Obituary: A Life of Violence,In a final moment of defiance, he refused a hood to cover his eyes.
Hours after Saddam faced the same fate he was accused of inflicting on countless thousands during a quarter-century of ruthless power, Iraqi state television showed grainy video of what it said was his body, the head uncovered and the neck twisted at a sharp angle.

A man whose testimony helped lead to Saddam's conviction and execution before sunrise said he was shown the body because "everybody wanted to make sure that he was really executed."

"Now, he is in the garbage of history," said Jawad Abdul-Aziz, who lost his father, three brothers and 22 cousins in the reprisal killings that followed a botched 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in the Shiite town of Dujail.

Revisited
The post-execution footage showed the man identified as Saddam lying on a stretcher, covered in a white shroud. His neck and part of the shroud have what appear to be bloodstains. His eyes are closed.

In Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City, hundreds of people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate. The government did not impose a round-the-clock curfew as it did last month when Saddam was convicted to thwart any surge in retaliatory violence.

It was a grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three U.S. presidents. Despite his ouster, Washington, its allies and the new Iraqi leaders remain mired in a fight to quell a stubborn insurgency by Saddam loyalists and a vicious sectarian conflict.

The execution took place during the year's deadliest month for U.S. troops, with the toll reaching 109. At least 2,998 members of the U.S. military have been killed since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

President Bush said in a statement issued from his ranch in Texas that bringing Saddam to justice "is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain and defend itself, and be an ally in the war on terror."

He said that the execution marks the "end of a difficult year for the Iraqi people and for our troops" and cautioned that Saddam's death will not halt the violence in Iraq.

Within hours of his death, bombings killed at least 68 people in Iraq, including one planted on a minibus that exploded in a fish market in a mostly Shiite town south of Baghdad.

Ali Hamza, a 30-year-old university professor, said he went outside to shoot his gun into the air after he learned of Saddam's death.

Saddam's Life
"Now all the victims' families will be happy because Saddam got his just sentence," said Hamza, who lives in Diwaniyah, a Shiite town 80 miles south of Baghdad.

But people in the Sunni-dominated city of Tikrit, once a power base of Saddam, lamented his death.

"The president, the leader Saddam Hussein is a martyr and God will put him along with other martyrs. Do not be sad nor complain because he has died the death of a holy warrior," said Sheik Yahya al-Attawi, a cleric at the Saddam Big Mosque.

Police blocked the entrances to Tikrit and said nobody was allowed to leave or enter the city for four days. Despite the security precaution, gunmen took to the streets of Tikrit, carrying pictures of Saddam, shooting into the air, and calling for vengeance.

Security forces also set up roadblocks at the entrance to another Sunni stronghold, Samarra, and a curfew was imposed after about 500 people took to the streets protesting the execution of Saddam.

A couple hundred people also protested the execution just outside the Anbar capital of Ramadi, and more than 2,000 people demonstrated in Adwar, the village south of Tikrit where Saddam was captured by U.S. troops hiding in an underground bunker.

In a statement, Saddam's lawyers said that in the aftermath of his death, "the world will know that Saddam Hussein lived honestly, died honestly, and maintained his principles."

"He did not lie when he declared his trial null," they said.

Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, were not hanged along with their former leader as originally planned. Officials wanted to reserve the occasion for Saddam alone.

"We wanted him to be executed on a special day," National Security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie told state-run al-Iraqiya television.

Sami al-Askari, the political adviser of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, told the AP that Saddam initially resisted when he was taken by Iraqi guards but was composed in his final moments.

He said Saddam was clad in a black suit, hat and shoes, rather than prison garb. His hat was removed and his hands tied shortly before the noose was slipped around his neck.

Saddam repeated a prayer after a Sunni Muslim cleric who was present.

"Saddam later was taken to the gallows and refused to have his head covered with a hood," al-Askari said. "Before the rope was put around his neck, Saddam shouted: 'God is great. The nation will be victorious and Palestine is Arab.'"

Iraqi state television showed footage of guards in ski masks placing a noose around Saddam's neck. Saddam appeared calm as he stood on the metal framework of the gallows. The footage cuts off just before the execution.

Saddam was executed at a former military intelligence headquarters in Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah, al-Askari said. During his regime, Saddam had numerous dissidents executed in the facility, located in a neighborhood that is home to the Iraqi capital's most important Shiite shrine, the Imam Kazim shrine.

