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--- Begin Message ---
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IBRAHIM ISA'S - FOCUS ON HUSSEIN TRIAL - 31 Jan 06*
*---------------------------------------------------------*
**** Hussein trial descends into a legal farce*
**** Saddam Hussein hearings: a show trial orchestrated in Washington*
*---------------------------------------------------------*
*Hussein trial descends into a legal farce*
By Peter Symonds
31 January 2006
<Socialist Website>
When it resumed last Sunday, the trial of Saddam Hussein soon became a
shambles, once again underlining the bogus character of the court set up
and managed by the Bush administration.
Under pressure to speed up proceedings, the newly-installed chief judge,
Raouf Abdel-Rahman, told the court that he would not tolerate political
speeches. “Any irrelevant remarks will be struck from the record, and
anyone who breaks the rules will be removed from the courtroom and tried
as if he were present,” he declared.
Abdel-Rahman ordered Barzan Ibrahim al Tikriti forcibly removed when the
former Iraqi intelligence chief questioned the legitimacy of the court,
describing it as “a bastard child”. Tikriti, who has cancer, was
complaining over the lack of proper medical treatment. Four bailiffs
seized Tikriti and physically dragged him out of the courtroom.
Amid shouts of “Down with the traitors! Down with America!” by the
defendants, Abdel-Rahman threatened to prosecute one of the defence
lawyers, Salih Armouti, a Jordanian. “You have incited your clients and
we will start criminal proceedings against you,” the judge declared,
ordering that the lawyer also be removed from the court.
The rest of the defence team walked out in protest, ignoring repeated
threats from Abdel-Rahman that they would not be allowed to return.
Hussein protested over the imposition of court-appointed lawyers as his
defenders and left the court, denouncing the chief judge.
When the proceedings finally resumed, the four main defendants, along
with their defence lawyers, had either been removed or left the
courtroom in protest. Yet the chief judge continued with the trial for
the next three hours, taking evidence from witnesses, which went
unchallenged by the court-appointed defence lawyers.
Hussein and his co-defendants have been charged with the killing of 148
men and teenage boys from the mainly Shiite town of Dujail in 1982. The
murders took place following an assassination attempt on Hussein by
members of the Shiite-based Da’wa Party in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war.
The court and its US advisers narrowly defined the charges against
Hussein quite deliberately. For the Da’wa Party, which is prominent in
the current Iraqi puppet regime, the prosecution of the Dujail massacre
will help to bolster its flagging support among Shiites. For Washington,
the atrocity conveniently has no obvious connection to the US
administration of the day.
The Bush administration has been concerned from the outset to prevent
Hussein from using any trial, as former Yugoslav president Slobodan
Milosevic has done, to expose the complicity of the US in the crimes
alleged against him. Washington insisted that Hussein be tried in Iraq,
rather than by an international tribunal, so as to maintain tight
control over the proceedings.
However, the trial, which began on October 19, has gone from one crisis
to the next. The former chief judge, Rizgar Muhammad Amin, tried to give
the trial a veneer of legitimacy by appearing to be even-handed and
allowing Hussein and his defence lawyers the opportunity to challenge
proceedings. He was bitterly criticised by government ministers and in
the US for failing to control proceedings tightly enough.
Visiting Baghdad in late December, Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of
the US Senate Judiciary Committee, told Amin that he was disappointed
that Hussein had been allowed to “dominate” the trial. “You have a
butcher who has butchered his own people, a torturer who has tortured
his own people. The evidence ought to be presented in a systematic way
which would show that there’s been quite an accomplishment in taking
[Hussein] out,” he declared. In other words, the purpose of the trial
was not to determine Hussein’s guilt but to politically justify the
illegal US-led occupation of Iraq.
Amin resigned as chief judge on January 9, saying he was fed up with
criticism from high-ranking government officials. The remainder of the
five-judge panel hearing the case designated Judge Said Hammashi to
replace Amin but he quickly came under fire. Ali Lami, head of the
government’s de-Baathification commission, accused Hammashi of being a
former member of Hussein’s Baath Party. Hammashi denied the accusation
but was transferred off the case and Abdel-Rahman appointed in his place.
This blatant political manipulation of the court provoked warnings from
the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) last week that the entire process
may be seen as illegitimate. “The demand for Presiding Judge Rizgar
Amin’s dismissal, which contributed to his resignation, was nothing less
than an attack on judicial independence,” Richard Dicker, HWT
International Justice Program director, stated.
“The removal of Judge al-Hammashi from the trial created the appearance
of a court that is continually subjected to political interference.
