We should have water-boarded the SOB for WMD info.
THE U.N. AND SADDAM
THE SPINE BLOG - TNR
Has the U.N. Human Rights Council gone mad? It can't be. It's already mad. It seems not to be able to find a human rights violator other than Israel. Not China, not Cuba, not North Korea, not Sudan, not Zimbabwe. (Even Kofi Annan has criticized the HRC for focusing only on Israel.) So I was skeptical when people told me that the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, was sane and balanced and fair. After all, she does have a job and her bosses are slanted--how do I say this?--to the third world's view of realities, that is, that they are not human rights abusers. It's as if, by definition, they can't be.
According to a dispatch from Reuters, the High Commissioner has condemned the death penalty meted out to Saddam Hussein (plus others of his henchmen) and also the rejection of the appeal of that sentence. "There were a number of concerns as to the fairness of the original trial, and there needs to be assurance that these issues have been comprehensively addressed...blah, blah, blah." U.N. human rights agencies are not trustworthy monitors of Iraqi developments. The Human Rights Council, the commission's predecessor, was very concerned about the alleged suffering in Iraq due to the Oil for Food regime. But it had, as far as I can tell, not but once had any qualms about how Saddam was slaughtering Shi'a and Kurds in what was more their country than his.
It is amazing to me how someone like Saddam can reach so many peoples' hearts. Or is it calculating minds? The Italian prime minister. The Vicar of Christ or his representative. Now, the U.N. High Commissioner. This is not the end of a campaign. This is only the beginning of a campaign. We may soon hear from Vladimir Putin. According to the Scottish Daily Herald today, Amnesty International declared, "We are against the death penalty on principle but particularly in this case beacuse it comes after a flawed trial." Soon you will see "progressives" demonstrating for Saddam's life all over the West. Are there to be retrospective condemnations of Adolf Eichmann's sentence? Or of the Nuremberg Trials, once called the Nuremberg Process?
You know where I stand. I thought it was altogether just that, when Mussolini was snatched from his escape to Austria, he was simply shot and hung out to dry. One of the most painful experiences in reading the 9/11 report was to realize the continuous to-do that the Clinton people made among themselves about how Osama bin Laden had to be brought in alive. This drove those who were helping us, "the tribals," wild, they preferring to kill him on the spot. Which also would have been just, very just. And, of course, Sandy Berger worried besides that, if Osama was brought in, whether he could be convicted in a court of law. Berger is lucky that he himself wasn't tried in a court of law for filching secret documents from the National Archives. Which is to say, he's lucky that the Bushies saw him as too insignificant to torture.
WHY NOT AN AUTO DA FE?
It worked for a thousand years, even more. So now the Vatican has been touched by the soul of Saddam Hussein. He should not be executed, said Cardinal Renato Martino, the prelate in the entourage of Pope Benedict who is responsible for the Council on Justice and Peace, that is, matters of justice and peace apparently everywhere. Martino had long been a critic of the Iraq war. But he also established his certified anti-American credentials when he absorbed the spirit of the United Nations as the Vatican's emissary during a 16 year stint. (See this article by Michael Novak that evokes Martino's career vis-a-vis the U.S.) There's much more on Martino in Il Foglio, Italy's absolutely best daily newspaper. Forget Corriere. Remember Il Foglio.
In the statement speaking if not for the Holy Father than for the Holy See, there's a lot of stuff about how nobody should take a human life. It must end naturally, the pronuciatmento asserts, as if this were a debate on abortion and Saddam were an innocent fetus in his mother's womb. Actually, the Vatican had been soft on Saddam's regime in order to buffer the Chaldean Catholic Church during and against the worst of his depradations. Here is a republication of a devastating article by Sandro Magister, first run before the war in November 2002. It's titled, "Saddam Hussein masacres Shiite Muslims, as Vatican looks away." Is it too provocative to ask if the pro-abortion folk also don't want Saddam executed? One cannot help thinking that it is really a shame that the church got religion, so to speak, about the sanctity of all human life so late in its history. |
