Posted on 07/02/2005 12:13:15 PM PDT by saquin
DUJAIL, Iraq - The scars of what happened after an assassination attempt on Saddam Hussein, on July 8, 1982, are painfully evident in this mainly Shiite town 35 miles north of Baghdad.
People lower their voices when they speak of fathers, brothers and sons who went to the gallows, their fates unknown until Mr. Hussein's overthrow 21 years later set off the ransacking of a secret police headquarters in Baghdad that uncovered official records of the executions. The landscape around Dujail is mostly barren scrubland, stark testament to the bulldozing of thousands of acres of date palms and fruit orchards after plotters fired on Mr. Hussein's convoy from thickets on the edge of town.
Now, the events at Dujail have come full cycle for Mr. Hussein.
Officials at the Iraqi Special Tribunal set up to try the former dictator and his top aides have said they expect to put him on trial by the end of the year in the deaths of nearly 160 men and boys from Dujail, all Shiites, some in their early teens. Some were shot dead in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, but 143 - 9 of them ages 13 through 15 - were executed three years later by Mr. Hussein's revolutionary court. Townspeople say that many others remain missing - at least 200, by some counts - and that they hope the trial will reveal at least something of their fate.
For now, their families have only fading photographs of their lost menfolk at weddings, school graduations and summer outings, and tales of the moments they disappeared, seized on the streets or pulled from their homes by secret police squads that descended on Dujail in the days that followed the attack on Mr. Hussein.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I still think his severed parts ought to be separately packaged and shipped off each to another terrorist state as a message.
Superb idea.
It would only take one head-of-state (say Syrian?) to get an identifiable part and make it known!
One thing that seems to hold true is the Butcher of Baghdad continues in his mind to think all his actions where somehow justified over those twenty five years. A criminal mind simply works differently then most others. Take the example of what happened when Igor grabbed the good brain, and then dropped it. Got scared when he saw the brain bounce around on the floor and grabbed the jar marked "criminal brain". We know the rest of the story.
Maybe in advance of trial he should be tattooed all over, so as not to waste time? Say, the text line: "this is a part of Saddam" and a state seal, repeated every few inches?
You have to believe the media will report almost nothing from the trial except what Saddam's lawyers say. CNN already admitted they covered up these kinds of atrocities in the past. We need a way to bring these tales to the fore.
Buried in the Saturday edition.
Where are the images on TV of the mass graves, the stories of the tortures?
[crickets]
Another crime for which Mr. Hussein is likely to face trial is the Anfal campaign - the Arabic word means spoils - of the late 1980's, in which as many as 150,000 Kurds were killed, many shot and dumped into mass graves, others killed in poison-gas attacks. The chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in March 1988, that killed an estimated 5,000 is likely to be treated as a separate case, like Dujail. Other crimes include the repression of a Shiite rebellion in southern Iraq in 1991, in which 150,000 people are believed to have been killed, and the executions of more than 200 Baath Party leaders after Mr. Hussein seized power in 1979."
The trial -- starting as soon as next month -- may not be great news for the United States. In fact, it may allow the former Iraqi dictator to publicize some obscure but extremely sordid aspects of the US relationship with him and make a very public defense against the validity of the constantly changing reasons for the current Iraq war. The trial could easily backfire and go haywire from the US government's point of view.
Did he have any significant link to Al Qaeda? No, says the 9/11 Commission.
Did he have current WMDs? No, says everyone now.
The charges against Saddam include killing huge numbers of Kurds, possessing and constructing weapons of mass destruction, and invading Kuwait. That only makes it clear that these actions were from 15 or more years ago, before the first Gulf War. Before the whole world, the trial will spotlight that we had nothing new for the new war in Iraq -- little to explain it other than rationalizations after initial reasons evaporated.
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I guess according to the MSM there is a 15 year statute of limitation on mass murder.
bump
NO, NO, NO! It was "Abby Normal," remember?
" NO, NO, NO! It was "Abby Normal," remember?"
Well I'll be damned. Of course. How silly of me. Thanks for
correcting my failing brain! heh heh heh. Abby normal. What a riot.
Thanks for the post. Can't add anything to what has already been said, other then I tend to go with what some say not to expect anything but the most terse carefully spinned occasional comments by the L/MSM commentators. We have to remember this trial may go on for a month or more. We can't really expect American broadcasters to eat up expensive broadcasting time on something most would not even watch.
It's not like it would be the OJ trial for instance. That was a hollywood stunt. As long as he gets tried and convicted and sentenced to death, then the sentence is carried out quickly, the Iraqi people can move on, and the Baathist can just call it quites. The party will be over.
Yes. Now. But the problem is akin to the issue of FBI Filegate. Just as now the claim is that Saddam had no WMD, the claim is made that no one can prove that anyone in the Clinton Administration made any use of the many hundreds of dossiers on Republicans which Craig Livingstone illegally acessed. True, perhaps - but the Clinton Administration owned the burden of proof.The Clinton Administration cannot, of course, prove the negative that no use was made of the files Craig Livingstone accessed - which is why Clinton had the responsibility not to illegally access them in the first place. In direct analogy, Saddam undertook - as a conditon of the armistace after the Gulf War - to verifyably dismantle and discontinue his WMD program. If that was too onerous a burden, he should not have accepted it. But accept it he did - and then he played games with the UN inspectors, and corrupted the subsequent Oil-for-food program, turning it into a slush fund used to pay for huge palaces which were so far as anyone could know simply cover stories for a WMD program.
The invasion was triggered by violations of the cease fire and the no-fly zone; by all rights P41 should have protected the Shiites from Saddam after Gulf War I and gone back in then. But of course the reporters and other Democrats would have had a cow. After 9/11 the Bush Administration concluded that the US cannot afford to have Saddam to be on the loose and to be believed by other Arabs to have probably had to do with 9/11. As a matter of street cred. So "poor Saddam" is deposed and a democratic republic is in work to make Iraqis not the most downtrodden people of the Middle East, but the least.
So if (truly) no WMD, the joke is on us - but Saddam is still gonna stand trial for mass murder. And if the Iraqis don't nail him on enough counts, the Iranians want a piece of him for the Iran-Iraq war.
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