Saddam found guilty; sentenced to death...

[Tingkai]

Re: Re: Saddam found guilty; sentenced to death...

Originally posted by SlowwHand
The only decision that could be reached.

Don't you mean it was the only decision that was going to be reached.

Quite a farce. The first judge didn't live up to U.S. government standards so gets tossed out. Second judge smacks down the defense lawyers, kicking them out of court.

Justice must not only be done. It must be seen as being done.

And killing Saddam will just make him a martyr. Better to throw him in jail and forget about him. He'd be forgotten just like that other CIA despot from Panama.

[MOBIUS]

"So America's one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war crimes he committed when he was Washington's best friend in the Arab world."

Sorry, who is guilty of what again...?

We should try him of ALL his war crimes!

Oh wait, all the dirty laundry would come out then...

Robert Fisk: This was a guilty verdict on America as well
Published: 06 November 2006

So America's one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war crimes he committed when he was Washington's best friend in the Arab world. America knew all about his atrocities and even supplied the gas - along with the British, of course - yet there we were yesterday declaring it to be, in the White House's words, another "great day for Iraq". That's what Tony Blair announced when Saddam Hussein was pulled from his hole in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we're going to string him up, and it's another great day.

Of course, it couldn't happen to a better man. Nor a worse. It couldn't be a more just verdict - nor a more hypocritical one. It's difficult to think of a more suitable monster for the gallows, preferably dispatched by his executioner, the equally monstrous hangman of Abu Ghraib prison, Abu Widad, who would strike his victims on the head with an axe if they dared to condemn the leader of the Iraqi Socialist Baath Party before he hanged them. But Abu Widad was himself hanged at Abu Ghraib in 1985 after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned man. But we can't mention Abu Ghraib these days because we have followed Saddam's trail of shame into the very same institution. And so by hanging this awful man, we hope - don't we? - to look better than him, to remind Iraqis that life is better now than it was under Saddam.

Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster that we have inflicted upon Iraq that we cannot even say that. Life is now worse. Or rather, death is now visited upon even more Iraqis than Saddam was able to inflict on his Shias and Kurds and - yes, in Fallujah of all places - his Sunnis, too. So we cannot even claim moral superiority. For if Saddam's immorality and wickedness are to be the yardstick against which all our iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects and carried out a few rapes and illegally invaded a country which cost Iraq a mere 600,000 lives ("more or less", as George Bush Jnr said when he claimed the figure to be only 30,000). Saddam was much worse. We can't be put on trial. We can't be hanged.

"Allahu Akbar," the awful man shouted - God is greater. No surprise there. He it was who insisted these words should be inscribed upon the Iraqi flag, the same flag which now hangs over the palace of the government that has condemned him after a trial at which the former Iraqi mass murderer was formally forbidden from describing his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now George Bush's Secretary of Defence. Remember that handshake? Nor, of course, was he permitted to talk about the support he received from George Bush Snr, the current US President's father. Little wonder, then, that Iraqi officials claimed last week the Americans had been urging them to sentence Saddam before the mid-term US elections.

Anyone who said the verdict was designed to help the Republicans, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, blurted out yesterday, must be "smoking rope". Well, Tony, that rather depends on what kind of rope it might be. Snow, after all, claimed yesterday that the Saddam verdict - not the trial itself, please note - was "scrupulous and fair". The judges will publish "everything they used to come to their verdict."

No doubt. Because here are a few of the things that Saddam was not allowed to comment upon: sales of chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so blatant - so appalling - that he has been sentenced to hang on a localised massacre of Shias rather than the wholesale gassing of Kurds over which George W Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara were so exercised when they decided to depose Saddam in 2003 - or was it in 2002? Or 2001? Some of Saddam's pesticides came from Germany (of course). But on 25 May 1994, the US Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs produced a report entitled "United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences (sic) of the Persian Gulf War".

