Reply #28: It might be Saddam's death sentence [View All]

[Lasher]

Arguably, this seems to be helping the GOP in the polls. The masses are stupid.

Saddam's guilty verdict: Bush's big, anticlimactic, pre-election surprise

Part one of Team Bush's show trial for Saddam Hussein has ended in Baghdad with no sense of surprise; as the news broke, even number-one Bush backer and partner-in-war Tony Blair "bizarrely declined to make any comment, preferring to address the issue" sometime later.

Of course Saddam was going to be found guilty of crimes against humanity and of course he was going to be sentenced to death "for his role in the killing of 148 Shiite villagers...in 1982." As though right on schedule, news of his fate emerged on the eve of U.S. midterm elections that are expected to be a wipe-out for Bush's Republicans, dogged as they are by scandals, rampant corruption and an endless, cooked-up war that even voters who once supported it now tell pollsters they abhor.

At least this phase of the former strongman's trial seems to have gone according to something of a plan in Bush's directionless, Iraq-war script. However, even supporters of his Iraq misadventure might ask: Wasn't this supposed to be a trial for the ages that would expose the whole, heinous catalog of evil linked to the former autocrat (whom current Team Bush power players like Donald Rumsfeld, in other roles not so long ago, helped empower in the first place)? Could it really be over so soon?

In fact, Saddam is also being tried on charges of massacring Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s (events about which the Reagan administration kept silent). The ex-dictator's just-announced "death sentence automatically to an appeals panel"; in the meantime, his genocide trial is supposed to proceed. But if an appeal decision upholds the verdict in the just-concluded case, Saddam could be hanged by the end of December. If that happens, Iraqis - and the world - will be deprived of a full, on-the-record, in-court accounting of his crimes and their assessment in the context of what Bush has lauded as "the rule of law."

Journalist Robert Fisk has been no fan of Bush and Blair's Iraq caper, nor an apologist for tyrants like Saddam. Raising questions that Washington and London would probably prefer to ignore, he notes: "America knew all about atrocities and even supplied the gas - along with the British, of course - yet there we were yesterday declaring it to be, in the White House's words, another 'great day for Iraq.'...And now we're going to string him up, and it's another great day."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=15&entry_id=10601