Another "Annomoly"/Bush

[Chris R]

Robert Scheer: Silencing Saddam_GREAT READ! http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061229_saddam_hussein_executed/
Dec 29, 2006
It is a very frightening precedent that the United States can invade a country on false pretenses, depose its leader and summarily execute him without an international trial or appeals process. This is about vengeance, not justice, for if it were the latter the existing international norms would have been observed. The trial should have been overseen by the World Court, in a country that could have guaranteed the safety of defense lawyers, who, in this case, were killed or otherwise intimidated.
The irony here is that the crimes for which Saddam Hussein was convicted occurred before the United States, in the form of Donald Rumsfeld, embraced him. Those crimes were well known to have occurred 15 months before Rumsfeld visited Iraq to usher in an alliance between the United States and Saddam to defeat Iran.
Related Truthdig Reports
Robert Scheer on Saddam's Conviction
Juan Cole on Saddam's Trial
The fact is that Saddam Hussein knew a great deal about the United States' role in Iraq, including deals made with Bush's father. This rush to execute him had the feel of a gangster silencing the key witness to a crime.
At Nuremberg in the wake of World War II the U.S. set the bar very high by declaring that even the Nazis, who had committed the most heinous of crimes, should have a fair trial. The U.S. and allies insisted on this not to serve those charged, but to educate the public through a believable accounting. In the case of Saddam, the bar was lowered to the mud, with the proceedings turned into a political circus reminiscent of Stalin's show trials.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061229_saddam_hussein_executed

Anno Moly? Never heard of her.

[shadowjak]

A Cleveland law professor who advised the tribunal that convicted Saddam Hussein said the former Iraqi dictator's execution will bring needed closure to legal wrangling that has spanned three years.

"I think many people feel like this is the right time," said Michael Scharf, director of the Cox International Law Center at Case Western Reserve University.

Scharf said the court's 298-page, single-spaced ruling will with stand history's scrutiny in chronicling "this sad chapter in Iraqi history." It is the longest judicial opinion ever written in a war-crimes trial, said Scharf.

Skeptics, he predicted, will be less skeptical after they see the documentation in the detailed opinion.

"They got the law right," Scharf said prior to the reported execution of the former Iraqi dictator on Friday night. "They didn't mess up on any of the legal issues."

He added that the ruling, which relies on "beyond a reasonable doubt" as its standard of proof, references international legal precedents cited in 45 memoranda - about 50 pages each and translated into Arabic - that were prepared by Case law students.

Scharf, who helped train the Iraqi judges and prosecutors, found the lengthy trial maddening at times.

"It used to drive me crazy when they didn't take my advice," he said, citing his ignored recommendation that Saddam be prohibited from speaking in court until it was appropriate at the end of the trial.

A former State Department lawyer, Scharf also is a co-founder of the Public International Law & Policy Group. The organization was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year for providing pro bono legal assistance that promotes peace and brings war criminals to justice.

Had Saddam Hussein never lived, the world would be a different place. But he changed the world more by his defeats than his victories.

For all his nationalist rhetoric, Iraqis never wanted to fight or die for him. After he invaded Iran in 1980, Iraqi troops surrendered en masse until Iran in turn invaded Iraq. In Kuwait in 1991, the Iraqi army again hardly fought against the US-led coalition. In 2003, the American and British armies suffered few casualties on the road to Baghdad. Only after Saddam fled did serious guerrilla warfare begin.

His nationalism was genuine: he identified Iraq wholly with himself. At his trial he presented himself as the symbol of Iraqi unity and independence, berating his judges as pawns of the US. When told he was to die this weekend, he remarked philosophically to one lawyer: "What do you expect from occupiers?"

As the standard-bearer of Arab nationalism and the opponent of Western imperialism, he was more popular outside Iraq than within. Every office, restaurant and street in Iraq bore his image. I once counted nine photographs of him in the office of a Baghdad newspaper editor. But for all that, he was liked by few Iraqis. The next time I saw the editor, he was in exile in London.

The reverence was more genuine elsewhere. Taxi drivers from Jordan to Sudan and Yemen to Bangladesh pinned up his picture in their cabs. It was only as his army fled without firing a shot, and the Sunni and Shia rose in rebellion, that they realized they had chosen an ineffective champion.

His regime was a police state, but a peculiar one. It had all the repressive apparatus of East Germany or Chile. Saddam's response to any form of dissent was repression, usually far in excess of what was needed to achieve his ends. He was executed yesterday for killing 148 people from the village of Dujail because of an attempt to kill him there in 1982, but the assassination bid was only a scattering of shots in the direction of his motorcade. The savagery of the retaliation aimed, very successfully, to spread terror.