Al-Askari said the government had not decided what to do with Saddam's body.

The Iraqi prime minister's office released a statement that said Saddam's execution was a "strong lesson" to ruthless leaders who commit crimes against their own people.

"We strongly reject considering Saddam as a representative of any sect in Iraq because the tyrant only represented his evil soul," the statement said. "The door is still open for those whose hands are not tainted with the blood of innocent people to take part in the political process and work on rebuilding Iraq."

The execution came 56 days after a court convicted Saddam and sentenced him to death for his role in the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims from Dujail. Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam's appeal Monday and ordered him executed within 30 days.

A U.S. judge on Friday refused to stop Saddam's execution, rejecting a last-minute court challenge.

U.S. troops cheered as news of Saddam's execution appeared on television at the mess hall at Forward Operating Base Loyalty in eastern Baghdad. But some soldiers expressed doubt that Saddam's death would be a significant turning point for Iraq.

"First it was weapons of mass destruction. Then when there were none, it was that we had to find Saddam. We did that, but then it was that we had to put him on trial," said Spc. Thomas Sheck, 25, who is on his second tour in Iraq. "So now, what will be the next story they tell us to keep us over here?"

At his death, he was in the midst of a second trial, charged with genocide and other crimes for a 1987-88 military crackdown that killed an estimated 180,000 Kurds in northern Iraq. Experts said the trial of his co-defendants was likely to continue despite his execution.

Many people in Iraq's Shiite majority were eager to see the execution of a man whose Sunni Arab-dominated regime oppressed them and Kurds. Before the hanging, a mosque preacher in the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Friday called Saddam's execution "God's gift to Iraqis."

In a farewell message to Iraqis posted Wednesday on the Internet, Saddam said he was giving his life for his country as part of the struggle against the U.S. "Here, I offer my soul to God as a sacrifice, and if he wants, he will send it to heaven with the martyrs," he said.

One of Saddam's lawyers, Issam Ghazzawi, said the letter was written by Saddam on Nov. 5, the day he was convicted by an Iraqi tribunal in the Dujail killings.

Najeeb al-Nauimi, a member of Saddam's legal team, said U.S. authorities maintained physical custody of Saddam until the execution to prevent him being humiliated publicly or his corpse being mutilated, as has happened to previous Iraqi leaders deposed by force. He said they didn't want anything to happen to further inflame Sunni Arabs.

"This is the end of an era in Iraq," al-Nauimi said from Doha, Qatar. "The Baath regime ruled for 35 years. Saddam was vice president or president of Iraq during those years. For Iraqis, he will be very well remembered. Like a martyr, he died for the sake of his country."

Iraq's death penalty was suspended by the U.S. military after it toppled Saddam in 2003, but the new Iraqi government reinstated it two years later, saying executions would deter criminals.

Saddam's own regime used executions and extrajudicial killings as a tool of political repression, both to eliminate real or suspected political opponents and to maintain a reign of terror.

In the months after he seized power on July 16, 1979, he had hundreds of members of his own party and army officers slain. In 1996, he ordered the slaying of two sons-in-law who had defected to Jordan but returned to Baghdad after receiving guarantees of safety.

Saddam built Iraq into a one of the Arab world's most modern societies, but then plunged the country into an eight-year war with neighboring Iran that killed hundreds of thousands of people on both sides and wrecked Iraq's economy.

When the U.S. invaded in 2003, Iraqis had been transformed from among the region's most prosperous people to some of its most impoverished.

Huge ice shelf breaks free in Canada's far north,- A chunk of ice bigger than the area of Manhattan broke from an ice shelf in Canada's far north and could wreak havoc if it starts to float westward toward oil-drilling regions and shipping lanes next summer, a researcher said on Friday.

Global warming could be one cause of the break of the Ayles Ice Shelf at Ellesmere Island, which occurred in the summer of 2005 but was only detected recently by satellite photos, said Luke Copland, assistant professor at the University of Ottawa's geography department.

It was the largest such break in nearly three decades, casting an ice floe with an area of 66 square km (25 square miles) adrift in the Arctic Ocean, said Copland, who specializes in the study of glaciers and ice masses. Manhattan has an area of 61 square km (24 square miles).
The mass is now 50 square km (19 square miles) in size.
"The Arctic is all frozen up for the winter and it's stuck in the sea ice about 50 km (30 miles) off the coast," he said.