This was the 1991 war which prompted our liberation of Kuwait, and the report informed Congress about US government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli. The same report stated that the US provided Saddam with "dual use" licensed materials which assisted in the development of chemical, biological and missile-system programmes, including chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans).

Yes, well I can well see why Saddam wasn't permitted to talk about this. John Reid, the British Home Secretary, said that Saddam's hanging "was a sovereign decision by a sovereign nation". Thank heavens he didn't mention the £200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two components of mustard gas we exported to Baghdad in 1988, and another £50,000 worth of the same vile substances the following year.

We also sent thionyl chloride to Iraq in 1988 at a price of only £26,000. Yes, I know these could be used to make ballpoint ink and fabric dyes. But this was the same country - Britain - that would, eight years later, prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi children on the grounds that it could be used for - you guessed it - "weapons of mass destruction".

Now in theory, I know, the Kurds have a chance for their own trial of Saddam, to hang him high for the thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja. This would certainly keep him alive beyond the 30-day death sentence review period. But would the Americans and British dare touch a trial in which we would have not only to describe how Saddam got his filthy gas but why the CIA - in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war crimes against Halabja - told US diplomats in the Middle East to claim that the gas used on the Kurds was dropped by the Iranians rather than the Iraqis (Saddam still being at the time our favourite ally rather than our favourite war criminal). Just as we in the West were silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds during the great ethnic cleansing of 1987 and 1988.

And - dare we go so deep into this betrayal of the Iraqis we loved so much that we invaded their country? - then we would have to convict Saddam of murdering countless thousands of Shia Muslims as well as Kurds after they staged an uprising against the Baathist regime at our specific request - thousands whom webetrayed by leaving them to fight off Saddam's brutal hordes on their own. "Rioting," is how Lord Blair's meretricious "dodgy dossier" described these atrocities in 2002 - because, of course, to call them an "uprising" (which they were) would invite us to ask ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath. Answer: us.

I and my colleagues watched this tragedy. I travelled on the hospital trains that brought the Iranians back from the 1980-88 war front, their gas wounds bubbling in giant blisters on their arms and faces, giving birth to smaller blisters that wobbled on top of their wounds. The British and Americans didn't want to know. I talked to the victims of Halabja. The Americans didn't want to know. My Associated Press colleague Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian dead lying gassed in their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra. The Americans and the British didn't care.

But now we are to give the Iraqi people bread and circuses, the final hanging of Saddam, twisting, twisting slowly in the wind. We have won. We have inflicted justice upon the man whose country we invaded and eviscerated and caused to break apart. No, there is no sympathy for this man. "President Saddam Hussein has no fear of being executed," Bouchra Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer on his team, said in Beirut a few days ago. "He will not come out of prison to count his days and years in exile in Qatar or any other place. He will come out of prison to go to the presidency or to his grave." It looks like the grave. Keitel went there. Ceausescu went there. Milosevic escaped sentence.

The odd thing is that Iraq is now swamped with mass murderers, guilty of rape and massacre and throat-slitting and torture in the years since our "liberation" of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi government we are currently supporting, democratically elected, of course. And these war criminals, in some cases, are paid by us, through the ministries we set up under this democratic government. And they will not be tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our cynicism. And our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been so obscenely joined?

So America's one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war crimes he committed when he was Washington's best friend in the Arab world. America knew all about his atrocities and even supplied the gas - along with the British, of course - yet there we were yesterday declaring it to be, in the White House's words, another "great day for Iraq". That's what Tony Blair announced when Saddam Hussein was pulled from his hole in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we're going to string him up, and it's another great day.

