11:50 pm MT: Witnesses say it was quick.

"It was very quick. He died right away," one of the official Iraqi witnesses said. The former president's face was uncovered, he appeared calm and said a brief prayer as Iraqi policemen walked him to the gallows and put the noose round him, the witness said.

10:00 pm MT: Saddam has been hanged.

8:00 pm MT: Saddam has arrived at execution site. The hanging will take place within minutes.

7:51 pm: Final arrangements are in place.

Saddam Hussein will be hooded with hands tied behind his back. Government and religious officials, a lawyer and a doctor will act as witnesses. The execution will be filmed to provide proof of his death.

7:05 pm. A federal judge in DC has denied Saddam's request for stay. You heard it here first. Here's the order.

7:00 pm MT: CNN reports Iraqi officials say he will hang within the hour.

6:33 pm MT: AP is reporting (incorrectly) Saddam's request for stay has been denied. It's not showing on the court docket sheet yet, I'll upload the order when it appears. CNN just confirms the AP was wrong, there has been no ruling.

Amnesty International after the death verdict of Saddam Hussein:

"This trial should have been a major contribution toward establishing justice and the rule of law in Iraq, and in ensuring truth and accountability for the massive human rights violations perpetrated by Saddam Hussein's rule," said Malcolm Smart, director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme. "In practice, it has been a shabby affair, marred by serious flaws that call into question the capacity of the tribunal, as currently established, to administer justice fairly, in conformity with international standards."

The AP is reporting:

A top Iraqi official said Saddam will be executed before 6 a.m. Saturday, Baghdad time, or 10 p.m. Friday EST.

I'm checking the District of Columbia docket and as of 5:17 pm, there has been no order issued on the stay of execution request yet.

I have uploaded the stay request here.

With Saddam's execution set for hours from now, I'm going to switch to a single execution watch thread, rather than keep posting separate entries.

Saddam Hussein's lawyers filed a motion for stay of execution in federal court in DC today.

Here is the 21 page petition (pdf).

News coverage here.

Update: The federal judge in DC has denied Saddam's request for stay. You heard it here first. Here's the order.

Update: Saddam's lawyer Giovanni diStephano is on CNN right now (from Rome) saying that a petition for a temporary restraining order has been filed in federal court in DC to prevent Saddam's turnover to Iraqi authorities. It has been assigned to Judge Sullivan.

Via Raw Story and AFP:

An anonymous lawyer for Saddam was now claiming Hussein will be executed on Saturday at dawn.

I'm not buying the U.S. denial and claim that Saddam remains in U.S. custody:

Raising the tension, US authorities also cancelled a planned meeting on Saturday between Saddam and his defense team, lawyer Issam Ghazawi told AFP. "I just received an email from US authorities in Baghdad in which a security official said it has been decided to cancel our visit planned for Saturday in Baghdad with president Saddam Hussein," Ghazawi said.

"We can't have you in Baghdad tomorrow. We cannot provide any protection for you. You can't see Saddam because he is not in our physical custody anymore," said the email according to Ghazawi, who read it by phone to an AFP reporter.

The White House is denying responsibility for the execution:

The cable networks are carrying the late President Gerald Ford's first funeral service in Palm Desert, CA live. The Palm Desert Sun is live-blogging it.

Betty Ford looks so sad, yet dignified. It's very quiet in the church, not a peep from anyone. He's then going to be flown to Washington and then to Michigan for his burial.

R.I.P., Gerald Ford.

Why did David Kaczynski become a leader of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty? Kaczynski suspected his brother Ted was the Unabomber, and he cooperated with the FBI to secure Ted's capture, fearing that if he didn't, his brother would kill again. Still, David thought the death penalty would never be imposed upon a man so mentally ill as his brother.

Ted eventually made a deal to avoid death (he's now serving a life sentence without parole), but even the possibility that the government might execute a severely mentally ill defendant was enough to turn David against the death penalty. He talked to MSNBC about the experience. The lessons he teaches deserve to be well learned.

I kind of thought once some of the investigators had said, 'We know that you're brother's mentally ill,' I thought that took the death penalty off the table. I honestly didn't realize that, you know, our system does execute the mentally ill. There's tremendous disconnect between what the law calls insanity and what medicine calls mental illness. And the end result is that sometimes we're executing people who have to be medicated to get them to the point where they're competent to be executed.

