Posted on 01/04/2007 4:23:27 PM PST by rhema
WHERE WAS THE OUTRAGE THEN?
"Saddam Hussein was responsible for massive human rights violations, but that can't justify giving him the death penalty, which is a cruel and inhuman punishment," said Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's International Justice Program, after the former dictator was hanged early Saturday for the deaths of 148 townspeople.
What's wrong with this statement? For starters, "massive human rights violations" is the understatement of the year. Is that what we now call genocide, cold-blooded murder of men, women and children?
Do we consider Adolf Hitler to have committed "human rights violations," or do we call it like we see it and call him a killer?
I've pored through hundreds of images taken by Iraqis of the excavation of Saddam's mass graves, discovered across Iraq since the dictator's May 2003 ouster. Some of the graves contained thousands of bodies, some dozens. The pictures are easily seared in one's mind: the leathery bodies of young men and teens clad only in underwear, hands tied behind their backs and bullet holes in their heads; the countless plastic bags containing skulls and bones; a tiny red-and-blue striped T-shirt pulled from a mass grave.
In July 2004, a Kurd named Taimour described surviving Saddam's regime for the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. Taimour was 12 years old in 1988 when Iraqi forces burned down more than 4,500 villages and initially imprisoned the inhabitants.
"Before we entered the jail they separated the men from the women … a lot of children died because of hunger and a lot of women were raped. … After living for 30 days a horrible life there, 6 o'clock one morning they brought 30 buses that were closed — no windows — and you could barely breathe. … When we got to the border of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, before we got to the place where they were to shoot us and kill us, they took everybody out and they gave us some water. I think the water had some kind of drug because when I drank the water my whole body became numb. …
"There were holes dug for us with bulldozers. … I would say more than a hundred holes, and they threw everybody in there and they waited for the weather to get dark and then they started shooting at innocent people, children and women, with machine guns, AK-47s.
"There was a woman who was pregnant and about to give birth … They threw her into the hole and they shot her so many times her stomach got ripped and the baby fell out. This is something I saw with my own eyes — I was there in the same hole."
Taimour was shot multiple times in the back and shoulder, but survived and played dead until the soldiers eventually left; the boy was later aided by a kindly Bedouin near the Syrian border.
The images summon thoughts of a similarly dark period decades ago, the one Mahmoud Ahmadinejad now spends his days denying.
Then there is the massacre for which Saddam was currently facing trial — the Anfal campaign. Take a look at images from Halabja, a town hit by Saddam's chemical weapons, where people dropped dead in the street, children with their eyes wide open and mothers clutching swaddled babies as they fell. Five thousand Kurds died this way.
After Saddam's sentence was carried out Saturday, death-penalty opponents lined up.
"We oppose the death penalty in all cases as a violation of the right to life and the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, but it is especially abhorrent when this most extreme penalty is imposed after an unfair trial," stated Amnesty International, joining a global chorus of detractors.
The trial was a circus of Saddam's own making, with frequent outbursts and refusals to show up, and serial meddler Ramsey Clark contributing a similar degree of disruption.
And whatever one's opinion on the death penalty — which one can make many valid arguments against — where was the outrage when young Taimour was being shot into the mass grave, when the Kurdish villages were going up in flames or being gassed, or at the recent testimony of the Dujail villagers, the massacre for which Saddam was hanged?
Where was the support for the overthrow of such a genocidal maniac?
American Liberals like Nancy Pelosi, Jack Murtha, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Chucky Schumer, Harry Reid, and those of their ilk, never met a terrorist they didn't like and feel sorry for. End of story!
Statements like his make Richard Dicker a genocide enabler.
Wahts the matter with these frigging idiots. If Saddam didnt deserve execution no one ever did. Its ticks me off when damned fools coemup with this crap. the jihadists cut off the heads of innocents every day and these IDIOTS get upset when one of the worst killers in the last 50 years get what he has coming to him. It makes you want to slap some sense into them.
This makes some sense when the crime is referenced to the authority. If it is a Federal crime, that is the USA. If it is a crime in Iraq, then it is a national crime. If it is a human rights violation then it is a UN crime or an EU crime, if it is endangering the commonwealth then it is a crime against Pennsylvania, if a crime against sharia then a crime against the islamic court union. It's always a crime against a state, never a crime against a person.
--Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's International Justice Program--
DICK DICKER??!!
I think you can only make sense of what they say when you keep their objectives in mind. Their objectives are to weaken America and the capitalist system. The Kurds and the Shiites who were being slaughtered were of no use to them. But the execution of Saddam Hussein can be used as a symbol of how "cruel" and "barbaric" the US is, how Bush is a complete failure, the US and its "puppet" government in Iraq have been besmirched before the world, etc.
Richard Dicker? Richard Dicker?!?!?!?!
(catching my breath)
Yo, Dickie, I'm against the death penalty too, but we're not talking about some drug-addled loser from Oklahoma who kills his neighbors for crack money...we're talking about Saddam freaking Hussein. I'd sooner defend my libertarianism using the stereotypical example of a pot-smoking, gun-toting, tax-evading, survivalist libertine than defend my opposition to the death penalty using...Saddam freaking Hussein!
By labeling vile murders as human rights violations, these leftists, who constantly accuse Bush of such violations, can equate America with the most evil regimes in the world.
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