Saddam may face execution before standing trial on all charges

[Judi Lynn]

Posted on Sun, Oct. 09, 2005

Saddam may face execution before standing trial on all charges

By Nancy A. Youssef
Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Saddam Hussein could be executed before the Iraqi Special Tribunal finishes charging him with all his alleged crimes, a source close to the tribunal said Sunday.

For members of some groups allegedly abused by Saddam, the possibility that he'd not face their allegations drew mixed feelings.

His first trial, along with seven co-defendants, is set to begin Oct. 19. It will weigh charges that they massacred 143 people in Dujail, a predominantly Shiite town north of Baghdad, in 1982 after a failed assassination attempt. If convicted, Saddam could be sentenced to death.

On Sunday, officials began releasing more details of how the court will operate. Instead of a jury, a five-judge panel will hear the case and one will be the presiding judge. The defendants will be charged together, unlike in U.S. courts.
(snip/...)

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12860794.htm

[henslee]

1. Dumb move to immortalize/martyrize . Smarter to let him decay slowly

in jail.

[Robb]

3. Agreed n/t

[niceypoo]

32. What is Saddam charged with that Bush hasn't done to Iraqis?

[Mokito]

4. Yes, but decaying men DO talk!

Dead men don't!

Three guesses which one * finds more comforting.

[indepat]

2. Should be a warning to all who would commit crimes against humanity or

war crimes.

[Skink]

6. All going as planned...

Dead men tell no tales unless they publish a book first.

[Kailassa]

10. But B*s* is hardly capable of learning from any warning.

It Will be a warning though to any leader who plans to sell their oil for euros rather than for American dollars, thus undermining international support for the floating dollar.

I'm not defending Saddam, but America has been much worse a disaster for Iraq than he was at his worst, and since when has America cared what a dictator did so long as they didn't go against America's interests?

[Sandpiper]

17. And what warning might that be?

That crimes against humanity are bad except for when they're politically convenient to the United States?

[indepat]

18. Something like that for the niceties of international law and relations

don't apply with the neocons in control.

[daleo]

44. Yes, if successful you can have your enemies killed after an invasion.

I don't see why war criminals like Bush and Blair should be encouraged in this way though.

[Journeyman]

5. "VERDICT FIRST! . . . trial afterwards." --The Red Queen

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead,
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head. Feed your head. Feed your head"


We have truly fallen through the rabbit hole . . .

[Twist_U_Up]

7. dead men tell no tales nt

[bluestateguy]

8. Iraq has every right to execute him

Don't make him out to be the victim. The victims are the people who get rounded up and sent to Abu Grahib for some trivial offense like being out 10 minutes after curfew, only to be jailed for months, tortured and sexually abused by Lyndie England wanna-be's.

[thebigidea]

9. and who exactly is "Iraq" in this case? Our little rubberstamp puppets?

[bluestateguy]

11. That isn't what I meant

I'm just warning people, let this one go. If anybody on our side is seen as hand-wringing over Saddam's execution, then it can only backfire.

[enigma000]

12. but but brown people have no right to judge

/sarcasm

Let Iraqis judge a former Iraqi leader.

[fujiyama]

13. I agree on a PR level

defending Saddam is pretty stupid...But I do believe that executing him before a trial is no better than something Saddam would have done. Even war criminals and scum deserve a trial.

But at the same time it'd be interesting to hear what he has to say about the chemical weapons that Reagan and Rummy sold and gave to him...

[StrafingMoose]

15. In fact...

The reason why they are so eager to kill the guy is precisely because of embarassing things they could find if the charge him for Halabjah (Chemicals) first instead of Dujail (no Chemicals), IMO.

Whoever provided them to him, is certainly not in the 'axis of evil'...

[Yupster]

19. They're not talking about executing him

before trial.

They are planning multiple trials for him trying him for single incidents one at a time.

The first trial is for rounding up townspeople and having them executed because there was an assasination atempt in their town. That's the crime he's going on trial for first.

The thinking is if he gets the death penalty in that trial, do they really need to have a dozen more trials? After all, how many times can you be executed?

On the other hand, I don't know if I agree. There will be many victims who will want to testify about what happened to them. I think it might be better to let the crimes be documented.