Sitting judges cannot be shuffled around as though they were deck chairs
on the Titanic,” Dicker added.
Law professor Michael Scharf, one of the US advisers who trained the
tribunal officials, expressed similar concerns to the /Los Angeles
Times/. “The game of musical chairs that is unfolding at the trial is
bound to take its toll on local and world opinion about the credibility
of the proceedings in Baghdad,” he said, adding hopefully: “But the
tribunal is far from critically wounded. I think it will pull through
the latest setback.”
However, it is impossible to obscure the basic fact that the court is
the product of an illegal US-led invasion. The efforts of Washington and
the Baghdad regime to muzzle Hussein and his lawyers will only make its
character as a political show trial more apparent. While Hussein and the
Baathist regime are undoubtedly guilty of crimes, this court is not
designed to provide justice for the victims, but to justify the
continuing neo-colonial occupation of the country.
The trial is due to restart on Wednesday. The defence team has declared
that it will boycott the proceedings. “The court hearing yesterday
[Sunday] lacked the basics of a fair and honest trial, and the judge was
biased against the defendants, who under the law are innocent until
proven guilty,” defence lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi said. He called for the
trial to be moved out of Iraq to an international court.
Hussein has also declared that he will not attend court. Without defence
lawyers and the chief defendants, the proceedings are a rather naked
legal sham.
------------------------
*Saddam Hussein hearings: a show trial orchestrated in Washington *
By Peter Symonds
10 December 2005
*<Socialist Website>*
The three days of hearings this week in the trial of Saddam Hussein have
demonstrated once again the fraudulent and illicit character of the
stage-managed proceedings.
No justice is possible in a court established by the illegal US
occupation of Iraq. Every aspect of the trial, from the choice of judges
and charges to the court statutes and the contrived media coverage, has
been supervised by US officials. A small army of American lawyers
operating from the US embassy advises the judges and prosecution on the
case.
Lashing out at the legal sham, Hussein exclaimed: “How is it [the court]
legitimate if it is set up by the Americans!” He declared that he was
not afraid of being executed and refused to take part in proceedings on
Wednesday, saying: “I will not be in a court without justice. Go to
hell, you and your agents of America!”
Underscoring the predetermined outcome of the trial, Hussein’s
co-defendant and former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti
interjected: “Why don’t you just execute us?”
The strategy of the court’s American minders is transparent: to exploit
the emotional impact of first-hand accounts of torture and murder to
drown out all other questions surrounding the case. Trial judge Rizgar
Mohammad Amin allowed defence lawyers only a quarter of an hour to
challenge the legitimacy of the court, and then only after the defence
team walked out in protest.
Hussein and his co-defendants have been charged over the murder of 148
men and teenage boys from the predominantly Shiite town of Dujail in
1982. The killings took place in the wake of an assassination attempt on
Hussein by members of the Da’wa Party in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war.
The choice of the Dujail massacre was deliberate. Not only did it suit
the political needs of the Da’wa Party, now a prominent part of the US
puppet regime in Baghdad, but, from Washington’s standpoint, had no
obvious connection to the US administration of the day. From the outset,
the Bush administration has been concerned to prevent Hussein from using
the trial, as former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic has done, to
establish US complicity in the crimes of the Baathist regime, such as
the gassing of Kurds in Hallabja in 1988.
Predictably, the media in Iraq and internationally has focussed
attention on the harrowing accounts of the survivors of the Dujail
massacre. Men, women and children were rounded up and held for months
and years, tortured and in some cases killed. The witnesses, most of
whom spoke with their voices electronically disguised from behind a
curtain, provided gruesome details of their ordeals.
From a legal standpoint, however, none of the witnesses has made any
direct connection to Hussein or the other accused. One man, who claimed
that intelligence chief Ibrahim was present during torture sessions, had
to admit that he was blindfolded at the time. Ibrahim flatly denied any
involvement declaring: “I am not a jailer, I am a political official.”
Coaxing “Witness A” to implicate the accused, one of the judges asked:
“Who is your complaint against?” The woman first replied “Saddam”, then
“the entire regime” and later added: “The president [Hussein] doesn’t
know anything about this, he wasn’t paying attention and he should not
be responsible for everything.” Even the media had to acknowledge that
much of the testimony was rambling and incoherent.
The coverage on the state-run and US-supervised TV channel al-Iraqiya
has made not the slightest pretence of impartiality. What is taking
place is a political show trial, as the Baghdad correspondent for the
British-based /Guardian/ explained:
“Whenever the courtroom had a break, the screen was filled with a
propaganda commercial showing Saddam’s face. Blood slowly pours across
it. Pictures of the former president bringing his hand down firmly to
make a point are intercut with archive footage of a prisoner lying on
the ground while a man uses a baseball bat to smash his wrists. In the
style of Shia religious mourning a voice wails a poem that taunts Saddam
with God’s judgment: ‘Where will you hide from all your crimes?’”