Of course, it couldn't happen to a better man. Nor a worse. It couldn't be a more just verdict - nor a more hypocritical one. It's difficult to think of a more suitable monster for the gallows, preferably dispatched by his executioner, the equally monstrous hangman of Abu Ghraib prison, Abu Widad, who would strike his victims on the head with an axe if they dared to condemn the leader of the Iraqi Socialist Baath Party before he hanged them. But Abu Widad was himself hanged at Abu Ghraib in 1985 after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned man. But we can't mention Abu Ghraib these days because we have followed Saddam's trail of shame into the very same institution. And so by hanging this awful man, we hope - don't we? - to look better than him, to remind Iraqis that life is better now than it was under Saddam.

Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster that we have inflicted upon Iraq that we cannot even say that. Life is now worse. Or rather, death is now visited upon even more Iraqis than Saddam was able to inflict on his Shias and Kurds and - yes, in Fallujah of all places - his Sunnis, too. So we cannot even claim moral superiority. For if Saddam's immorality and wickedness are to be the yardstick against which all our iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects and carried out a few rapes and illegally invaded a country which cost Iraq a mere 600,000 lives ("more or less", as George Bush Jnr said when he claimed the figure to be only 30,000). Saddam was much worse. We can't be put on trial. We can't be hanged.

"Allahu Akbar," the awful man shouted - God is greater. No surprise there. He it was who insisted these words should be inscribed upon the Iraqi flag, the same flag which now hangs over the palace of the government that has condemned him after a trial at which the former Iraqi mass murderer was formally forbidden from describing his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now George Bush's Secretary of Defence. Remember that handshake? Nor, of course, was he permitted to talk about the support he received from George Bush Snr, the current US President's father. Little wonder, then, that Iraqi officials claimed last week the Americans had been urging them to sentence Saddam before the mid-term US elections.

Anyone who said the verdict was designed to help the Republicans, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, blurted out yesterday, must be "smoking rope". Well, Tony, that rather depends on what kind of rope it might be. Snow, after all, claimed yesterday that the Saddam verdict - not the trial itself, please note - was "scrupulous and fair". The judges will publish "everything they used to come to their verdict."

No doubt. Because here are a few of the things that Saddam was not allowed to comment upon: sales of chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so blatant - so appalling - that he has been sentenced to hang on a localised massacre of Shias rather than the wholesale gassing of Kurds over which George W Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara were so exercised when they decided to depose Saddam in 2003 - or was it in 2002? Or 2001? Some of Saddam's pesticides came from Germany (of course). But on 25 May 1994, the US Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs produced a report entitled "United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences (sic) of the Persian Gulf War".

This was the 1991 war which prompted our liberation of Kuwait, and the report informed Congress about US government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli. The same report stated that the US provided Saddam with "dual use" licensed materials which assisted in the development of chemical, biological and missile-system programmes, including chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans).

Yes, well I can well see why Saddam wasn't permitted to talk about this. John Reid, the British Home Secretary, said that Saddam's hanging "was a sovereign decision by a sovereign nation". Thank heavens he didn't mention the £200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two components of mustard gas we exported to Baghdad in 1988, and another £50,000 worth of the same vile substances the following year.

We also sent thionyl chloride to Iraq in 1988 at a price of only £26,000. Yes, I know these could be used to make ballpoint ink and fabric dyes. But this was the same country - Britain - that would, eight years later, prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi children on the grounds that it could be used for - you guessed it - "weapons of mass destruction".

Now in theory, I know, the Kurds have a chance for their own trial of Saddam, to hang him high for the thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja. This would certainly keep him alive beyond the 30-day death sentence review period. But would the Americans and British dare touch a trial in which we would have not only to describe how Saddam got his filthy gas but why the CIA - in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war crimes against Halabja - told US diplomats in the Middle East to claim that the gas used on the Kurds was dropped by the Iranians rather than the Iraqis (Saddam still being at the time our favourite ally rather than our favourite war criminal). Just as we in the West were silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds during the great ethnic cleansing of 1987 and 1988.