I'm sure the current government is worried that as long as he lives, he could still be a rallying point for some future government.

[oblivious]

23. Or someone is worried his accomplices were his foreign allies.

Western campanies and governments who supplied him with chemicals, helicopters and logistics during that period. Accomplices in mass murder. Allies like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait who helped finance him during that period. Should they not all be on trial?

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

26. It's not whether he should be executed

Personally, I think he should be executed several times for what he's done to his people. My objection is how convenient it is that he's being tried only for events that can't be directly linked to the U.S. Kill him now and you (Bushco) avoid the embarrassment of incriminating information being made public.

[radwriter0555]

22. Right, saddam isn't a victim. He just ran the country that he tried for 20

years to keep from the clutches of the bush regime.

Got wmds?

Nope.

Why do we start believing the bush regime NOW about saddam hussein? Since when were they in the business of truth telling?

[leesa]

31. Ummm...WE did that, not Saddam. Since when do you prefer execution

before the trial. Are you a barbarian?

[bluestateguy]

46. Please refer me back to where I said he should not get a trial

Maybe that's what you wanted me to say, but it is not what I said, and it is not what I believe.

[sleipnir]

35. No one has the right to kill someone else.

No one.

No country.

No government.

No one.

If we continue to allow legal murder, we will never fully see peace.

[daleo]

45. Without due process, the killing would be murder.

Nobody has that right, no matter how much Bush acts like he does.

[Ezlivin]

14. Drain his brain first

Killing Sadaam before we've had a chance to thoroughly interrogate him and get a data dump is a waste.

Don't let all his victims die in vain.

Let's learn all we can from this son-of-a-bitch so we can catch other evil-doing mf'ers. We'll probably find more than a few in CONUS.

[StrafingMoose]

16. Agreed

[radwriter0555]

20. What victims? There hasn't been one single verified victim of rape,

torture or murder.

If you're still operating on the assumption that the bush regime was telling the truth about how saddam ran his country, then you need to make a slight adjustment in your critical analysis.

To imagine that suddenly, the bush regime managed to conjure up a pile of TRUTH about saddam when everything else they've ever represented since the early 80's has proven to be a patent lie, is just... well.. not well thought out.

I don't believe saddam committed any of the atrocities that he's accused of. The only people who claim such stories are cronies to the bush regime. There are no credible witnesses, no independent investigations, no victims, no 'survivors,' etc. Just stories from people aligned with the bush regime.

You don't trust the bush regime on anything else, why trust them with the truth about saddam hussein? After all, if he's on trial, the man who said he didn't have wmds, and who DIDN'T HAVE WMDS, will finally be able to tell the truth.

We can't have that, now can we?

[mudderfudder77]

21. Right....

Wow, I can't believe i just read that.


Say what yoiu will about our leadership, but don't try and defend Saddam.

Do you deny the gassing of the Kurds happened?

[radwriter0555]

25. The 'gassing of the kurds......" Well, the US army war college said the

gas was iranian.

So I find that particular case to be suspect along with all the victimless rape camps, torture chambers, mass graves, etc.

Considering that the source for all the hussein demonization is the bush regime or their close allies, is the same source(s) that have demonized castro and now chavez, why would anyone trust the source?

Was saddam lying when he said he had no wmds?

Why were his sons murdered by US troops? By what right? Why were they not allowed a trial?

Consider the source.

The same source that sold 2000 US troops to their deaths to 'liberate' the iraqis that they're now slaughtering in a wholesale genocide?

Consider the source.

[The Magistrate]

28. The Problem With That Report, Sir

Is that it was written at a time when the Reagan regime was openly supporting Hussein in his war against Iran. It seems odd that the same standards of self interest and propaganda are not applied to it by some who tout it as an exoneration of Hussein: it was quite in the interests of the U.S. government at that time to whitewash the affair. Nor is it the only instance of the use of poison gasses in the campaign waged against Kurdish irridentism during the eighties by Hussein's regime: the same weapons that were used on the battlefield against the Iranians were used routinely in that endeavor, and no one seriously denies it.

