Saudi Arabia beheads foreign maid

Source: BBC News

An Indonesian housemaid has been executed in Saudi Arabia after being convicted of killing her employer, the Saudi interior ministry has said.

The woman was beheaded in the southern Asir province, in what was the second execution in the country in 2008.

The maid was earlier found guilty of suffocating her female boss and stealing her jewellery.

Rape, murder and other serious crimes can carry the death penalty in the conservative desert kingdom.


Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7185532.stm

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Following the outcry about the 1980 Death of a Princess UK TV documentary huge diplomatic efforts were made to reach an agreement with the Saudis on capital punishment of women.

At one stage the UN Security Council secured a reprieve that banned executions, beatings, lapidations and mutilations of all females in country.

That was eventually scrapped after Wahhabis ruled the ban non Sharia Law-compliant.

We can only hope that W at least got to hear that the maid asked for mercy, so he could ridicule her like he did with Karla Faye Tucker.

W. has never changed. He was a brutal insult to humanity then, and he will remain so until the day he dies. I'm sure he got wistful that the family friends, the Saudis, got to order this execution, and he didn't.

woman sentence and beheading is a bridge too far.

The Saudis have beeen at this sort of justice for CENTURIES--even before they found black gold under their feet.

By blaming Bush, you, in effect, give the Saudis a pass.

I said he likely regretted he couldn't order her execution, as he did with Karla Faye Tucker.

I stand by that.

Let's remember which family has been the Saudis' greatest enablers over the years.

The linkage is weak...

Do you think he really could be if their idea of "justice" made him gag, as it should any one with a shred of empathy for others?

BTW, though it doesn't excuse murder, I wonder about the stress of being poor and waiting hand and foot (quiet literally, I imagine) for an obscenely rich and possibly abusive employer. Not to mention being away from friends, family and her home culture. She still shouldn't have done it, but I bet there are very few in her situation who didn't at least think about it.

Death as a punishment is ingrained in the culture over there. It has been ever thus for centuries.

It's unsavory, and they haven't evolved from the days of beheadings and stonings.

But to marry that hideous custom to Bush in any fashion is just fucking dumb. Yes, he's an asshole, they are assholes for levying this penalty, but there is just no 'convergence' there, and it's sloppy logic to assert that there is. It's the kind of thing a lazy thinker would do.

Bush relishes executing people. This is documented from his days in Texas with Gozo.

Bush loves the Saudis. This is also clear as day.

The fact that the ruling family of a country that practices a particularly "hideous" form of capital punishment is extremely close to (in so many ways) and beloved by the family of our pResident, a person who seems to revel in this ultimate form of "justice," speaks volumes to his depravity as a human being, to what he values and what he doesn't, and to his entire sociopathic makeup, in which he sees fit to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, to imprison thousands of people around the world without charge, to torture who knows how many of them, to sanction the outing of a covert operative, putting the lives of who knows how many US agents at risk, etc., etc., etc.

It goes to the heart of his love and compulsion for death and murder, in service of his ego, the pocketbooks of his cronies and supporters, and his view of how he should operate in the world.

Bush is not simply "an asshole." He is a mass-murdering madman. To use the first term to describe the latter is more than just "sloppy logic." It minimizes the seriousness of his assault on humanity and the scale of the misery and death he has directly caused, and indirectly endorsed.

If you ask me, THAT is what's "fucking dumb."

:grr:

Good grief, make us all look bad, why don't you?

One has NOTHING to do with the other.

If the Dalai Lama were president of the US, this woman still would have been executed.

:eyes:

But without generations of support from the Bush Cabal, without Bush's affection for capital punishment, might not Saudi Arabia be a different country, that doesn't chop of the heads of criminals?

We'll never know.

Bush's affection for the Saudis seems like it could have a LOT to do with their barbarism being attractive to his depraved sense of "justice" and blood lust.

Why is that so hard to consider?

start with the Bush family. They were chopping off heads before FDR and the Brits showed up, and they'll continue to do it for the foreseeable future. It is custom, it is tradition, and it is part and parcel of Sharia law. So, yes, we do know--Bush has made no difference, for better or worse, in the way that the Saudis kill off their criminal population.

Oil is a commodity. We are certainly not the only buyer for their product; not by a long shot. The only reason we get to stand near the front of the line is because we're generous in loaning the Saudis our military. We've got a little deal working with them...we'll come to their aid if anyone attacks them.

