged at dawn on Saturday for crimes against humanity, a dramatic, violent end for a leader who brutally ruled Iraq for three decades before he was toppled by a U.S. invasion in 2003.

[snip]

As Maliki’s fellow Shi’ite Muslims, oppressed under Saddam, celebrated in the streets, the prime minister called on Saddam’s Sunni Baathist followers to end their insurgency.

“Saddam’s execution puts an end to all the pathetic gambles on a return to dictatorship,” said Maliki.

State television showed him signing the order for the hanging which officials said he did not attend.

Police in Kufa, near the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf, said 36 people were killed and 58 wounded by the car bomb at a market packed with shoppers ahead of the week-long Eid al-Adha holiday. They said a mob killed a man they accused of planting the bomb. Article

For many Muslim faithful performing the annual hajj pilgrimage, news of Saddam Hussein’s hanging on Saturday came as an unpleasant surprise, though Iraqis were divided about his end.

“He was a very good man and all the Pakistani people love him,” said Mohammad Nadim, a 45-year-old Pakistani who is among more than two million Muslims from all over the world taking part in the hajj in Saudi Arabia.

Nadim’s government, although a key US ally, described the execution of the ousted Iraqi president as a “sad event” and expressed the hope that it would not further exacerbate the violence in Iraq. Article

An anxious nation awoke to the news of Saddam’s execution, wondering whether his death would galvanize insurgents to launch still more suicide assaults against their fellow countrymen or whether it would close an ugly chapter in Iraqi history and allow the government to stave off a full-scale civil war.

U.S. and Iraqi forces braced for a possible surge in violence by supporters of Saddam and those frustrated that an Arab leader was killed by what they consider to be an American-controlled government. Iraqi officials canceled leave for their police and army. The Pentagon announced that troops in Iraq were at a high state of readiness.

The execution of a former head of state in his own country after a trial by an internationally monitored tribunal is almost without precedent.…

[snip]

More than an hour after Saddam’s death, members of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s office were still celebrating, gathering in their offices and singing popular Shiite chants. Article

“The killing of the guilty party is not the way to reconstruct justice and reconcile society,” said the Vatican’s spokesman, Federico Lombardi. “On the contrary, there is a risk that it will feed a spirit of vendetta and sow new violence.” Article

Saddam Hussein’s execution may result in deterioration of the military and political situation in Iraq and heighten the ethnic and religious tension, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said on Saturday.

Russia as many other countries is against the death penalty, irrespective of motives for such court decisions, Kamynin was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency as saying. Article

In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam’s shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created. Article

Popular reactions were fairly muted as Iraqis woke on the holiest day of the Muslim calendar to begin a week of religious holidays for Eid al-Adha. Unlike at previous times of tension, no curfew was imposed on Baghdad after the execution.

The date and time were set only hours before, in the early hours of Saturday after late night government meetings.

While foreign media watched every twist and turn of Saddam’s final hours, many Iraqis have no electricity to watch television and anyway are preoccupied with violence that kills an average of 100 people a day, pushing Iraq to the brink of civil war.

Norzan Yaseen, a 32-year-old teacher in Kirkuk, said Saddam’s hanging would make no difference and she urged the government to concentrate on security and basic services.

“The Iraqi government has brought nothing but calamities to the Iraqi people in the last three years,” she said on Friday evening as she awaited news of when Saddam would hang.

A car bomb killed 36 people in a Shi’ite town on Saturday morning in what looked like a swift response. But given the short notice of the hanging and the frequency of such attacks, it may have been planned independently of the execution. Article

The ousted leader mounted the gallows inside a former torture center in Kadhimiyah in northern Baghdad and was hanged just before 6:00 am (0300 GMT) Saturday, said National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, who was among those present.

Iraqi state television showed a brief film of Saddam being placed in a noose by masked hangmen, cutting away just before his execution.

[snip]

…The guards wore black balaclava-style hoods.

[snip]

Once on the gallows, Saddam “refused to allow a guard to place a hood over his head. They stared at each other briefly” before the guard stepped away, granting Saddam’s wish to leave his face uncovered, said Rubaie.

[snip]

Saddam’s American jailers had handed him over to Iraqi officials and there were no US personnel in the building as the trapdoor dropped and Saddam’s life was ended.

“This was a 100 percent Iraqi process,” said Rubaie. “There were only Iraqis present, no foreigners. The Americans were not present at the execution.” Article

As surely as the G. Walker administration and the American military pulled down that statue in Firdous Square in 2003, the G. Walker administration and the American military, though perhaps not physically present this time, pulled that lever on the gallows.

A vile tyrant, stripped of power and without portfolio as the G. Walker administration and multitudes of survivors of his regime said they sought, is dead by decree.

A secular ruler of a predominantly Muslim nation, stripped of power and without portfolio as al-Qaeda wanted, is dead by decree.

Dead after a final order of the ostensible state and resultant of a judicial process set up and financed by the occupation power, by a state which only quasi-independently commands the grounds of one of his former monuments to himself and which controls but little else. A state, such as it is, which cannot rule, but which can kill.

Revenge is not synonymous with justice.

No man is an island. The death of any man diminishes me, for I am a part of mankind, and therefore never sin to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
–– John Donne