Dr. Gwynne Dyer, a London-based independent journalist wrote a number of interesting articles which may be viewed at
gwynnedyer.com.
Below is one of them:-
18 December 2003
The Trials of Saddam Hussein
By Gwynne Dyer
"(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 14 December. "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. |