You don't know much about SA if you think the few piddling executions we do here in America hold a CANDLE to the shit that goes down in SA. They've got only a fraction of our population, but they kill way more people than we do every year.

You're also sorely mistaken if you think that the Saudis take their CUE from Bush--it's the other way around. Certainly, if he could have, Bush would have "jawboned" his buddies a little better to "open the spigots" to get that lousy approval rating of his up a bit, and maybe stave off some of the ire and dislike he's feeling late in his last term.

There's more information about executions in SA at Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch if you're interested in pursuing it.

Then I guess you don't think the fact that we're the world's #1 oil consumer gives us much influence.

But I didn't say SA takes its "CUE" from Bush, it is more the other way around--he follows them around like a doting errand boy.

I didn't say Bush was the first or the only Western enabler of their barbarism, or the first or only Western leader to overlook human rights abuses when it suited them.

I also didn't say US executions are anything compared to those in SA--it is the other way around. Based on his record in Texas, I would imaging Bush *wishes* the US were more like SA.

And while I appreciate the referrals for more info on SA's grisly practices, I'm more concerned with the fact that our government supports them, in spite of their abysmal human rights record. Of course, we're not the first, and won't be the last, and we can argue about how significant our support is, but surely we can agree that, no matter what, it's BAD...yes?

They rent our Army, in essence, and we get lower oil prices because of it. We provide them with aircraft, training (a few 'guest' pilots who do the heavy lifting), AWACS and other early detection assets, missles and a few fellers to "help" them use them, that kind of thing. You don't need to leave a big footprint, or an obvious one. In return, we aren't paying six dollars and fifty cents for gasoline.

Quid pro quo. It's been going on since well before Poppy was affiliated with the term.

My point remains--Bush has no 'influence' over Saudi executions. It's not his presence, or his absence, that motivates them either way. That's just how they kill people--they behead them. That's how they've always killed them. Publicly, as a warning to others, often as not. They like that Eye for an Eye business.

The only time they will make an exception is if the victim's family agrees to take "restitution" in exchange, instead of seeing the murderer executed. This is why the rich over there can get away with killing people. They just pay the family the amount of money that the poor dead bastard could reasonably expect to make in his lifetime, and maybe a little vigorish on top of that, and the slate is wiped clean. Poor people, of course, have no money, so it's "Off with yer head" for them.

China has barbaric practices, too, and they're a Most Favored Nation. We make a lot of disapproving noise, but we really don't put our money where our mouth is, because we want what they've got. Neither does Canada, Mexico, a host of others.

The 'interests' that we demonstrate towards other nations as often as not have nothing to do with how they behave towards their own populations. We only make a point of squawking about those sorts of shortcomings if we happen to take issue with the nation in question for other reasons.

We may disagree as to whether another US President, with a different moral compass (or a moral compass at all), might be able to use the economic power of the US as a force for good around the world, in places like SA and elsewhere, and whether or not such efforts would succeed. But otherwise, I agree with your assessment 100%.

"They like that Eye for an Eye business."

I suspect Georgie Boy does, too. That's the only point *I'm* trying to make.

How can anyone rationally argue that there is such a thing as humane capital punishment <"Lethal Injection," editorial, Jan. 6>?

Americans recoil at the thought of public beheadings in Saudi Arabia, hangings in Iran and firing squads in Vietnam, calling such acts barbaric. But what is the difference between what those countries do and what our states do? Killing is killing, and death is usually terrifying and always final whether it is by hanging, shooting, electrocution, a knife to the throat -- or lethal injection.

Someday we will look back with disbelief and shame that our country ever countenanced something so medieval as the death penalty.

ROBERT J. INLOW

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/08/AR2008010804636.html

http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2008/01/governor_saves_spirko_from_exe.html
January 9, 2008

John Spirko will not be executed for the 1982 murder of Betty Jane Mottinger. But he'll never get out of prison, either.
Citing the lack of physical evidence in the 1982 murder and what he described as "slim residual doubt" about Spirko's guilt, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland said today that executing the death-row inmate would be "inappropriate." Instead, Strickland commuted Spirko's sentence to life in prison without parole.

I thought we executed here? Don't we shock the bejesus out of our criminals? Don't we lay them on a stretcher and push poison into their tubes to kill them? Didn't we hang and shoot them just a few years back?

Cutting her head off is another form. Quick, painless as any of the above mentioned methods. Are WE so much better? I'm confused. Help me out.

We regard beheading as more barbaric than electrocution because it is messier.
I suspect being electrocuted hurts more for longer.

