Odd choice of words for the second screwed-up hanging

Check out this quote from this very disconcerting article in today's New York Times, reporting on the execution of Saddam Hussein's half-brother:

An official video played to a small group of Iraqi and Western reporters more than 13 hours after the hanging showed Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, former head of Mr. Hussein’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 in Cuba, his head and mustache shaved. Beside him, praying feverishly in identical garb, stood the other condemned man, Awad Hamad al-Bandar, the former chief judge of Mr. Hussein’s revolutionary court.

After executioners in full-face balaclavas pulled black hoods over the two men’s heads, tightened nooses around their necks and pulled the lever opening the trapdoors, both fell like weights. But the hangmen’s calculations of weight, gravity and the momentum needed to snap their necks — a grim science that has produced detailed “drop charts” used for decades in hangings around the world — appeared, in Mr. Ibrahim’s case, to have gone seriously awry.

Meaning his head got instantly severed from the rest of his body, combining an officially approved hanging with an unofficial decapitation.

Notice how they describe Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti as the "former head of Mr. Hussein's secret police, standing nervously on the trapdoor..." So the guy basically gets decapitated in what should only have been a hanging that would break his neck, and they refer to him as a FORMER HEAD standing nervously? Somebody woke up with a sense of humor, huh?

The article goes on to describe how after the original mishap, in which Saddam was mocked by sectarian Shiites right before he croaked, the Iraqi government consulted with western "humanitarian organizations" in order to improve their procedures.

This strikes me as very weird... if they had really consulted with humanitarian organizations, wouldn't these organizations have said something like "umm... maybe we're biased, but we don't believe that hangings, or executions in general, are exactly very humanitarian"?

P.S. If you want to learn about the hanging "drop charts" the article refers to, see this Slate Explainer article from last year.