Saddam Hussein's Trial

And now come the appeals...

The sad part about all of this is that while the verdict was everything anyone could hope for, the process was severely lacking. Human rights groups, former US attorney generals, etc, have all called the trial a sham- not because they don't think he's as guilty as hell, but because of the process. Sadly, victor's justice, while it gets the job done, doesn't bode well for future Iraqi justice.
 
Eh, we just murdered his sons and now we're going to be the cause to murder him. Whatever, if the milestone in Iraq is killing a guy who an acting leader for a nation that lost one too many battles then that war's as useless as ever before.
If a town of folks was poised ready to attack Bush's Ranch he'd have all of them gas and buried before anyone would know what happened. But he'd cover it up better. So whatever.

Huzzah, more unwarrented murder in the world. Throw a ticker tape parade and welcome to modern life.
 
WatchMaker said:
*Blinks oddly*

Hanging? Isn't that... alittle... weird? :confused: No one else seems to be pointing this out, so maybe it's slang for execution.
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No, they really mean hanging. Noose around the neck. Trapdoor. The whole deal.

A lot of countries still employ hanging as their primary capital punishment. An Australian drug smuggler was executed in Sinagpore not too long ago. They hung him, for example.
 
Luciro I'm pretty sure that if an entire city plotted George Bush's death, and acted on it, they wouldn't be gassed. Comments like that are ignorant, and express's no real evidence whatsoever. Bush may want to be a dictator, and try his hardest, but the fact is he isn't.
 
/Agree

Folks in countries like the US, UK, Australia, Canada, etc, have freedoms half the world can only dream of. To even make comments like you made, Luciro, are born of a freedom that many in the world don't enjoy. And no, I'm not giving some patriotic, chest-thumping speech here... this is just fact.
 
frostydf2 said:
Bush may want to be a dictator, and try his hardest, but the fact is he isn't.
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QFT!

About the hanging- actually there are still several states in the good old US of A that allow hangings. There are just very strict laws about how they are done- neatly broken neck instead of the old long, slow suffication. I think they call it "more civilized."

Warning: In an attempt to head off any nasty unpleasantness that would mar our forums community feel (as politics tends to do) I'm going to weigh in on the Saddam issue in a hopefully well informed (and neutral) manner. I have a politics degree and spent quite alot of time in college working through the history and issues of the middle east. I'd love a good debate, but don't just flame please... ok, yeah, you can flame me about the Bush comment ;) Thank you!

During one of my International Politics classes in college, we dissected the whole Iraq issue. I won't go into details, but suffice to say the major world powers after WWI created Iraq and all the problems that have plagued it throughout its entire history. It's never been a stable place because it has never had a unified people. There is a question of whether the reality of Iraq made Saddam a dictator or whether Saddam made Iraq the way it was. Given the way events are going without him, (and the entire history of the country) I think we can answer that one.

Now, I'm not defending him. I repeat, I'm glad to see him hang. He authorized the mass murder of civilians and was an overall heavy handed dictatorial leader. However, I do not personally fault him for being a dictator as there is really not much chance in hell of all Iraqis coexisting peacefully. But that does not give him authorization or reason to torture/maim/kill at will.

That said, there is now infinitely more violence in Iraq than there was under Saddam, and as far as "bad people" go in the world, he wasn't even one of the worst ones out there. Does he deserve to die? A resounding yes. Is he the embodiment of all that is evil as Bush would like us to think he is? Absolutely not. Our good friends the Saudi's have as many (if not more) human rights violations as Saddam's government had. But we are friends with their ruling family so that's ok... Suffice to say I can think of two other nations in that region that are as bad or worse on human rights as Iraq was (and still is)- Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
 
frostydf2 said:
Luciro I'm pretty sure that if an entire city plotted George Bush's death, and acted on it, they wouldn't be gassed. Comments like that are ignorant, and express's no real evidence whatsoever. Bush may want to be a dictator, and try his hardest, but the fact is he isn't.
Click to expand...

