operation red dawn (11. 187)

Codenamed after the 1984 World War III invasion scenario of the US by a coalition of the Warsaw Pact and Latin American countries—starring Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze as resistance-fighters—a task force of American soldiers apprehended deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein on this day in 2003, having disappeared and gone into hiding shortly after the US invasion, discovered in his hometown of ad-Dawr near Tikrik, holed up in a foxhole or spider-whole with guns and three-quarters of a million dollars in cash. The site where Hussein was captured, Wolverine 2, is also a reference to the teenaged band of guerrilla fighters of the movie. Put before a special tribunal called by the provisional authority and interim government (which many characterised as a creature of American jurisdiction and a show trial not representative of an independent Iraq) six months later and found guilty of crimes against humanity for genocidal campaigns against the Kurdish and Shiite populations during the war with Iran and subsequently executed at the trial’s conclusion and having exhausted appeals in November of 2006.