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by Elan Journo |
January 27th, 2006
By granting Hussein a trial, justice is perverted.
The American-endorsed trial of Saddam Hussein is touted as an opportunity to render justice and lay the groundwork for an Iraqi transition from the arbitrary courts of a dictatorship to a proper legal system. But the trial will accomplish neither goal.
A trial that presumes Hussein's innocence can achieve nothing but a travesty of justice.
Saddam Hussein is not a private citizen, whose guilt requires proof in an objective court of law, but a dictator whose incontestable evil was manifest to any rational observer of his tyranny. The Bush administration, after all, determined that Hussein was so vicious that we had to go to war to topple his regime.
Once we defeat and capture a militant dictator like Hussein, he deserves to be definitively condemned as evil and then executed — immediately, or after any valuable information is extracted from him. Prior to his execution, there can be a legitimate reason to hold a public hearing — not to establish his guilt, but to fully expose his secretive dictatorship by publicly cataloguing its myriad vile deeds. Such a hearing would recognize that, unlike a private citizen, a dictator is responsible not merely for his own individual acts of violence but for all crimes committed by his regime, whether or not in any given case he himself pulled the trigger or gave a direct order to murder the victims.
But the trial now underway evades Hussein's incontrovertible culpability, absurdly presumes him innocent, and demands that his "command responsibility" be established for particular acts of murder. In the case that began October 19, the prosecution is required to prove that Hussein specifically ordered his thugs to carry out the 1982 massacre of some 140 people. This is as perverse as presuming Hitler, Stalin, or Mao innocent in the millions murdered by their regimes — and then groping for evidence that they personally ordered the execution of a handful of dissidents in one small village.
It is outrageous that after more than two years into a war that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of American lives, we regard as legitimate the possibility that Hussein could be found culpable for only some minuscule number of murders or even not guilty. It is outrageous that he is given a defense team of 1,500 lawyers, that he is granted the right to appeal a guilty verdict, and that he is allowed to address the court. In one more injustice against all his victims, domestic and foreign, Hussein has eagerly exploited this international stage — paid for with American money and blood –to challenge and scold his Iraqi victims, to rail against the United States, and to cheer on the insurgents murdering Americans.
And yet this trial, the epitome of injustice, is defended as paving the way for a truly just legal system. Proponents argue that, whatever one thinks of the specifics of the trial, it marks the transformation of Iraq's judiciary from courts subservient to a dictator's whims, to courts objectively determining guilt or innocence. But the trial does no such thing.
Observe that only Iraqis were deemed qualified to decide Hussein's culpability. With President Bush's encouragement and blessing, the Iraqi leadership was given full control of the proceedings — and deliberately excluded American judges. Though there are plenty of American judges with decades of experience under a proper legal system — and few, if any Iraqis with comparable experience — American participation was viewed as unacceptable. Why were only members of Hussein's ethnic tribe deemed fit to judge him?
Because justice, on the premise of the trial, is determined by the tribe; the tribe alone is the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, good and evil, innocence and guilt. On this view, a meticulously logical assessment of universally available facts has no bearing on justice. Whatever the tribal group feels is just — regardless of evidence or logic — is just. A trial conducted on this premise is a repudiation of justice as an objective principle.
The trial is not, in essence, a departure from the subjective courts of the former regime. Instead of Hussein capriciously prescribing a "just" verdict, that arbitrary power now belongs to the Iraqi tribe — or any sub-tribe (whether Sunni, Shiite, Kurd) that wrests control of the courts.
This trial is irredeemably corrupt. The United States — which gave Iraq millions of dollars and sent lawyers and forensic investigators to launch the proceedings — must immediately withdraw its moral sanction from this travesty of justice.
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Responses to "The Injustice of Saddam's Trial"
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We are in a war not just to stop a bunch of crazy people from killing us, but also to prove our way of life superior to that being forced on us. The terrorist and monsters like Saddam recognize no rule of law. If we, likewise, throw out law as applies to them, who wins? The precedent will alter the rules regarding innocence and process, not just for Saddam, but for everyone else touched by our legal system. It does not matter that government promises it won’t; they will have and will have established they can do so in each extraordinary circumstance. It then becomes only a matter of what constitutes “extraordinary”.
