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Politics : TRIAL OF SADDAM HUSSEIN -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MKTBUZZ who wrote (415)	7/10/2004 2:09:20 AM
From: marek_wojna	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 493

<<His countrymen are going to give him what he deserves.>> What do you know about his countrymen? Do you have a better insight in this country than all American intelligence who is too afraid to give up physical custody of Saddam not out the fear Iraqis would harm him but they might be able to set him free. With Americans never gained control over this country lots of Iraqis are so fed up with crime, lack of electricity and basic needs that like in Serbia people rather have dictatorship than instability, unknown next hour or day.

To: MKTBUZZ who wrote (415)	7/10/2004 2:35:12 AM
From: Richnorth	Respond to of 493

In the Islamic world justice is often swift and brutal. BUT if Saddam dicovered the cure for cancer and if he were living in the western world, perhaps extenuating circumstances could be found to get him off the hook rather lightly, in view of the fact that the cure for cancer will eventually save more lives than the number Saddam was alleged to have killed. BTW, maybe Prez Bush might grant him a full pardon <VBG!> just as Prez Gerald Ford pardoned "I'm-not-a-crook" Richard Bixon 1974. Did Prez Clinton pardoned himself for perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements in conection with Monica Lewinski? To be sure, Saddam will have pardoned himself <VBG>

To: MKTBUZZ who wrote (415)	7/11/2004 7:34:28 PM
From: marek_wojna	1 Recommendation Respond to of 493

""Hercules versa plures" So, the world is coming every day closer and closer to the pre WWII comparison. We have "Hercules", read US, and small number of countries supporting bush. Like Hitler with his superior war machine which seemed invincible, Mussolini acting like Blair and the rest of the coalition of the willing like Romania, Hungary not really reliable against rest of the world. But bushies cannot count on support of even closest allies when it comes to international justice. Ruling against ghetto wall Israel is building was supported by every country except US. No wonder they fear Saddam being tried by independent court. bushies could be found out in final verdict guilty of unlawful imprisonment of the legitimate president of Iraq. Hitler done it with many leaders who didn't escape. My strong belief is bushies are pushing world toward WWIII. One bomb of any kind using WMD on US soil planted by CIA or FBI and there will no election. From economic point of view pre-war Germany was only tiny fraction in trade deficit with other nations comparing to present US deficit. The end will be much more catastrophic for the US than it was for Germany, Japan or Italy and will come faster as the US will lose support and will have to turn against the whole world except Israel under Sharon. Of course big majority can call me "doom and gloom" maybe insane. Finally same way were people who warned against Hitler real intentions were treated as almost insane too.

To: MKTBUZZ who wrote (415)	7/12/2004 9:43:43 AM
From: Richnorth	Respond to of 493

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.

To: MKTBUZZ who wrote (415)	7/12/2004 9:59:12 AM
From: Richnorth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 493

Here's another of Gwynne Dyer's articles taken from gwynnedyer.com 15 December 2003 Saddam's Capture: Will It Make Any Difference? By Gwynne Dyer If the only reason that some Iraqis have been resisting the American occupation was that they wanted Saddam Hussein back in power, then presumably they will now lose all hope. But that is as blinkered a view of what is really going on in Iraq as the notion that Saddam was personally directing the resistance from his basement hideout near Tikrit. Even among dedicated Baathists who retained the movement's original socialist and Arab nationalist ideas, there were few who actually wanted Saddam back in power. Nobody has killed as many Baathists as Saddam, or so comprehensively perverted the movement's values: he was the Stalin of Baathism. But Stalin's death did not make devout Communists abandon their faith. On the contrary, it gave them new hope. By the same token, a Baathism freed of Saddam's malign influence is likely to be stronger, not weaker: as the only mass political movement in the Arab world that has never knelt before American power, it retains some credibility in Iraq even now. But while the stalwarts of the Baath party are doubtless a key factor in organising the attacks on American and other foreign troops, they are not the main reason that the US occupation faces such strong opposition in Iraq. The basic problem facing US viceroy Paul Bremer and his collaborators is mistrust: a profound belief among almost all Iraqis that the Bush administration's motives in invading Iraq were not altruistic. This is not just anti-Americanism. It comes from a perfectly rational conviction that great powers never act out of pure altruism. Indeed, Americans themselves would be outraged if they thought that their soldiers were dying in Iraq for reasons having nothing to do with US national interest, which is why Mr Bush has to keep saying that it is also part of the 'war on terror'. Iraqis, however, know that there were no terrorists in their country before the US invasion, and if they weren't sure before that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, they know it now. So they are left to puzzle out what Washington's true purposes in their country are -- and none of the answers they come up with are reassuring. The simplest answer, of course, is 'oil' -- and while that is generally too simplistic an answer, Iraqis are not wrong to believe that they would not have been 'liberated' by American troops if they grew carrots for a living instead of pumping oil. They are also aware that the United States had to get its troops out of next-door Saudi Arabia, their main base in the region for the past decade, and that it has now transferred that base to Iraq. So it is assumed in Iraq that any new government created by the Americans will have to defer to US interests on both these issues. If what Iraq gets in return is a stable and prosperous democracy, many Iraqis would be inclined to pay the price anyway, but as they watch plans unfold for the mass privatisation of the Iraqi economy and see Iraqi contractors frozen out of the reconstruction bonanza in favour of American corporations, their suspicions mount. They also know (because various members of the Bush administration have said so in speeches to American audiences, forgetting that everybody else can hear them too) that Washington intends the new Iraqi democracy to make peace with Israel. An Iraqi government that does America's bidding on oil, gives the US military bases, opens the country to American business domination and cozies up to Israel is not one that will enjoy much popular support in Iraq, so Iraqis assume that their new democracy is going to be of the 'guided' variety. That is why most Iraqis are sitting on their hands, neither fighting nor welcoming the American occupation. Those who have already taken up arms against the occupation forces, paradoxically, are those who fear that there might really be a genuine democracy in Iraq: the Sunni Arabs. For many centuries the Arabic-speaking Sunnis who live in central Iraq have been the politically dominant elite of the country, even after the growth of Shia Islam in the south of the country turned them into a relatively small minority (now not much more than 20 percent) of the population. The Turks confirmed them in their position, Iraq's British rulers took them over wholesale, and their domination of the Baath party kept them in power right down to early this year. But they would lose that role in a genuinely democratic Iraq, where Shias would dominate and Sunni Arabs would be even less influential than the Kurds. Whether Baathist or not, the Sunni Arabs who comprise the great majority of the current Iraqi resistance fighters are not fighting for Saddam. For those who feared that a successful resistance movement would merely pave the way for Saddam's return, his capture is as likely to galvanise them into open resistance as to reconcile them to the American occupation. What we are likely to see in the short term, therefore, is a spike in the violence as the resistance leaders try to show they are still in business, followed perhaps by a lull as they try to exploit Saddam's capture to broaden their popular base, and then a resumption in the steady rise of attacks on occupation troops. The likeliest long-term outcome, once the US has given up and gone home, is still a civil war and the partition of the country. gwynnedyer.net