Iraq's turbulent effort to reckon with the violence of its past took a macabre turn Monday when the execution of Saddam Hussein's half-brother ended with the hangman's noose severing his head from his body after he fell through the trapdoor.
An official video shown more than 13 hours later to a small group of reporters showed the half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, former chief of Saddam's secret police, standing nervously on the trapdoor in a flame-orange jumpsuit of the kind used at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
