Saddam Hussein's trial

1) Implicitly sanctioned by the USA (oops)
2) Legit, if you look at the precolonial boundries... (uhhh anyone?)

Oddest of all, just a few years ago Britain sent Pinochet back home rather than extraditing him to Spain because the law lords effectively ruled that a head of state could not be tried for crimes against his own people.

Various legal minds have claimed that, technically, he still is...

this is debatable... the most one can say is that the USA probably told SH that it would not object to his using force to resolve a border dispute, which isn't the same as just rolling over the entire country.

2) Legit, if you look at the precolonial boundries... (uhhh anyone?)

this is just not true. Kuwait is an older country than Iraq.

Then when he's convicted they can string him up within 30 days and draw a line under the whole thing.

As I said, I don't think he's a very nice guy, but the more I look at this the more I think it all stinks.

this is what i mean by 'pathetic'. i mean, whence the mandate for the UN? how does it have more authority than the US over anything, other than by the consent of right-thinking people. as with the war itself, the UN's yea or nay is irrelevant to the rights and wrongs of the case. i don't know where the idea of using the crinimal court system for this kind of 'crime' came from but it's pretty stupid. it'd be better if they'd simply shot him in the head when they found him, at least it would have been honest. many innocent iraqi civilians died in the invasion, so i don't really see any moral problem here.

lots of the most extreme war crimes reports come from the same ppl who gave us the WMD assurances
-- _ (...), October 19th, 2005.

true, but lots of the people who had a problem with saddam using poison gas on civilians are now anti-war. just sayin.

That wasn't quite the case - the extradition was for crimes against Spanish people in Chile. The ruling was that a head of state can not be tried *in another country* for things he's done as part of his job - even if that does include torture, murder etc.

Torture in Iraq
A Report by Human Rights Watch
"Residents of Fallujah called them "the Murderous Maniacs" because of how they treated Iraqis in detention. They were soldiers of the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division, 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, stationed at Forward Operating Base Mercury (FOB Mercury) in Iraq. The soldiers considered this name a badge of honor."

NOT CURRENTLY ON TRIAL

London Review of Books: "We do not deserve these people
Anatol Lieven: America and its Army "A key justification of the Bush administration’s purported strategy of ‘democratising’ the Middle East is the argument that democracies are pacific, and that Muslim democracies will therefore eventually settle down peacefully under the benign hegemony of the US. Yet, as Andrew Bacevich points out in one of the most acute analyses of America to have appeared in recent years, the United States itself is in many ways a militaristic country, and becoming more so."

NOT CURRENTLY ON TRIAL.

NOT CURRENTLY ON TRIAL

Momus begins the year in New York City, working on an album with his ex-wife, Shazna under the collective name of Milky. The album, 'Travels With A Donkey', is recorded throughout February, with Shazna visiting Momus' studio after work. The result is an interesting mixture of el Records-style acoustic whimsy and electro-acoustic musique concrete.

NOT CURRENTLY ON TRIAL

NOT CURRENTLY ON TRIAL (for redundancy)

Insert caption here.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War

In late July, 1990, as negotiations between Iraq and Kuwait stalled, Iraq massed troops on Kuwait's borders and summoned American ambassador April Glaspie for an unanticipated meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Two transcripts of that meeting have been produced, both of them controversial. According to the transcripts, Saddam outlined his grievances against Kuwait, while promising that he would not invade Kuwait before one more round of negotiations. In the version published by The New York Times on September 23, 1990, Glaspie expressed concern over the troop buildup, but went on to say:

We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late '60s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via [Chadli] Klibi [then Arab League General Secretary] or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly.

Some have interpreted these statements as signalling a tacit approval of invasion, though no evidence of this has been presented. Although the State Department did not confirm the authenticity of these transcripts, U.S. sources say that she had handled everything "by the book" (in accordance with the US's neutrality on the Iraq-Kuwait issue) and had not signaled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein any approval for defying the Arab League's Jeddah crisis squad, which had conducted the negotiations. Many believe that Saddam's expectations may have been influenced by a perception that the US was not interested in the issue, for which the Glaspie transcript is merely an example, and that he may have felt so in part because of U.S. support for the reunification of Germany, another act that he considered to be nothing more than the nullification of an artificial, internal border.

Or here

But America, we have God on our side, and we will prevail. These atheist Eurotrash liberals will burn in hell with Saddam soon! God Bless America!

Uh, yes he did. I've met her at a breakfast in NYC that Momus and a slew of other ILXors attended, and she's a very cool soul.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41359000/jpg/_41359209_saddam66iafp.jpg http://www.robotperson.com/features/celeb_spots/images/ricky-tomlinson.jpg

Isn't one of the first rules of law that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty and that precludes authorities from publicly declaring them to be "criminals"? Well it hasn't stopped the Guantanamo fiasco and prisoners being labelled "terrorists" before trial. However, the evidence is a no-contest with Saddam. Human rights groups have been documenting his abuses for years. Yet most of the witnesses are understandably too terrified to testify. A sad case all around.

Other news: while Pinochet has still not been charged for crimes against humanity, at least Chile's Supreme Court has now stripped him of presidential immunity for tax fraud. Maybe this is the first step for other charges though.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200510/s1486284.htm

Before the prosecutors made their opening arguments, the chief judge, Abdullah al-Amiri, asked each defendant to state his name, occupation and place of residence.

“You know who I am,” Mr. Hussein said.

Most of the other defendants, accused of crimes against humanity, entered not-guilty pleas. Like Mr. Hussein, they mostly sat in silence, sometimes jotting notes, sometimes staring at the judges. Four of them wore traditional robes and headscarves.

At one point, Judge Amiri explained to the court that Anfal is a phrase from the Koran that means “the spoils of war.”

Mr. Hussein interjected.

“You interpreted that wrong,” he said. “You should interpret it in a detailed and accurate manner.”