*US war crimes*
Hussein and his Baathist regime are undoubtedly responsible for many
crimes. But President George Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney and
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as well as a long line of US
officials, should be standing alongside him in the dock for their crimes
against the Iraqi people.
Hussein is being tried for punishing the village of Dujail for an
attempt on his life in the midst of Iraq’s war with Iran. Yet exactly
the same methods are being used by the US military today against towns
and villages suspected of harbouring anti-occupation fighters. Last year
US forces levelled the city of Fallujah killing hundreds of civilians,
at a conservative estimate. Similar operations are currently underway
against strongholds of armed opposition in the west of the country.
There is mounting evidence that the US and its Iraqi allies have
established death squads to systematically round up, torture and murder
opponents of the American occupation. Each month the number of bodies in
Baghdad’s main morgue showing signs of torture and execution-style
killing is in the hundreds. Along with journalists, clerics and
politicians critical of the US presence, two of Hussein’s defence
lawyers have been murdered in circumstances that point to the
involvement of pro-government forces.
Many more Iraqis have been arbitrarily rounded up, detained without
trial and tortured by US forces. Highlighting the obvious hypocrisy of
the Bush administration, Hussein’s defence lawyers have asked witnesses
whether they had been stripped naked or threatened by dogs while held in
Abu Ghraib prison. While accounts of abuse are being broadcast from the
courtroom in Baghdad, US officials are publicly defending the CIA’s
worldwide system of prisons and torture chambers, to which US captives
are “rendered”.
From the outset, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other
international bodies have been critical of the US-established court,
warning Washington that the Hussein trial risks being regarded as
illegimate. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both
produced lengthy reports detailing the numerous breaches of
international law and basic legal rights involved in the proceedings.
As the present session began, John Case, the UN’s human rights chief in
Iraq, declared: “We’re very anxious about the tribunal. The legitimacy
of the tribunal needs to be examined. It has been seriously challenged
in many quarters... We believe that weaknesses in the administration of
justice, in addition to the antecedents surrounding the establishment of
the tribunal, will never be able to produce the kind of process that
would be able to satisfy international standards.”
Following this week’s hearings, there is a distinct nervousness in
ruling circles in Washington and Baghdad that the trial has not turned
out as the political triumph it was meant to be. Despite the efforts by
US and Iraqi officials to control proceedings and the media coverage,
Hussein has refused to be cowed, demonstrating his contempt for the
legal fraud. In an Iraqi population overwhelmingly hostile to the US
occupation, his stance has resonated, including grudgingly among those
who suffered under his regime.
Vice President Ghazi al-Yawar openly expressed his alarm that Hussein
had turned the trial into a rallying point for anti-US sentiment. “This
has become a platform for Saddam to show himself as a caged lion when
really he was a mouse in a hole,” he told the media. “I don’t know who
is the genius who is producing this farce. It’s a political process.
It’s a comedy show. I don’t know what this is.”
In the US, the conservative /Stratfor/ thinktank voiced concern about
the “profound effect” on Iraq’s Sunni population. “Hussein’s defendants
have repeatedly called into question the legitimacy of the court,
claiming the trial was ‘made in America.’ There also has been a broad
campaign to inform Iraqi Sunnis of the alleged mistreatment endured by
prisoners and the lack of due process to former Baathist officials since
the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003... The court proceedings
against Hussein suggest the kind of treatment Sunnis might expect from
the ruling government, thus negatively impacting the ongoing
negotiations to bring Sunnis into the political fold.”
Writing in the /Washington Post/, right-wing commentator Charles
Krauthammer lambasted the Bush administration for “bungling the trial”.
The only purpose of bringing Hussein to court, he declared, was “to
demonstrate the justice of a war that stripped this man and his gang of
their monstrous and murderous power.” Instead, “we are witness to a
political test of wills between the new Iraq represented by an as-yet
incompetent legal system and the would-be tyrant-for-life defiantly
raising once again the banner of Baathism, on a worldwide stage afforded
him /by us/ [emphasis in the original].”
Such comments reflect a fear that the trial is turning into a political
disaster. Far from legitimising the US invasion of Iraq, the legal
charade in Baghdad has simply underscored the criminal character of the
occupation which is being maintained by the very methods employed by the
ousted Hussein regime. ***
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