And - dare we go so deep into this betrayal of the Iraqis we loved so much that we invaded their country? - then we would have to convict Saddam of murdering countless thousands of Shia Muslims as well as Kurds after they staged an uprising against the Baathist regime at our specific request - thousands whom webetrayed by leaving them to fight off Saddam's brutal hordes on their own. "Rioting," is how Lord Blair's meretricious "dodgy dossier" described these atrocities in 2002 - because, of course, to call them an "uprising" (which they were) would invite us to ask ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath. Answer: us.

I and my colleagues watched this tragedy. I travelled on the hospital trains that brought the Iranians back from the 1980-88 war front, their gas wounds bubbling in giant blisters on their arms and faces, giving birth to smaller blisters that wobbled on top of their wounds. The British and Americans didn't want to know. I talked to the victims of Halabja. The Americans didn't want to know. My Associated Press colleague Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian dead lying gassed in their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra. The Americans and the British didn't care.

But now we are to give the Iraqi people bread and circuses, the final hanging of Saddam, twisting, twisting slowly in the wind. We have won. We have inflicted justice upon the man whose country we invaded and eviscerated and caused to break apart. No, there is no sympathy for this man. "President Saddam Hussein has no fear of being executed," Bouchra Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer on his team, said in Beirut a few days ago. "He will not come out of prison to count his days and years in exile in Qatar or any other place. He will come out of prison to go to the presidency or to his grave." It looks like the grave. Keitel went there. Ceausescu went there. Milosevic escaped sentence.

The odd thing is that Iraq is now swamped with mass murderers, guilty of rape and massacre and throat-slitting and torture in the years since our "liberation" of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi government we are currently supporting, democratically elected, of course. And these war criminals, in some cases, are paid by us, through the ministries we set up under this democratic government. And they will not be tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our cynicism. And our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been so obscenely joined?

[SlowwHand]

He killed thousands. Can't lock him up, Tingkai.
Lock him up where? Guard him with what disposable guards? He'd be a risk and a danger until he was finally murdered.

Tell the world your insightful plan.

[DinoDoc]

Re: Re: Re: Saddam found guilty; sentenced to death...

Originally posted by Tingkai
Quite a farce. The first judge didn't live up to U.S. government standards so gets tossed out. Second judge smacks down the defense lawyers, kicking them out of court.

I'm fairly certain that if we were the ones in charge of the trial he wouldn't have been able to tie it up for so long by endless speeches and we might have given him more competent defense lawyers than the ones he had.

[SlowwHand]

Mobius, go play Nuke Your Neighbor online.

[Q Classic]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
He killed thousands. Can't lock him up, Tingkai.
Lock him up where? Guard him with what disposable guards? He'd be a risk and a danger until he was finally murdered.

Tell the world your insightful plan.

Send him to a Thai prison. Or an American one.

For every Osama tape sent out, release another of Saddam getting buggered.

[SlowwHand]

I doubt the USA wants the responsibility. Listen to Tingkai, for example. "All a USA plot". Who needs it?
Thailand won't want the responsibility either.

If any think hanging is bad, then let's just give him to the Shiities and/or Kurds. Won't be a piece big enough to even get a clear DNA sample.

[SlowwHand]

Here you go. A place to hide him.

Blair opposes death penalty for Saddam
AP - 31 minutes ago

LONDON - Prime Minister Tony Blair said Monday he opposed the death penalty for Saddam Hussein even though the deposed Iraqi leader's trial had reminded the world of his brutality. Asked about Saddam's sentence at his monthly press conference, Blair noted that Britain opposed the death penalty "whether it's Saddam or anyone else."

Maybe some of the world renowned Welsh will now volunteer as guards.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by TCO
We should have hung him a while ago.

To bad the grenade didn't get dropped in the hole before he announced himself. Would have saved a lot of problems and embarassment.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by MOBIUS

Sorry, who is guilty of what again...?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

New York Times calls for deferring Saddam's execution
Nov 06 8:13 AM US/Eastern

The New York Times called for the deferment of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's execution, saying Iraq had not received "full justice."
The newspaper, which is opposed to the death penalty, said Iraq not only needed to hold Saddam fully accountable for his atrocities but also to heal and educate the nation he "ruthlessly divided."


