religious intolerance Bush will pull his troops right out.
hee hee. Sorry couldnt help that. Yup. Sure is a dicey situation. But on
the flip side, you cant do nothing because you have no perfect exit
strategy.
DRE
-----Original Message-----
From: Angel Stewart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2004 4:46 PM
To: CF-Community
Subject: Why Saddam will never get a fair tri
"(Saddam Hussein) was wise not to wait too long," said Colonel James
Hickey, commander of the American forces that took the former Iraqi
leader prisoner on December 14.
"We were about to clear that (underground facility) in a military sort
of way," he added, explaining that "things like that are cleared with
hand grenades, small arms, things like that." But Hickey's instructions
were to capture or kill Saddam, and the latter managed to get his hands
up in time.
The Bush administration is probably wishing quite hard by now that
Saddam had waited a little longer and been killed in his hole. While
others debate where he should be tried and by whom, and whether he
should face the death penalty or not, President Bush's people will be
realising just about now that they can't afford to give him a fair trial
at all.
He would certainly be convicted in the end: the evidence of Saddam's
crimes over the years is overwhelming. But in a fair trial, with normal
rules of evidence and reasonably competent defence lawyers, it would be
impossible to stop the defence from pointing out that every US
administration from 1980 to 1992 (all Republican administrations, as it
happens) was directly or indirectly complicit in his crimes.
During Saddam's quarter-century of power in Iraq, every year saw tens of
thousands of people tortured and killed, for that is the nature of
absolute dictatorships of any political ideology. Mao Tse-tung, the
Argentine generals and Idi Amin all did it, the Algerian regime, the
Burmese generals, and Kim Jong-Il are all doing it today. But nobody
would have tried Mao for the routine fifty or hundred thousand people
killed by his regime in an average year like 1962; they would have
focused on the millions who were exiled, tortured, and/or murdered
during the Cultural Revolution.
Saddam's career includes three great crimes: the use of poison gas
against Iranian troops during the 1980-88 war; the slaughter of
rebellious Iraqi Kurds towards the end of that war and just afterwards
(again involving the use of poison gas); and the massacres of Kurds and
Shia Arabs who rebelled against his rule after the Gulf War of 1991.
After that, his misdeeds fall back to a more mundane level.
These three great crimes, committed between 1983 and 1991, would be the
primary focus of any trial. The problem for the US government is that it
was directly implicated in the first two, and largely though indirectly
responsible for the third as well. A truly impartial court might even
lay charges against senior American political and military figures
(including some in the present administration) who assisted Saddam in
his war crimes. At the least, the whole process would be acutely
embarrassing for the United States.
US involvement with Saddam's regime began in 1983, when his ill-advised
invasion of Iran had backfired spectacularly and Iraq was facing defeat
at the hands of Ayatollah Khomeini's radically anti-American regime in
Iran. The US knew that Saddam was already illegally using chemical
weapons against Iranian troops on an almost daily basis, but in
December, 1983 the Reagan administration sent Donald Rumsfeld (now US
Defence Secretary) to Baghdad to tell Saddam that it was willing to help
and wanted to restore full diplomatic relations.
In the following years, the US government allowed vital ingredients for
chemical weapons to be exported to Iraq, together with dozens of
biological agents, including anthrax. It also supplied Iraq with
intelligence information on Iranian troop movements and positions, and
from 1986 even sent US Air Force officers to Iraq to help interpret
US-supplied satellite and aerial photos to plan attacks against Iran-in
which it was clearly understood by Washington that huge quantities of
poison gas would be used.
The Reagan administration used its influence to kill a Senate bill
banning the export of US military technology to Iraq to punish Saddam
for using chemical weapons against Iran. When Saddam used poison gas
against his own Kurdish population at Halabja in 1988, killing 6,800
innocent people, US diplomats were instructed to blame the incident on
Iran. All this would come out in gory detail (and perhaps much more
besides) if Saddam ever got a fair and public trial.
The third great crime of the Saddam years was the massacre of rebellious
Shia Arabs and, to a lesser extent, of Kurds, after Saddam's defeat in
the 1991 war. These occurred because President George H.W. Bush urged
the Iraqi population to revolt against Saddam-but when they did, he
withheld US military support, even allowing Saddam's helicopter gunships
to range freely over the rebellious areas. It was not complicity, but it
was at least great carelessness.
This is why there will probably be no public trial at all. It has
already become clear that the ousted Iraqi leader, contrary to
Washington's first statements, will not be treated as a prisoner of war
although he is technically the captured commander-in-chief of a defeated
national army. Instead, he will be assigned to the same legal limbo
shared by the hundreds who have been imprisoned in Guantanamo for the
past two years, suffering perpetual interrogation without the protection
of the Geneva Conventions and beyond the reach of any national law
including that of the United States.
Nobody at Guantanamo has yet been brought to trial. Saddam will be the
same.
- Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist."
-Gel
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