There have been other states ruled by fear - most Middle East countries are controlled by corrupt and parasitic ruling élites, backed by ferocious security services - but Saddam's grip on power was also sustained by kinship and tribal links. In so far as he ever trusted anybody, it was relatives. He came from the al-Bejat clan, part of the Albu Nasir tribe from around the city of Tikrit on the Tigris river. "Do you want to know how we run Iraq?" said one of his lieutenants in the 1990s. "Exactly the same way as we used to run Tikrit."

Saddam had highly educated advisers to balance Ba'ath party loyalists and tribal allies. But there was always something archaic about his regime - for all the trouble he had taken to invade and hold Kuwait, the Iraqi occupiers behaved as if they were on a Bedouin raid, looting everything from bulldozers to museum artefacts.

Saddam was a man of intelligence, but also arrogance so great that it led to catastrophic blunders. Iraq was a growing power in 1980, but to wage war on revolutionary Iran, a country with three times Iraq's population, was the height of foolishness. Ten years later Saddam once again miscalculated his strength in invading Kuwait. Tragically for Iraqis, these blunders were matched by great skill on Saddam's part in retaining power. A natural-born conspirator himself, he had a secret policeman's instinct for smelling out conspiracies against his regime.

His appeal was always to Iraqi unity. Iraqi nationalism can be a powerful force, but it is also true that Iraq was historically far more divided between Sunni, Shia and Kurd than most Iraqis admit. Although Iraq is a country created by the state, this is not so peculiar as some who see Iraq as "an artificial state" suppose, since the same is true of the United Kingdom. But under Saddam the state had been overstrained by war and 13 years of economic sanctions, until it dissolved at the time of the capture of Baghdad in 2003.

For the division of Iraq, Saddam bears some, but not all, the responsibility. He was part of the Sunni community, as were his senior lieutenants. Towards the Kurds he never adopted any policy but repression. He made war on the Shia religious parties, but tried to conciliate ordinary Shia during the war with Iran. After the Shia uprising in 1991, however, he viewed them - 60 per cent of the population - as potential rebels.

Saddam was a convenient enemy, as the US and Britain found. Few opponents could have been as easy to demonize, because in many ways he was a real demon. His physical appearance was threatening, and so was his rhetoric. In 1990 he appeared with a young British hostage sitting on his knee, like the wicked king in a fairy tale.

Doubly convenient for Washington and London, his menacing rhetoric was far from reality. The "Mother of all Battles" he promised foreign invaders in 1990 never happened. Instead, there was an embarrassing rout. The allies later boasted of destroying 2,000 Iraqi tanks, but most of them were empty, their crews having sensibly fled before they were hit.

If Iraqis had really identified with Saddam - as so many Germans identified with Hitler - then the task of the US and Britain in Iraq might have been easier. But to the surprise of the invaders, the serious fighting began after his flight. When he was captured by US troops in December 2003, it had no dampening effect on the insurgency, which grew steadily in strength.
This was hardly surprising. No Iraqis, not even the Sunni community from which he came, wanted Saddam back in power. Only the US generals, at their ludicrous press conferences in Baghdad's Green Zone, pretended that he played a central role in the war against the occupation. As his lieutenants pictured on the US Army's notorious pack of cards were killed or captured, it became increasingly evident that none was at the centre of the war of resistance.

Many Iraqis will rejoice at the death of Saddam. While some will accept his estimate of himself as a symbol of his country, making the final patriotic sacrifice, he is only one of 4,000 Iraqis who will die violently this month. The war has its own momentum, and Iraqis are too worried about staying alive themselves to lament or rejoice very long at the execution of the man who ruled them for a quarter of a century.

It's hard in the middle of a moment in history to see how this will be remembered. If Iraq ends up as a failed state like Somalia, it will not be significant. "But if in 10 years Iraq has a democratic government, the trial of Saddam will be one of the seminal events in the transition toward democracy and peace.

[Soundbear]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Aydeloof</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Anno Moly? Never heard of her.
</div></div>

"The irony here is that the crimes for which Saddam Hussein was convicted occurred before the United States, in the form of Donald Rumsfeld, embraced him. Those crimes were well known to have occurred 15 months before Rumsfeld visited Iraq to usher in an alliance between the United States and Saddam to defeat Iran."

I hadn't noticed.

[Soundbear]

Thanks, once again, Shadowjak for a balanced and informative post.