"The risk is that next summer, as that sea ice melts, this large ice island can then move itself around off the coast and one potential path for it is to make its way westward toward the Beaufort Sea, and the Beaufort Sea is where there is lots of oil and gas exploration, oil rigs and shipping."
The break went undetected when it happened due primarily to the remoteness of the northern coast of Ellesmere island, which is only about 800 km (500 miles) from the North Pole.
The speed of the crack and drift-off shocked scientists.

Satellite images showed the 15-km long (9-mile long) crack, then the ice floating about 1 km (0.6 miles) from the coast within about an hour, Copland said.

"You could stand at one edge and not see the other side, and for something that large to move that quickly is quite amazing,.Copland said the break was likely due to a combination of low accumulations of sea ice around the mass's edges as high winds blew it away, as well as one of the Arctic's warmest temperatures on record. The region was 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees F) above average in the summer of 2005.

Ice shelves in Canada's far north have decreased in size by as much as 90 percent since 1906, and global warming likely played a role in the Ayles break.

"It's hard to tie one event to climate change, but when you look at the longer-term trend, the bigger picture, we've lost a lot of ice shelves on northern Ellesmere in the past century and this is that continuing," he said. "And this is the biggest one in the last 25 years."

Report Says Ford Opposed Bush Iraq Policy, President George W. Bush and his top advisers made a "big mistake" in their justification for invading Iraq, Gerald Ford told journalist Bob Woodward in an interview embargoed until after the former president's death.

Ford, who died on Tuesday at his home in California at age 93, said he would not have gone to war, based on what was known publicly at the time, said the report on The Washington Post Web site on Wednesday.

"I don't think, if I had been president, on the basis of the facts as I saw them publicly," Ford said,
"I don't think I would have ordered the Iraq war. I would have maximized our effort through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever, to find another answer."

In a four-hour tape-recorded interview in July 2004, Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq advocated and carried out by key Bush advisers and veterans of his own administration -- Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- reported Woodward.

"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said.

The Bush administration's initial justification for the war was that Iraq posed a threat because it had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. None were found.

The interview and a subsequent conversation in 2005 were done for a future book project, although Ford, who became president in 1974 after Richard Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal, said his comments could be published any time after his death, Woodward wrote.

Woodward's reporting with fellow Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein played a key role in uncovering the Watergate scandal.

Ford was quoted as saying he understood the theory of "wanting to free people." But the former president said he was skeptical "whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what's in our national interest."

Remembering a President
He added, "And I just don't think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security."

Woodward said Ford fondly recalled his close working relationship with Cheney and Rumsfeld, while expressing concern about the policies they pursued in more recent years.

"He (Cheney) was an excellent chief of staff. First class," Ford said. "But I think Cheney has become much more pugnacious" as vice president.

According to the article, Ford said he agreed with former Secretary of State Colin Powell's assertion that Cheney developed a "fever" about the threat of terrorism and Iraq. "I think that's probably true."

U.S. and Britain to mobilize in Gulf,The United States and Britain will begin moving additional warships and aircraft into the Gulf region in a display of military resolve toward Iran that would come as the United Nations debates possible sanctions against it, according to military officials.

The officials said Wednesday that Defense Secretary Robert Gates was expected to approve a request by commanders for a second aircraft carrier and its supporting ships to be stationed within quick sailing distance of Iran by early next year.

Senior U.S. officers said the increase in naval power should not be viewed as preparation for a strike against Iran. But they acknowledged that the ability to hit Iran would be increased and that Iranian leaders might well call the growing presence provocative.

Vice Admiral Patrick Walsh, commander of naval forces across the U.S. military's Central Command, said that while "Iranian tone and rhetoric creates an environment of intimidation and fear," the United States "must be careful not to contribute to escalation."

One purpose of the deployment, they said, is to make clear that the focus on ground troops in Iraq has not made it impossible for the United States and its allies to maintain a military watch on Iran. That would also reassure Washington's allies in the region who are concerned about Iran's intentions.

The officials said the planned growth in naval power in the Gulf and surrounding waters would be useful in enforcing any sanctions that the United Nations might impose. Washington says Iran wants to acquire nuclear weapons and is seeking to punish it for that.

The buildup would address another concern: that Iran could attempt to block oil shipments from the Gulf in retaliation for UN sanctions or other U.S.-led pressure.

