NYT reported On Wednesday, 22 months after he was dragged from his hiding place in an underground bunker, Saddam Hussein will appear in an Iraqi court to answer for the brutalities he inflicted on his fellow Iraqis. But what should be a moment of triumph for his victims is instead stirring concern about the fairness and competence of the court itself.
I suspect only the NYT and a few bleeding hearts are worried about that.The special Iraqi tribunal established to conduct the trial has chosen a case that many Iraqis believe to be too narrow to answer the widespread yearning for Mr. Hussein to be held to account for the most savage of his crimes.
Everyone would want him to be tried for what he did to them, but dead is dead, and I think that is the way most Iraqis want to see him.And the political pressure to hasten the trial has forced the tribunal to accelerate some of the work needed to prepare for other cases involving tens of thousands of victims, nearly 300 mass graves and about 40 tons of documents gathered from the government agencies that oversaw his repression. While many Iraqis are eager for the moment when they see Mr. Hussein in the dock, Western human rights groups and legal experts have warned that the former dictator is unlikely to get a fair trial, and that the probable outcome, a death sentence, will be what the tribunal's harshest critics have described as "victor's justice."
The victor also writes the history books.
2 comments:
Someone would have to be a very simpleminded creature to think Saddam Hussein is getting anything resembling a real trial. Were it to be an actual trial he'd be acquitted in about 30 seconds. The reason is simple: Everything that made possible his capture is illegal. The illegal war of aggression launched against Iraq which was doing nothing to provoke America. The subsequent and equally-illegal occupation of Iraq. If one takes away those two enormously illegal conditions there is no way Saddam Hussein would have ended up in U.S. custody. To disregard or forget about the situations by which someone came to be in custody in the first place is to forget about the rule of law altogether. Let's just call it what it is, a lynching. It has all the legitimacy of the Moscow show trials in the late 1930s in the Soviet Union. I feel sorry for anyone who doesn't realize this is a kangaroo court show trial, as such "thinking" betrays an exceedingly shallow grasp of the concept of the rule of law.
As I understand most, if not all, of the judicial procedures predate the war in Iraq. They now have a new constitution, so the old one that gave him immunity does not apply.
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