Ignorant? Others talking about freedom? No fly lists, the Patriot Act, hell I working in Katrina and saw what we did and didn't do for our own people. Which in my eyes was just as bad as someone using some military surplus gas to kill some folks. Due to our inaction as a nation and our procrastination to get anything done during a disaster other than drop off a dollar in a tub at Wal-Mart people indeed died. Look at us celebrating another Nation's plight? Our soldiers have killed 500,000 people plus to take revenge for how many? A few from 9/11 which Iraq had nothing to do with and a handful from a decade ago in which his own people were poised for some time to take revenge for anyway. As a free nation and a member of our free nation I say it's foot in mouth for any of US to celebrate or even be glad someone across the world is dying for something we're just as guilty of as a nation.
Where's the trial for the Waco clan's killers? How about the war crime tribunial for the US using nukes on Japan? Sure it was an act of war, but we write up guys for just having missles that can reach beyond their boarders and then word it like that's a horrific crime.
The Iraqi war at this point has taken 3 of my good friends needlessly and I'm certain the nation of Iraq has lost way too many folks in our Freedom Operation for the death of one man to make anything better.

We're just going to make even more enemies who actually are capable of harming us with our meddling. The sham trial of Saddam and his execution will indeed be reason enough for someone to plot violence back at us. Was 9/11 unwarrented? Will the next terrorist attack be completely shocking and illogical? Sure, because we'll survive and write the history on it later.

Now if you're going to say the genocide of the Native Americans was in the past, Hiroshima was in the past, yada yada excuses excuses. Saddam's quelling was also in the past. So yeah, execute the guy and fly our colors proudly for it. I like how it's timed with our elections and has little to do with the actual peace process in Iraq.

Ya know what seems befitting? A quote from someone I'm sure most modern thinkers deem a quack.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

 
Luciro I can see where your coming from since you probably get your information from the news. How many terrorist attacks have we had on U.S. soil since we went to Iraq. Some things you don't understand is that Iraq had always harbored those who would seek to attack the U.S. Now its getting less and less because bush had the balls to take the fight to them.

Saddam's Trial a shame? Ya maybe but what he did he def deserved the death penalty. Until you've actually been to the place he gassed you probably won't get a full understanding of what he did. And it wasn't just one place there were numerous places up in northern iraq in kurdistan.

And to answer was 9/11 unwarrented. Hell ya it was and if you think otherwise you should really sit down and evaluate your thinking process imo anyway.

And lastly Hiroshima?? How can you even compare the two. 1 we were at open war with Japan after they attacked our nation unprovoked. So tell me why we shouldn't have dropped that bomb. Did it kill innocent people? Yes. Did it destroy their largest manufacturing facilitys that were supporting the war? Yes. Did it end the war so more people didn't have to die? Well yes again.

But in the end we all have our opinions and your entitled to yours as much as I am to mine.
 
There's a flaw to yours tho'. They're not your own.

In Afghanistan we left the people who attacked us to die without any support after the Russians pulled out of their land. We let war lords rampage over the villages we were secondarily supporting to fight our Cold War for us. We left them alone, abandoned them after they did our dirty work.
Not only that but we've constantly have been in some sort of combat with the Islamic world. If it wasn't the constant barrage of Iraq from sacred Saudi soil, it was target bombings of facilities civilian and militarily in the region. We MADE our enemies in the Middle East and indeed Osama and his soldiers feel there's attacks made on them from us.
We bombed, killed, interrogated, raped, murdered their people on and off since the end of WWII. The on and off wasn't even decades. It was just measured in months. We were pressing our ways on their ways and they earned the right to fight back. Does that mean I agree with them? No, but I can see where they're pissed off.
In ratio for every one person who died in 9/11 we've taken about 1000 of their people. That's not unwarranted. It's just confusing to us because we're misled and misguided and an extremely ignorant nation of what our government is doing over seas. Ya know, it's not like they wanted OUR oil or anything.
If you think the men who flew the planes into the Pentagon and 9/11 did so just for kicks, then by all means continue enjoying your Wal-Mart existence.

Plus killing half a million Iraqis + doesn't mean we've done felgercarb for their nation except impoverished them more so. Great job.
I dare anyone to tell me how us bombing an Iraqi city with dumb bomb arty is any bit more noble than him gassing folks who were poised to over throw his government. Our leaders do the same thing constantly. We're have our secret military bases and our made up on the fly rules of how we treat our prisoners and that's worse than out right stopping your intended target.

Our use of the nuclear bombs on Japan was the worse war crime in the history of man. Period.

And yes, not only is Saddam's trial a sham. Our invasion was in vain and is a complete waste of time and tax payers dollars. That nation harbored folks who were living under strict US surveillance for a decade, we bombed anything we thought was a threat and we monitored every person in and out of Iraq for that tenure of time. I know the men who did the duty for Clinton's 8 years and up to about 6 months before the invasion. They have books out there if any of you could believe anything other than what Fox News has to present to you Super Sized.
 