The toppled Iraqi leader was sentenced Sunday to die by hanging for ordering the deaths of 148 Shiite residents of Dujail, north of Baghdad, after a 1982 assassination attempt.

"But Iraq got neither the full justice nor the full fairness it deserved," it said in an editorial.

"President Bush overreached in calling the trial 'a milestone in the Iraqi peoples efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law.'"

The paper expressed regret that dominant Shiite and Kurdish politicians "have been determined to use Mr. Hussein's trial and punishment to further their own political ends, as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has continued to do in recent days."

The editorial called for deferring the death penalty "long enough to allow the completion of a second trial, in which Mr. Hussein is charged with ordering genocidal massacres against the Kurds."

The Wall Street Journal meanwhile said the the verdict was "one admirable legacy of the American sacrifice in Iraq."

"But to make it permanent, the US must also defeat the insurgency that battles on in Saddam's name," it said in an editorial.

"No matter what happens in Tuesday's election (in the United States), the US commander in chief who ended Saddam's tyranny has to find a strategy and generals who will finish the job."

In the view of The Washington Post, the trial, while imperfect, will help advance Iraq's democracy.

"In the short term, Saddam Hussein's conviction and eventual execution may worsen Iraq's civil conflict," The Post said.

"His trials nevertheless may come to be seen as milestones in the slow and painful attempt to construct a more civilized Iraq from the poisonous wreckage of his regime."

Breitbart

[SlowwHand]

"But to make it permanent, the US must also defeat the insurgency that battles on in Saddam's name," it said in an editorial.

We're going to need to change our methods then, if we're going to be out within the next 1000 years.

[SlowwHand]

Saddam appeal ruling due in January

11:57 AM CST on Monday, November 6, 2006

Associated Press




BAGHDAD, Iraq — A round-the-clock curfew imposed in the capital ahead of Saddam Hussein's conviction eased Monday, with residents once more allowed to walk the streets and sidewalks. Around the country, jubilant Shiites celebrated the verdict, as Sunnis held defiant counter-demonstrations.

Iraq's appeals court was expected to rule on the verdict and sentence by mid-January, the chief prosecutor said Monday. Should the court uphold the death penalty, the Associated Press has learned that Iraq's three-man presidential council agreed previously not to block Saddam's hanging, which must be carried out within 30 days.

The surge in violence expected immediately after the Sunday verdict on Saddam's trial for crimes against humanity did not materialize. An Interior Ministry spokesman credited the round-the-clock curfew in Baghdad, which has a mixed Shiite-Sunni population, and two restive Sunni provinces. Checkpoints were closed along Iraq's border with Jordan and Syria, a standard precaution taken during domestic emergencies.

Authorities were gradually lifting the restrictions, with pedestrians allowed back on the streets of Baghdad late Monday afternoon. Vehicle traffic in Baghdad would be permitted beginning at 6 a.m. Tuesday, according to police Lt. Mohammed Khayoun and an aide to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
He killed thousands. Can't lock him up, Tingkai.
Lock him up where? Guard him with what disposable guards? He'd be a risk and a danger until he was finally murdered.

Tell the world your insightful plan.

The U.S. is among the top countries for jailing its citizens, so it would be able to handle one more.

And prison guards face more risks of death from harden criminals than they would from any potential assassination attempt on Saddam.

Besides, you can't justify killing Saddam because of some possible threat that someone, somewhere at sometime might try to kill him.

[Tingkai]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Saddam found guilty; sentenced to death...

Originally posted by DinoDoc
I'm fairly certain that if we were the ones in charge of the trial he wouldn't have been able to tie it up for so long by endless speeches and we might have given him more competent defense lawyers than the ones he had.

It's hard for the defence team to do their jobs when the lawyers keep getting murdered.