"Prior to his execution, there can be a legitimate reason to hold a public hearing — not to establish his guilt, but to fully expose his secretive dictatorship by publicly cataloguing its myriad vile deeds."
The communists had this kind of show trial back in the 1930’s and right through Khrushchev. Guilt was established prior to trial, and the trial itself was merely a cataloging of crimes to demonstrate the executions were for the public good. No proof was offered or required. Immediately following the denunciations, the offender was hauled out to a courtyard and shot or hanged. Many of these “offenders” were executed because they dissented against the regime, or simply because they were an embarrassment to some commissar.
Had Saddam been killed in the process of capture, I would have felt no remorse for his death and probably be relieved we’d be spared having to sit through a recounting of his many crimes until so inured by them as to lose all sense of horror. However, had he been killed in the act of surrender, unarmed and prostrate, by men out of control of themselves, I would have been concerned for the conscience of the men who killed him. I am even more concerned should our government order the dispatch of even one monster like Saddam without due process. When we slip the constraints of process, what we do thereafter is our responsibility alone answerable to G-d. Saddam was, in large measure, a monster precisely because he took no heed of the rights or safety of others. Would you have us become the very thing we seek to stop?
I know and share your concern he will find a way to manipulate our sloppy justice system and escape retribution. I want justice too. But, I am confident his crimes are so many and so heinous he will, at most, escape death and rot away in prison. I don’t think anyone is so crazy as to set him loose. He would never be released to roam the streets of the USA (even our judges are not that crazy), and would be, at most, expelled to the land of his enemies. But, if released to some neutral country, like say Sweden, we could expect the families of his victims might provide their own justice and dispatch him where they find him. Knowing this, he would be a fool to ask for release to his home or any other country. He will have no power and will have to hide from the many factions who would track him down and execute him as a dog. Even if he were to evade all this and escape into anonymity, he is not the unknown bully he was before his rise to power. His rise was possible, then, only because he was an unknown, and unperceived as a sufficient threat to the men above him. Now, his enemies and his rivals are equally wary of him, making his chances for survival on the street almost non-existent. Should he escape to another Muslim country ruled by a kindred spirit (or even moderate), who will risk letting him run about at large? Instead, he will be confined as though in prison or put in an actual prison where he can cause no mischief.
I, personally, feel Saddam ought to be handed over to the people whose loved ones he murdered. However they choose to dispense justice would be okay with me. But, I would pray they give him a fair trial, one in which he is given every opportunity to exonerate himself. My reason has nothing to do with fairness to Saddam (I have absolutely no doubt of his guilt or the need to execute him). It has everything to do with preserving civilization, and defending it from those who cast it aside at each “extraordinary” circumstance. Iraq has rejoined the ranks of civilized nations, and I would not want to see her tenuous hold on it lost before it became well rooted. Even more, do I stand by civilization here, and insist it be maintained by our government. Every day we maintain justice, we defeat those who would destroy it.
Our justice too often serves the guilty, to be sure, but it serves the people far more. Who of us prefers to live in a country where niceties like trials and evidence are dispensed with? Who of us could sleep nights knowing, we, or someone close to us, could be hauled away to jail, sentenced, and executed on a specious charge and presumption of guilt? Who of us believes government can be relied on to do the right thing every time, and be assured they could never execute the wrong man? We have confidence in our system of justice precisely because we do observe these niceties, and our confidence will evaporate the moment they are denied. I would rather bend too far toward a misplaced justice than any measure toward an arbitrary rule.
Comment by Bob Stapler | January 27, 2006
The trial does not really presume Hussein's innocence, except in appearance. Everybody knows that, in the end, he will be found guilty (of these crimes or other crimes) and sentenced either to death or to life imprisonment. Still, a trial is a good and necessary thing. It helps discover the truth and bring it to common people. And it also set important moral standards in a country where democracy has but weak roots for the moment.
It is indeed shocking that Saddam Hussein is being judged "just" for having approximately 140 people killed. But the reason for this is both simple and sad : the western countries are linked to all of his greater crimes. They sold weapons to Hussein and gave him monetary aid for many years. And so, they had to find this comparatively small crime to charge Hussein with, in order to avoid being accused of complicity.
Comment by Romain Baudry | January 29, 2006