Saddam in World Court?

[SHRED]

Of course they couldn't have turned Saddam over to a World Court.
Mr. Scheer explains below.

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Robert Scheer: Silencing Saddam
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061229_saddam_hussein_executed/
Posted on Dec 29, 2006

By Robert Scheer

It is a very frightening precedent that the United States can invade a country on false pretenses, depose its leader and summarily execute him without an international trial or appeals process. This is about vengeance, not justice, for if it were the latter the existing international norms would have been observed. The trial should have been overseen by the World Court, in a country that could have guaranteed the safety of defense lawyers, who, in this case, were killed or otherwise intimidated.

The irony here is that the crimes for which Saddam Hussein was convicted occurred before the United States, in the form of Donald Rumsfeld, embraced him. Those crimes were well known to have occurred 15 months before Rumsfeld visited Iraq to usher in an alliance between the United States and Saddam to defeat Iran.

The fact is that Saddam Hussein knew a great deal about the United States’ role in Iraq, including deals made with Bush’s father. This rush to execute him had the feel of a gangster silencing the key witness to a crime.

At Nuremberg in the wake of World War II the U.S. set the bar very high by declaring that even the Nazis, who had committed the most heinous of crimes, should have a fair trial. The U.S. and allies insisted on this not to serve those charged, but to educate the public through a believable accounting. In the case of Saddam, the bar was lowered to the mud, with the proceedings turned into a political circus reminiscent of Stalin’s show trials.




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Robert Scheer: Bush’s November Surprise
Posted on Nov 7, 2006
By Robert Scheer

How convenient for Saddam Hussein to be convicted two days before the midterm election by a U.S.-elected and -directed court, providing President Bush with his much needed November surprise. How irresponsible for the mass media to neglect to point out that the “crimes against humanity” for which Hussein was convicted occurred 15 months before Donald Rumsfeld, then the special envoy to Iraq, met with Hussein in Baghdad to develop an alliance between the administration of Ronald Reagan and that of the murderous Iraqi dictator.

The record of that trip, an enormous stain on our nation’s human rights record, is detailed in State Department memoranda readily available on the Internet. Rumsfeld journeyed to Baghdad as President Reagan’s special envoy after the bloody crackdown in the town of Dujail. Ironically, Hussein’s terror campaign was a response to an assassination attempt on his life by Shiite militants belonging to the party now in power in Baghdad, thanks to President Bush’s invasion.

Back then, Rumsfeld and the Reagan administration he represented viewed the Iraqi Shiites, who detested Hussein, with suspicion, considering them natural allies of their co-religionists in Iran. Rumsfeld’s mission was explicitly intended to align the United States with Hussein’s Iraq and offer military support in the ongoing war with the Iranian ayatollahs, regarded as our main enemy in the Mideast.

Rumseld met with Hussein in December 1983 and returned again on March 24, 1984—the very same day the United Nations released a report that Iraq had committed war crimes by using mustard gas and tabun nerve agent against Iranian troops. “American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with Iraq and the U.S., and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been established in all but name,” The New York Times reported five days later.

MORE: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061107_robert_scheer_november_surprise/