George W. Bush: Executioner in Chief

Last week, before he retired for bed on the night Saddam Hussein was to be hanged, U.S. President George W. Bush issued a statement saying that Saddam was receiving the justice he had denied to his own victims.

Bush was not awakened to be told that Saddam had been put to death. As an experienced executioner, Bush has learned to take such events in stride.

After it was over, the execution of Saddam Hussein swiftly became a major embarrassment not only for the U.S. client regime in Baghdad, but for Washington as well. Not only was the condemned man subjected to taunts and indignities at the gallows, his last words portrayed him as considerably more dignified than the howling pack in attendance.

The execution was filmed on a cell phone by one of the witnesses. He has since been arrested presumably for humiliating the regime.

It was not as though the process propelling Saddam to the hangman’s noose was not already an embarrassment. The first judge in the case was dismissed for being too soft on the defendant. Three defence lawyers were murdered over the course of the trial. American efforts to internationalize the trial failed because the U.S. was not prepared to countenance a sentence other than death. And Europeans, among others, regard the death penalty as barbaric. When it came to setting the date for the execution, Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani, an opponent of the death penalty, refused to sign the death warrant. Without his signature, the government just decided to go ahead anyway. Not least outré in the whole affair is the fact that Saddam was put to death for crimes committed in 1982 when the Reagan administration looked on his regime with considerable favour for the prosecution of its war against Iran.

The consequence of all this is that the Americans and their Iraqi clients have achieved something few would have thought possible. They have created considerable sympathy and respect in the Arab world for Saddam Hussein---a bloodthirsty tyrant whose crimes should have been much more judicially and thoroughly exposed before a sentence was handed down.

What made George W. Bush an experienced executioner---and not one to flinch in the face of the unpleasant---was the post he held prior to the presidency, the governorship of Texas. Texas is the capital punishment capital of the western world. While he was governor, Bush presided over 143 executions, more than any other governor in American history.

One of the most notorious of the Texas executions while Bush governed the Lone Star State was that of Karla Faye Tucker on February 3, 1998. Along with her boyfriend when she was a young woman, Tucker was guilty of a horrific crime in 1983. The two bludgeoned a man to death in Houston. Tucker’s boyfriend died in prison. In the years following her death sentence, Tucker underwent an extraordinary personal transformation, one attested to by a very large number of people. While it is not unusual for prisoners on death row to find religion, Tucker did much more than that. From her cell, she dispensed succor and advice to women in many parts of the United States. She had herself been a prostitute and a drug addict by her early teens. Tucker revealed a unique gift in her correspondence, an ability to understand and to counsel the women who wrote to her.

Despite pleas that she not be executed from people from all parts of the political and religious spectrum, Tucker was duly transferred to Huntsville where all executions in Texas are performed. Adding to the national and international interest in the case was the fact that Tucker was to be the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War.

I drove to Texas from Toronto a few days before the execution to write about the Tucker case and the debate about capital punishment in Texas and the rest of the United States.

On the day of the execution, a dismal and boisterous carnival of sorts developed in Hunstville, a town of three or four thousand people whose main industry is the prison. Dozens of television trucks, in a large parking area next to the prison, aimed their transmitters skyward. Merchants posted notices in their shop windows advertising “Deals to Die For”, and “Killer Burgers”.

Several thousand people gathered outside the prison, for the countdown to the lethal injection of Karla Faye Tucker. They were about evenly divided between opponents of the execution who maintained a quiet vigil, and celebrants, many of them students, who cried out for her blood. One sign proclaimed that with her execution, Tucker would experience her last orgasm.

Shortly after 6.00 p.m., from his office in the State Capitol in Austin, Bush who had the power to halt the execution for thirty days, announced that he would leave it to a higher authority to judge Tucker. With this unctuous bow to the almighty, the governor cleared the last hurdle for the execution, which duly proceeded.

A year later, George W. Bush gave an interview to a reporter from Talk Magazine. The reporter insists that during their conversation Bush mimicked Karla Faye Tucker pleading for her life. “Please don’t kill me,” Bush was reported to have purred. In fact, there was no such plea on the part of the deeply religious Tucker who met her death with composure.

For George W. Bush who has presided over Abu Graib and Guantanamo, executions are run of the mill affairs.