Cell phone video of Hussein hanging

I've read a couple accounts of this.

(Update below)

(Update II below)

...a prosecutor at the trial that condemned Mr. Hussein to death, said that one of two men he had seen holding a cellphone camera aloft to make a video of Mr. Hussein’s last moments — up to and past the point where he fell through the trapdoor — was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Mr. Maliki’s national security adviser. Attempts to reach Mr. Rubaie were unsuccessful. The prosecutor, Munkith al-Faroun, said the other man holding a cellphone above his head was also an official, but he could not recall his name.

Each time a link was given to this page.

Those words are not part of the story now. It appears they've been expunged. It now reads.

Mr. Maliki seemed equally eager to ward off the opprobrium stirred by the execution. His aides announced that the events at the hanging would be the subject of an inquiry. A prosecutor who attended the execution, Munkith al-Faroun, said he thought one of the invited witnesses had recorded the session on a cellphone, but he could not recall his name.

In fact there is no mention of "...he fell through the trapdoor...". That was probably just too embarrassing for Bush and Maliki.

Yep, you're watching history re-write itself right in the pages of the NYT.

UPDATE: My apologies to Bush (hard to type that), Maliki and the NYT. As if they need them. But it appears they changed their story because the eye witness denied what the NYT originally reported.

I will fault the NYT for not mentioning that little denial at the time they posted the re-write. Disappeared facts always seem very suspicious.

On Wednesday, an Iraqi prosecutor who was also present at the execution denied a report that he had accused National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie of possible responsibility for the leaked video.

"I am not accusing Mowaffak al-Rubaie, and I did not see him taking pictures," Munqith al-Faroon, a prosecutor in the case that sent Saddam to the gallows, told The Associated Press.

"But I saw two of the government officials who were ... present during the execution taking all the video of the execution, using the lights that were there for the official taping of the execution. They used mobile phone cameras. I do not know their names, but I would remember their faces," al-Faroon said in a telephone interview.

UPDATE II: The person believed to have taken the cell phone video has been arrested, but not named.