The idea that all reports of atrocious conduct by Hussein and his agencies originate with the current regime in the U.S. is risible. Reports published at the time by Amnesty International and similar organizations make that abundantly clear. Attempts to paint Hussein as some sort of innocent, benign, and even heroic creature are worse even than political folly, which they certainly are: they are a denial of plain fact impudent as an assertion that racial profiling is not routine in police-work in this country would be.

[radwriter0555]

34. Saddam was no more a tyrant than Fidel Castro is. While he ruled harshly

I do believe that ultimately he was defending his regime from overthrow albiet in a heavy handed manner. But, each instance that I know of was defensive rather than offensive or in the very least, retaliation.

He's no hero, but, under saddam, Iraq could have been a great nation if not meddled with and targeted for extermination and conquest; even under the sanctions it was still turning out great scholars, professors and engineers; the universities were some of the best in the middle east, and bagdad was considered the cultural hub of the middle east.

All this is lost now. It's been bombed, dessicated, and desecrated back to the stone age... the atrocity is the US actions, not saddam hussein.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

37. And what do you call starting the war with Iran? n/t

[radwriter0555]

39. None of our business actually. It was between them and resolved

between them, except that the bush regime people saw the chance to make a fast buck by backing saddam in his power play. Israel lead him to believe that the two nations could be combined with little effort, but it appears they lied about the strength of the iranian military.

saddam wasn't engaging in wholesale genocide, his army was fighting their army.

We'll never know the whole truth I imagine, but I'll be damned if I'll let the bush regime force me to swallow THEIR version. Just because it's the bush regime insisting that we believe their stories, I simply have to give SH the benefit of the doubt, once I step aside and consider the source.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

40. Ah. I see.

It wasn't actually genocide, so it didn't rise to the level of a crime, but somehow this was defensive in nature. That still doesn't make any sense. The guy is a pigfucker. Casting a violent dictator as a victim of circumstance is silly. Having the backing of the US doesn't absolve him of responsibility - nor does it absolve his backers of responsibility. They were the agressors.

Sounds kinda familiar.

[The Magistrate]

41. You Would Be Well Advised, Mr Writer

To do a good deal more research on the war between Iraq and Iran. That was one of the purest exercise of predatory aggressive war, explicitly criminalized by international law, in the last half of the twentieth century. It conduct was even more grossly criminal owing to the introdution of poison gasses as routine battlefield wapons, a thing prohibited from the mid-twenties of the last century. The man should have stood in the dock for that at the earliest opportunity, and it is a great shame upon the United Nations that he has not.

Further, the war was hardly a pure battlefield exercise, as it was accompanied by open bombardment of population centers, both by aircraft and by rockets, the latter in particular devices so innaccurate that they could not be aimed at anything other than random impact in a city among its civilian populace. It was a war backed by race hate: you may not be aware that there is a longstanding enmity between Arabs and Persians, and that Hussein's family had long been prominent promoters of hatred for Persians in Iraqi political life.

Hussein's mis-calculation had nothing to do with the things you have referenced, and the claim that Israel is somehow to blame for Hussein's actions is risible. Hussein calculated that the revolutionary chaos abroad in Iran made it weak enough that he would be able to over-run and detatch the western portion of it, rich in oil and mostly populated by Arabs. He was mistaken: foreign invasion of a revolutionary power tends to consolidate popular support for the current government of it, as the history of the French and Russion revolutions clearly demonstrates, but despiet the history of such matters, it is a mistake aspiring conqueror's frequently have made, and doubtless will continue to make.

It is noted that you do not attempt to engage the views and charges of the human rights activists reporting on events in the eighties and nineties of the last century in regard to Hussein's conduct and the character of his regime, but merely recur to the claim all such charges originate witht he current regime in the United States. That will hardly do, Sir. These organizations and their reports are not things to be taken up when it siuts some political purpose, and discarded when they are inconvenient. It is just this propensity to turn serious charges of crimes against humanity into a mere propagandist's club that renders the general populace insensible to them, and inclined to dismiss charges of criminal behavior by their side in a conflict as mere politics, and lacking any real foundation: we on the left must be even-handed in our condemnations on that score if we wish anyone outside our own circles to treat them as seriosu matters.