Iran was a bigger threat in those days than Iraq. Sort of similar to us forming an alliance with Stalin to defeat Germany. Does that mean that the Allies endorsed Stalin's domestic policies? Did that make Stalin a good guy? I think Churchill would have jumped at the chance to have him executed after WWII was done.

Perhaps this shows that the trial wasn't manipulated by the USA after all.

[Chris R]

I too like some of Shadowjaks submitted articles: and, this one in particular.I'm left wondering were he obtained the article as i see no reference?
Seems Barrack and Speedo are in argreement with it as well, there are NO derogatory comments made as of yet by them!
May-be there admiring them-selves in the mirror!

[Chris R]

"Annomoly",was employed as BAIT!

LOL.Got ya!

[Chris R]

JUST:another Perspective!


Truthout: Puppet Kills Puppet *
By Marc Ash
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 01 January 2007
Shortly after Saddam Hussein was hanged at a US installation in Baghdad, the New York Times called him a "Dictator Who Ruled Iraq With Violence." The Washington Post dubbed Hussein an "Architect of ruthless Iraqi dictatorship." President Bush said, "Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial."
Curiously absent from US mainstream media accounts were a few additional details. Saddam was indeed a ruthless dictator, true, but specifically ruthless on behalf of his benefactors: US multinational petroleum and arms dealers and their patrons well-placed in Washington.
As long as Saddam obediently protected and facilitated the economic and territorial interests of the American (and European) colonialists who backed him, his ruthlessness was their profit, and clearly tolerable. When Saddam said he needed assistance to quell internal resistance, he got all the help he needed in the form of cash and training for his security forces. If that meant 143 Shiites received "red cards," that was no problem for his backers.
In 1979, Iranian revolutionaries ousted the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and with him foreign corporate domination. He was replaced by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who hated the US. None other than Donald Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad as Reagan's "special envoy," to make sure Hussein understood that he had a friend in Washington. Saddam reciprocated by promising to defeat the very same Iranian revolutionaries. What followed was a long, bloody, regionally devastating stalemate.
Puppet exits the reservation.
Saddam was less obedient than Reagan and Rumsfeld had hoped. Hussein dreamed of "reuniting Mesopotamia," a plan not in keeping with the designs for the region held by his foreign partners. Saddam decided to hedge his bets and began accepting favors from the Soviets as well, which had a chilling effect on his relationship with Washington, to be sure.
However vile and objectionable Saddam Hussein's methods were, he clung to his dream of ridding his region of foreign domination. Saddam Hussein's final words were, "Down with the traitors, the Americans, the spies and the Persians."
The game came to a screeching halt shortly after midnight August 2, 1990, as Saddam's army crashed into the territory of the US-Western protectorate of Kuwait. It had become time for George H. W. Bush to dispatch the former puppet, and the price would be high for the human instruments of war. ......(more)
The rest of the article is at:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010107Y.shtml
_____________________________________

[Verotik]

Comment #44864 by Marlow on 1/01 at 2:51 pm
...
Hitler started WWII on the false accusation that Poland was planning an attack on Germany. Sound familiar? What Nuremberg established was that preemptive wars, wars of choice are the highest of crimes.The trial bar WAS set high at Nuremberg, Mescalero, and your fearless leader’s legacy will go down in history as causing the greatest damage to it’s precedent.

[darryl smith]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: cyberfox</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> I too like some of Shadowjaks submitted articles: and, this one in particular.I'm left wondering were he obtained the article as i see no reference?
Seems Barrack and Speedo are in argreement with it as well, there are NO derogatory comments made as of yet by them!
May-be there admiring them-selves in the mirror! </div></div>

No cyber I am just excercising the old adage "never argue with an idiot"

[Chris R]

No argument here Barrack:your a grumpy,hateful old [censored]!

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: cyberfox</div><div class="ubbcode-body">"Annomoly",was employed as BAIT!

LOL.Got ya!</div></div>

lol! you're admitting you are a troll!

[Chris R]

I've been called every-thing under the Sun:why not troll.LOL.

[Wrangler35]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Aydeloof</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Anno Moly? Never heard of her.
</div></div> Still the CLASS Clown..!

[Wrangler35]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Aydeloof</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: cyberfox</div><div class="ubbcode-body">"Annomoly",was employed as BAIT!

LOL.Got ya!</div></div>

lol! you're admitting you are a troll! </div></div>

I un-like a "Troll" live in a house!

[Soundbear]

"In Kuwait in 1991, the Iraqi army again hardly fought against the US-led coalition."

And yet the USA managed to kill over 100,000 of them.

