A Great Miscarriage of Justice

Saddam Hussein is dead.

This is a great shame.

Before I get lynched, let me state that I think Hussein was a tyrant. He was a dictator who ruled a country with an iron fist. But did he deserve to die?

Bob Ellis had a good opinion piece about this in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday. It is not a long article, but makes you think. I don't usually have much time for Mr Ellis, but this article struck a chord with me.

I feel a great pity when I think of all the crap that the U.S. is making the world go through. I know through other reports that the U.S. wanted to postpone Hussein's execution, but apparently they only wanted to by two weeks.

We have all heard the reports of ordinary Iraqis longing for the good old days of Saddam Hussein. The days when you were pretty sure that when you left your house in the morning, you would live through the day to enjoy coming back to a still standing house. That is, unless you had spoken out against Hussein. Then you knew you were a marked target.

Yes, he was a bastard, but at least under his rule, there was law and order. It may have been his law and his order, but what has been left in his absence?

I won't try to defend Hussein's record. Not in the slightest. My greater concern is in the performance of the US. The hypocrisy, the incompetence, the double standards.

Ellis says in his opinion piece: ...if a head of state can hang by the neck until he is dead for having ordered, or countenanced, or signed off on, or not punished, or failed to countermand the torture and killing of 148 Iraqis guiltless of any great crime, what will happen to the generals, bureaucrats, prime ministers and heads of state who ordered, or countenanced, or signed off on, or did not punish, or did not countermand, the killing of 150,000 Iraqis guiltless of any great crime (this is now the Iraqi Government's estimate of the dead) and the torture of ten thousand more of them in Abu Ghraib? And how many Americans - Bremmer, Abizaid, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Bush - should on this precedent be charged and hanged?

This reminds me of a few important points.

1. The U.S. went against U.N. orders when it invaded Iraq.

2. The U.S. is the only country, to my knowledge, that has been found guilty of terrorism by international courts

3. The U.S. no longer consider it's citizens to be answerable to international courts

4. Hussein, and Bin Laden are essentially U.S. creations. Both were financially and materially supported by various U.S. administrations, and were at one stage or another considered allies.

The world is still going to Hell in a hand basket, and it is the U.S. that will drive us forward.

The people in power (and in this regard I do not include Bush) will probably never answer for their actions. All the atrocities the U.S. have committed, or allowed to be committed, will go unanswered by those who are responsible.

Ellis also raises the point:

They may also ask, as many legal experts have, how much was fair about a trial in which three of the defence lawyers were shot dead and those who survived forbidden to see the prosecution's written testimony before it was unveiled in court, and only those parts of the proceedings the Government liked were telecast - lest Saddam "grandstand" his cause and gain followers. And how wrong it was this trial was not aborted, and another trial begun in The Hague.

They may ask as well why Saddam died so soon. Something to do, perhaps, with his coming genocide trials and the complicity of Germany, France, the US and Britain in the manufacture of his nerve gas, anthrax, cluster bombs and helicopter gunships, and his amiable business relationships with Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush snr, once head of the CIA, in past decades, and how his genocidal methods back then did not greatly annoy them, not so long as he paid his bills.

Interesting questions indeed. Read the opinion piece. There are some thought provokers about the freedoms we have, too.

So, why was Saddam Hussein executed. Really.

DPS