Castro is a tyrant on several levels, without the slightest doubt. The classic definition of the term is a ruler who seizes power illegaly, and that definition he, and indeed any revolutionary leader, certainly meets. It has been marked from ancient times that such a ruler often will commit cruel and unjust actions, but they are not necessary for the term to apply, and do not always follow. He is a tyrant as well on more standard grounds, for there is no doubt that his regime has certainly suppressed, and suppressed cruelly, political dissent on certain lines throughout its history. This is a seperate concern from whether or not his rule has been of benefit to the mass of people in Cuba: it is my view that, on comparison to the condition of that island's people before his revolution, and on compare today with the condition of many neighboring and otherwise similar lands, that his rule has been of benefit to the Cuban people. Hussein's rule of Iraq cannot really be said to have elevated the condition of its people much above either their previous condition under colonial rule, or above the state of neighboring countries such as Jordan or Syria or Egypt, and it can be readily said that his rule was crueler than that of some, such as Jordan, and as bad or worse than that of others, such as Syria, and Iran under the Shah, and under the mullahs of today.

[davekriss]

24. That's quite an interesting challenge

Let Saddam have his day in court. Of course. The rule of law demands it. Let the evidence and testimony of accusers and defenders be heard. Then comes the conviction and the sentence. Now, what if? (as you suggest) what if even this, the picture we have of Hussein's atrocities and egregious crimes against humanity, what if these too are largely untrue?

He was, like Noriega of Panama before him and Chavez currently, Hitlerized in the media to further a Bush agenda. What a world we live in if Hussein turns out to be just your typically violent USG-supported dictator.

[Ezlivin]

30. I agree: They want Sadaam dead not for justice, but to prevent justice.

In fact, that is what I hinted at in my last sentence. There are plenty of criminals in our administration with ties to the regime.

[Xithras]

43. Excuse me, but I've actually spoken to one.

I live in an area with a major Assyrian population, and have a number of Assyrian co-workers. One of them fled Iraq via Turkey in 1993 after her sister was kidnapped and raped for four straight days by a handful of Uday's personal guards. She was 14 years old at the time, and when they were done with her they simply dumped her nearly-dead body back where they picked her up from.

Her crime? One of the guards whistled at her, she ignored him.

Of course, I guess you could still claim that it isn't "verified" and is just another anecdotal accusation, but the same can be said for the majority of rape allegations in all circumstances. I don't know what kind of standard you hold up for rape and murder, but I consider mass graves and hundreds of complaining women to be proof enough.

By the way, according to my co-workers, these types of things were pretty common in pre-invasion Baghdad. Sunni's had nothing to worry about, but Shiite, Assyrian, or women of any of the other Iraqi ethnic minorities were always at risk for rape or kidnapping. Men who so much as looked sideways at some of the Republican Guard troops could be summarily imprisoned and "questioned" for years. Sometimes they never came back.

The stories aren't BS. Saddam really was a genuinely evil person, and many of the people who served under him were equally evil. It's debatable as to whether he was really "as evil as Hitler" (as some like to call him), but he was certainly a murderous, genocidal megalomaniac.

[mbperrin]

27. Red Queen: Sentence first, trial after. Off with his head!

Nice to see due process in action.

Poor guy. After all, for the longest, he was OUR dictator. Then Glaspy did him in....

[HuffleClaw]

29. what a complete sham

if even ONE american was being tried similarly in ANY nation, imagine the outrage... and thats it in a nutshell.

[tinrobot]

33. Kill him before he talks....

Execute him for some minor charge before he can rat out all the people in the White House who helped him to power in the 1980's.

[OKthatsIT]

42. EXACTLY!

My guess is the questions have been of particular interests to Bush, Sr, Rumsfeld, Rice and Bolton...huh

[Julius Civitatus]

36. Quick! Before he spills the beans on Poppy and Reagan!

If they put Saddam on trial, he sure will tell more than a handful of pretty nasty secrets about Reagan and Poppy Bush, about how they armed him, sold him WMDs, financed his regime for a decade, and other embarrassing details.

Make no mistake. This is done to avoid some very nasty details to reach public opinion.

[superconnected]

38. What a nice announcement to the world about how American democracy

really works.

It truly delivers.