Steps are already being taken to increase the number of minesweeping vessels and magnetic sleds carried by helicopters to improve the ability to counter Iranian mines that could block oil-shipping lanes, Pentagon and military officials said.

As part of future deployments after the first of the year, the British Navy plans to add two mine-hunting vessels to its ships that already are part of the international coalition patrolling waters in the Gulf.

A British Navy news release said the ship movements were aimed at "maintaining familiarity with the challenges of warm-water mine-hunting conditions." But a senior British official said: "We are increasing our presence. That is only prudent."

Military officers said doubling the aircraft carrier presence in the region could be accomplished quickly by a shift in sailing schedules.

As opposed to ground and air forces that require bases in the region, naval forces offer the ability to project power into parts of the world where a large U.S. presence is controversial, unwanted even by allies. Many of the ships could be kept over the horizon, out of sight but close enough.

In an interview from his headquarters in Bahrain, Walsh declined to discuss the specifics of future deployments. "To assure our friends, we have to have capabilities to secure the critical sea lines of communication," Walsh said.

"They need reassurances that we expect to be part of the effort here for the long term, that we will not run away from intimidation and that we will be part of the effort here for security and stability at sea for the long term," he added. "Our position must be visible, and it must have muscle in order to be credible. That requires sustained presence."

Other military officials did describe specifics of the planned deployments in order to clarify the rationale for the movement of ships and aircraft, but they would not do so by name because Gates has not yet signed any deployment orders.

Pentagon officials said the military's joint staff, which plans operations and manages deployments, had recently received a formal request from commanders for a second aircraft carrier strike group in the region. That request was mentioned in various news accounts over the past few days.

The aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower and its strike group — including three escort ships, an attack submarine and 6,500 sailors in all — entered the Gulf on Dec. 11 after an autumn naval exercise to practice halting vessels suspected of smuggling nuclear materials in waters across the region.

A carrier had not been inside the Gulf since the Enterprise left in July, according to Pentagon officials. The next carrier scheduled to sail toward the Middle East is the John C. Stennis, already set to depart Bremerton, Washington, for the region in late January, according to naval officers.

Jessica -- My Christmas Sucks,Filed under: Let's Get This Party Started
Jessica SimpsonFor Jessica Simpson, it's the most miserable time of the year, with no man and a career that's going off the rails. Jessica didn't leave her trailer on the Louisiana set of her movie "Blonde Ambition" for two days, according to In Touch Weekly, prompting an emergency intervention by sister Ashlee. Then, when the thought of sun and warmth in Hawaii was just too much to bear, Jessica decided to go to blizzard-ridden Colorado instead.

Britney SpearsHer dark moods are being blamed partly on her recent "9 to 5" debacle at the Kennedy Center Honors -- only a brief glimpse of her arm could be seen during the broadcast of the tribute to Dolly Parton last night. And the mag says, Jess' second Christmas without ex-hubby Nick Lachey has been particularly hard, especially because Nick is constantly and very publicly out and about with girlfriend Vanessa Minnillo.


Is Carrie Stealing Jess' Cowboy?

Jessica isn't getting action from her ex-boytoy, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo -- but Carrie Underwood might be. Underwood, says In Touch Weekly, was a surprise guest at Texas Stadium for the Cowboys' Christmas Day game against Philadelphia, and gave Romo a hug on the field before kickoff.

Kelly Clarkson

Romo told a small-town paper in central Illinois, where he went to college, that he was dating the "American Idol" chanteuse. Christmas wasn't her first appearance at a Cowboys game -- she sang at Texas Stadium on Thanksgiving Day. Of course, Carrie might want to skip the next game – Romo had a terrible outing against the Eagles as she watched from the sideline.


Tara Conner photogalleryWho is Miss USA Sleeping With?

The answer: Herself.

Tarnished beauty-pageant tart Tara Conner won't be having many debauched late nights – or fast guys to spend them with -- at her latest home, the Caron Foundation rehab center in Pennsylvania. In fact, reports the New York Daily News, Tara will be in bed by 11 o'clock at night, up at 6:30 in the AM, and will be doing chores like mopping, cleaning and making her own bed, just like all the other attendees of the $24,000-per-month facility.

And even if she gets a little boy-craving during her 28-day stay there, she'll have to squelch it, because men and women are segregated at Caron. Still, there's no word on whether she'll be able to, you know, lend her support to other female rehabbers like she allegedly did to Miss Teen USA Katie Blair.