[GenX]

Killing your enemy in war is bad?

Sheesh, no wonder Canadians don't try the military-thing: they don't have a clue what to do with one!

[Soundbear]

Sorta like you do with an actual question.

[GenX]

Says the guy who answers questions with questions /ubbthreads/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/smile.gif

[GenX]

Until you guys begin to realize that the political realities of the Cold War World and the Post-Cold War World called for differentiated actions that can be judged fairly only within the context in which they occurred, then you'll simply continue spinning your wheels.

[Soundbear]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Speedy the Arrogant Parrot</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Says the guy who answers questions with questions /ubbthreads/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/smile.gif </div></div>

Why not?? /ubbthreads/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/smile.gif /ubbthreads/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/smile.gif


Better than a guy who NEVER answers hard questions.

[GenX]

I answer them all.

Because you do not like the answer, psychologically you convince yourself I did not answer.

It's very common in people with weak debating skills. It's a psychological soother, so to say.

[Wrangler35]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Speedy the Arrogant Parrot</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Killing your enemy in war is bad?

Sheesh, no wonder Canadians don't try the military-thing: they don't have a clue what to do with one! </div></div>

Yea..America stayed at home in world war 2:when most Canadians eligible to emlist trained and went over seas.. Amercians..learned it was better to get involved in that war than sit and wait for public attitude to change..ummm Pearl Harbor.Iraq is a good example of lesson learned.

Hey Parrot: you excel in putting words into peoples mouth lately..is your trainer giving lessons..

[GenX]

Wait a second...I thought Americans were too quick to go to war...

...or is it too slow to go to war...

...or too quickly slow...

...or slowly quick...

...or

[GenX]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> Hey Parrot: you excel in putting words into peoples mouth lately..is your trainer giving lessons.. </div></div>

Son, if that's what I'm doing for you, you should be sending me 'thank you' card everyday. /ubbthreads/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/smile.gif

[Wrangler35]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Speedy the Arrogant Parrot</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Wait a second...I thought Americans were too quick to go to war...

...or is it too slow to go to war...

...or too quickly slow...

...or slowly quick...


Your Phyco babble is showing!

...or </div></div>

[Wrangler35]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Speedy the Arrogant Parrot</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> <div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> Hey Parrot: you excel in putting words into peoples mouth lately..is your trainer giving lessons.. </div></div>

Son, if that's what I'm doing for you, you should be sending me 'thank you' card everyday. /ubbthreads/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/smile.gif </div></div> NO: your doing it to Barry..Your are on a real ego trip..and it shows..Let it go..

[GenX]

"Your are"

Classic stuff!

[Wrangler35]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Speedy the Arrogant Parrot</div><div class="ubbcode-body">"Your are"

Classic stuff! </div></div> Thats the nicest thing you said to me to-day..Now go to bed..and i will read you..My Pet Goat!

[GenX]

Why are you fascinated with "My Pet Goat"?

What should Bush have been reading to a class of third-grade children, "Gulag Archipelago", by Solzhenitsyn?

[Wrangler35]

He should of never been in the classroom..the moment the CIA learned a plane flew into the first twin tower let alone the second one.

[Soundbear]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Speedy the Arrogant Parrot</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I answer them all.

Because you do not like the answer, psychologically you convince yourself I did not answer.

It's very common in people with weak debating skills. It's a psychological soother, so to say. </div></div>

I'm saving this one!!!

[GenX]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Barry Morris</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Speedy the Arrogant Parrot</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I answer them all.

Because you do not like the answer, psychologically you convince yourself I did not answer.

It's very common in people with weak debating skills. It's a psychological soother, so to say. </div></div>

I'm saving this one!!! </div></div>

You should save them all; every last one!

Lord knows I've given you the equivalent of a four-year education in here over the last nine months or so.

Do NOT let this education go to waste, Slugger!

[Soundbear]

Please Speedy, go back to your job of messing with the minds of american youth.

[GenX]

As soon as you wire up that next Sparkomatic, Slugger!! /ubbthreads/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/smile.gif

[Wrangler35]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Barry Morris</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Please Speedy, go back to your job of messing with the minds of american youth. </div></div> Barry..Speedo..spends more time on the internet..either lurking or posting,could it be hes currently employed any-where, let alone full time.

He must work in a call center!

[GenX]

No, Americans do one of two things with such menial jobs that are an affront to our superior abilities and boundless creativity: we either hire illegal Mexicans (car washes/lawn care/McDonald's), or we send those jobs to Canada (call centers/making orange blinker lenses for the Form Taurus).