Word: gibbets
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...jarring finale last week. In the chill of dawn, naturalized U.S. Citizen Farhan Attassi, 37, was hanged in Damascus' Al Marjah Square. Attached to the white robe customary for a condemned criminal was a large poster stating the verdict. For seven hours the limp body swayed on the gibbet, watched by curious crowds, before it was cut down and taken away for burial. On the same day, Attassi's cousin and alleged accomplice in spying for the U.S., Syrian Lieut. Colonel Abdel Muin Hakemi, 43, was shot in the courtyard of a Damascus army barracks...
...convicted murderer was dragged to the gibbet and eyes dipped for the last benediction. The sentenced man also lowered his head-and then suddenly drove it into the hangman's belly, sending him hurtling off the scaffold to his death on the cobblestones below During the 24 hours set aside for a second executioner to get to Soledad City near the Mexican border, new evidence surfaced, exonerating the "murderer" of his original charge. But what about the murder he now had committed...
...plot of this old nightmare is too athletic to be staged successfully in an age dulled by realism, but in Stacton's retelling it moves as smoothly as the oiled gears of a stretching rack. The reader's disbelief is abruptly suspended-as from a gibbet-as the rich young widowed duchess runs off with her lover Antonio, and her brothers, the bloody Ferdinand and the scheming Cardinal, stalk her to earth for profit and incestuous love...
...lawyer, the reader sees, dwells in the same skin as a grimy little boy gleefully obsessed with a hanging. Boswell plagues the condemned man with questions about how it feels to be condemned, chats with him of a woman who is called "half-hangit Maggie" because she survived the gibbet, and happily plans an experiment to revive Reid's corpse...
Equally unconcerned is Sergeant Croft (Aldo Ray). Tough as teakwood and cruel as a gibbet, he shoots prisoners to loot them of their gold teeth, crushes a broken-winged bird in his bare hand. He too builds power on tiers of terror, cries drunkenly to his platoon: "The generals take orders just like I do. It's just as much my army as it is theirs...