I also note you keep using this half a million casualities figure.

Have you ever been to http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ ?

Have you seen their response to The Lancet suggesting there have been 650,000 casualties? If you truly like to critcaly evaluate things, have a look (and a think), about the following:

A new study has been released by the Lancet medical journal estimating over 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq. The Iraqi mortality estimates published in the Lancet in October 2006 imply, among other things, that:

On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms;

Some 800,000 or more Iraqis suffered blast wounds and other serious conflict-related injuries in the past two years, but less than a tenth of them received any kind of hospital treatment;

Over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering most of central Iraq;

Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued;

The Coalition has killed far more Iraqis in the last year than in earlier years containing the initial massive "Shock and Awe" invasion and the major assaults on Falluja.

If these assertions are true, they further imply:

incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in hospitals and ministries, on a local, regional and national level, perfectly coordinated from the moment the occupation began;

bizarre and self-destructive behaviour on the part of all but a small minority of 800,000 injured, mostly non-combatant, Iraqis;

the utter failure of local or external agencies to notice and respond to a decimation of the adult male population in key urban areas;

an abject failure of the media, Iraqi as well as international, to observe that Coalition-caused events of the scale they reported during the three-week invasion in 2003 have been occurring every month for over a year.

In the light of such extreme and improbable implications, a rational alternative conclusion to be considered is that the authors have drawn conclusions from unrepresentative data. In addition, totals of the magnitude generated by this study are unnecessary to brand the invasion and occupation of Iraq a human and strategic tragedy.
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Luciro said:
There's a flaw to yours tho'. They're not your own.
Click to expand...

Just wondering how you came to this conclusion? Of course your entitled your opinion but one thing you have to understand is I've been there. Seen everything first hand. Talked to people there. I don't get my information from the news or some author who wants to make a buck.

To truely understand something you have to see it with your own eyes.
 
Man I saw with my own eyes how we treated our own people in New Orleans.
I do believe more than 650,000 people have died to our military action in the Middle East. Arty alone had civilian counts of over 12,000 per blanket. This is something that happens at least once every 3 days over there now. Check out reports on the anicent sites English and Austrailian professors where uncovering and what's left of the them now?

Let me tell you how I drew that conclusion. Riddle me this.. In your eyes, why did the 9/11 attacks happen? Plus, when Saddam is hanged what will do for you and I? You know man, share with me.
 
Actually, Iraq/Hussein harbored very little in the way of international terrorists, prior to our invasion. Hussein was hardly on any better terms with international terrorist that we are. He was a secular, oppressive sociopath purely dedicated to furthering his own goals in becoming a regional power. Funding and propagating international terrorism with cash and wmds would have put him on the short list for a tac glowy and he knew that quite clearly.

Then in view of Hussein's goals of becoming a regional super power and the fact that he had a fixed address, and by needs, had to be able to function as a state on the world stage, Hussein despite his particular ambitions could not harbor or propagate international terrorism and the use of a wmd.
It was completely against his own interests in two primary ways. One, he kept his postion by maintaining ruthless control and turning loose, weapons that he needed for his own ambitions was something he would not do. Hussein was all about control.
Second, any international terrorist groups that could/would have made use of any wmd that Hussein might have eventualy made held no love for Hussein and in fact regarded him as much an infidel as the U.S. Again, turning over something like an wmd to anyone that he had no control over was not anything Hussein would have done. Just wasn't consistent with his profile and his known goals. Hussein was just about everything but stupid, and allowing terrorists to flourish in his country would have undermined his own control of Iraq and expossed him to being toppled from within. Precisely very much the situation that Musharaf faces in Pakistan now..... but I digress.

Granted there was limited engagement between Iraqi Inteligencia and certain elements of Al Queda, most notably in relation to the first World Trade Center bombings, but even that was tertiary at best.

No, Iraq was not an incubator for international terrorists prior to the U.S. invasion. There were certainly some terrorist that made use of Iraq to a limited degree but nothing like it is now. Virtually everything that has transpired was predictable by anyone who had a reasonable working knowledge of the area and the cultural and historical dynamics. Actually it was predicted by career analysts and ignored by political appointees.

Hussein will swing and the world will be a better place at his passing. It won't change anything but at least he gets a little of what he deserved.
 

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