As the president's poll numbers continue to decline (and you can expect them to decline further if he announces his anticipated plan to escalate the war in Iraq), he'll probably not be comforted by the knowledge that he won at least one poll this year. Respondents in an AP-AOL News poll named Bush "the biggest villain of the year," beating out second place Osama bin Laden by a comfortable margin.

With a much smaller percentage of the total vote, Bush also won "hero of the year," laughably defeating "soldiers in Iraq." Those who die to carry out the president's failed policies are apparently less heroic to some than the architect of those policies. Go figure.

In a credibility contest between the police and almost anyone else, the police usually win. Not so in New Orleans, where a grand jury rejected the official account of police shootings on the Danziger Bridge six days after Hurricane Katrina. The police justified the slaying of two people and the wounding of four others as “an appropriate response to reports of both sniper fire and people shooting at police officers near the bridge.”

Lance Madison was arrested for shooting at cops, but a grand jury refused to indict him. Instead, it indicted seven officers for a variety of charges that include murder.

There may well have been shots fired near the bridge before the police arrived, but survivors of the shooting spree filed a lawsuit that raises serious questions about the claimed justification for gunning down the (apparently unarmed) people on the bridge.

On Sept. 4 about 9 a.m., Ronald and Lance Madison walked near the top of the Danziger Bridge, returning to their brother's dental office on Chef Menteur Highway after a failed attempt to go to their mother's home in eastern New Orleans. Ronald Madison, who was severely retarded, had insisted on staying in the city because he could not bear to leave behind the family dachshunds, Bobbi and Sushi. ... At the same time, according to the lawsuits, another group of people was walking at the base of the bridge on a trek to a nearby Winn Dixie to retrieve food and water. ...

Suddenly, the people on the bridge were confronted by a hail of gunfire coming from a group of men in "dark clothing" who had emerged from the back of a rental truck at the foot of the bridge, the lawsuits said.

The men “turned out to be the seven heavily armed, out-of-uniform police officers [who were] indicted on Thursday.”

Saddam has been transferred to Iraqi custody.

Saddam Hussein has been transferred from U.S. custody, his lawyers said, and an Iraqi judge authorized to attend the former dictator's hanging said he would be executed no later than Saturday.

The physical hand-over of Saddam to Iraqi authorities was believed to be one of the last steps before he was to be hanged, although the lawyers' statement did not specifically say Saddam was in Iraqi hands.

"A few minutes ago we received correspondence from the Americans saying that President Saddam Hussein is no longer under the control of U.S. forces," according to the statement faxed to The Associated Press.

"Saddam will be executed today or tomorrow," said Munir Haddad, a judge on the appeals court that upheld Saddam's death sentence. "All the measures have been done."

Fred Hiatt asks:

What's more, his trial was in no sense the model of civilized justice that would have showcased a new, democratic Iraq -- in large measure because that new Iraq has yet to materialize. Several defense lawyers were murdered; judges had to be replaced. Political interference was evident. Even this week, the appeals tribunal sent back one life sentence as insufficiently tough, in effect demanding death for one of the co-defendants. Still, there is something unreal about the cries of foul from human rights groups demanding perfect procedural justice from a country struggling with civil war, daily bombings and death-squad killings. The reality is that by the trial's end, there was no significant factual dispute between prosecution and defense: Saddam Hussein acknowledged on national television that he had signed the death warrants after only the most cursory look at the evidence against his victims. That, he testified proudly, "is the right of the head of state." Exactly what would a perfect trial be capable of discovering?

Well, we believe in due process for a reason I thought. We try to have it because there are things that we might not know without it. But it's Saddam, who cares about that for him?

To no avail, I've been searching You Tube since Thursday of a video of Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live falling down in parody of former President Gerald Ford.

I suspect I have it on a VCR tape in storage somewhere, as I have most of them from the first few years of the show, but with the snow storm, I'm not about to head out to the storage locker.

Until someone else posts it on You Tube, we'll all have to make do with today's New York Times article about it.

If anyone has a video from 1975 -- the only year Chevy Chase was on the show, let me know. I'll be glad to convert it to a format You Tube will accept.