Legal lynching of Saddam Hussein begins in Iraq
By James Cogan
19 October 2005
The trial of Saddam Hussein that begins today in Baghdad, under the auspices of the US-created Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal (SICT) and the US-sponsored Iraqi government, is a legal travesty. No credibility can be given to the prosecution of the former Iraqi head of state by a puppet court and client administration that exist only due to the illegal and predatory invasion of Iraq by US imperialism and the continued presence of more than 150,000 American and other foreign troops.
Hussein and his Baathist regime have many crimes against the Iraqi people to answer for. However, the proceedings starting today are nothing but a show trial designed to have the former dictator quickly sentenced to death and executed. The aim is not justice, but to obscure the complicity of the United States, Britain and other major powers in many of Hussein’s atrocities.
Today Hussein is being prosecuted only for 19 charges relating to the massacre of some 150 people in the village of Dujail in 1982. The murders followed a failed assassination attempt on the Baathist leader by alleged members of the Shiite fundamentalist Da’awa organisation—the party of the current Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
The Dujail massacre has been carefully chosen, instead of other Baathist crimes that were encouraged or sanctioned by the major powers. These include the slaughter of Iraqi Communist Party members in 1979; the murder of thousands of Shiites in the lead-up to the 1980 US-backed Iraqi invasion of Iran; the use of Western-supplied chemical weapons against Iranian troops and civilians during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war; the pogroms against the Kurdish population in the late 1980s; and the butchery of tens of thousands of Shiites and Kurds following the 1991 Gulf War.
It is no secret that the prosecution of Hussein has been crafted to prevent any repetition of the ongoing trial of former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic in the UN-run International Criminal Tribunal, where he is facing 66 charges of war crimes and genocide allegedly committed in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/huss-o19.shtml