From Amensty USA website:



SEE:

http://blogs.amnestyusa.org/death-penalty/archive/2007/06/28/execution-toll-tops-100--beheading-preferred-method-of-saudi--quot-justice-quot-.htm


Generally victims have to kneel in a public square and hope the swordsman is quick, accurate and confident.

No stats about multiple attempts to complete the execution are published.

I lived in Saudi for 4 years - and attended 2 beheadings. The first involved 3 and the second 2.

But I now live in Florida. I see no difference in their form of the death penalty and our faulty electric-chair that tortures the person before he/she dies.

They both should be banished.

from the death penalty moral position.

But our legal system, and political freedoms (the product of the Western Enlightenment) is infinitely more advanced than Saudi Arabia, which is still an undemocratic monarchy upholding medieval Islamic values. They're legal and religious system has not gone through the intellectual fervor of our Western Enlightenment...and that's why they're still behind.

Sorry cultural relativists...I'm not agreeing with you on this issue.

who are forced to work in foreign countries because they are so poor in their own country. My cruise ship had an all Indonesian crew. They were worked 15/7 and I don't know if they made much money doing it. At least they had food and a bunk, but I was a little bit upset about how they were treated. They were such sweet people too and the Dutch crew were somewhat snotty and imperious towards them.

It was, at the time of Henry VIII thought to be a more humane way of executing than what had been used before. But in these days and times, there is no reason to use beheadings any longer, since there are now what are thought to be more humane ways to execute than that.

Why would they still do it the old way?

Poor woman. Of course, if she really did murder her employer, I would also feel sorry for her employer, who wasn't professionally murdered so I'm sure it didn't go all that well, either. But the way they treat women in those M.E. countries, I wonder if she did do the deed in the first place.

When you think about it, Saudi Arabia is the REAL Islamofascist entity (not splinter
or isolated terrorist groups).
Fascism is a state-based phenomenon;Saudi Arabia is a an actual Theocracy
ruled by dictatorial Islamic religious law.

Put 'em together...Voila! You have Islamofascism.

Sounds like what the Dominionists would like to set up
right here in the good 'ole USA.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

"Rape, murder and other serious crimes can carry the death penalty"

Why can't we do that here?

Nicety to the criminals is hatred for non-criminals.

"Nicety to the criminals is hatred for non-criminals."

:wtf: :wtf: :wtf: :wtf: :wtf: :wtf: :wtf:

Basic decency towards all human beings, and prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment, are a couple of cornerstones of civilized society. Do you really think that we somehow show "hatred for non-criminals" by adhering to basic standards of human rights and decency?

Good God. Go crawl back to the middle ages (or better yet, Saudi Arabia).

Still as backward as ever.

...the Saudis keep lending us ca$h to prop up
our oil-dependent economy--The ca$h that THEY get
from drinking up OUR ca$h
while we drink up their oil.

and I don't think it's going to end well.

I don't do fucking hospital corners! Can't you get that through your head!!

Well, somewhat bad, I guess not all that close to being as bad as Texas.

Stoning to Death -
First you'll hear a speech, then a man gets flogged. The stoning of two women starts 6 minutes into the video.



The stoning of women is practiced in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b1e7e992d7

No love lost in Iraq either
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d56_1177871911
they don't practice stoning in Texas

Very observant.

Actually, the specialty in Te-Has is Dragging...

http://www.rickross.com/reference/supremacists/supremacists4.html

=======================================================================
"Aw, c'mon! Pizza in Texas?

Please!

You gotta' go to New York City,
where they know what pizza's supposed to taste like..."

1999 ?
thats a reach when talking neck stretching !



As you know in some places, it's a spectator sport not done under the cover of darkness in isolated areas

Iran: Turkish citizen hanged to death on a stretcher

Tehran, 14 Jan. (AKI) - A Turkish citizen has been hanged in Iran while still on the stretcher that was used to transport him from the prison hospital to his execution in the Khoi jail in western Iran.

snip



http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=1.0.1768886115

geeze, ya think they would have given him a massive shot of steroids to at least get him on his feet ;)


13 days into the new year and Iran already had 24 executions. But then Iran follows a different calendar so it's a moot point in their justice system
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2008/01/ec3b38a0-00af-4743-9943-5d00e920249f.html

and i happen to think that Saudi Arabia is by and large a backwards kingdom...

but if she killed that woman, it's hard for me to envision a crime more deserving of the punishment she received.

I'm not really against this execution on legal grounds...though I am against it from the anti-death penalty moral position.