The beat goes on...

This has to be one of the funniest things I've read in quite sometime, if one takes "funny" to mean laughable bullshit:

American officials said that they had worked until the last hours of Mr. Hussein’s life to persuade Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to delay the execution. The officials, who spoke on condition that they not be identified, said they appealed to Mr. Maliki not to execute Mr. Hussein at dawn on Saturday because of the onset of a major Islamic festival, and because of constitutional and legal questions that the Americans believed threw the legitimacy of the execution into doubt.

But when Mr. Maliki decided to go ahead with the hanging, the Americans said they made no further attempts to stop it, having concluded that they could advise the Iraqis against the execution, but not prevent it if the Iraqis persisted, out of respect for Iraqi sovereignty.