Saddam trial – a cover-up for American crimes

Saddam trial – a cover-up for American crimes

6 November 2006. A World to Win News Service. Saddam Hussein is certainly guilty of horrendous crimes against the Iraqi and other peoples. But his trial was a mockery of justice.

As former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark pointed out before the trial began, the US had no legal basis to try Saddam because the American-led occupation itself is illegal. Further, under international law, occupiers are not allowed to set up special courts. Yet that is exactly what the US did. The Iraqi parliament passed legislation to make the trial an “Iraqi” affair only several days after the proceedings had already started. The American embassy issued regular instructions to the judges and paid for the whole thing, which took place in the so-called Green Zone, a US fortress where ordinary Iraqis are prohibited.

In fact, a main reason why the US was so anxious to have Saddam tried before an “Iraqi” court instead of an international tribunal was American opposition to the International Criminal Court in The Hague: if an international tribunal can try people for war crimes and crimes against humanity, then, Bush administration officials have admitted, Henry Kissinger, the main surviving figure behind the war in Vietnam, or Americans from genocidal GIs to the US president himself could also be the target of legal proceedings.

When Saddam was sentenced to hang, George Bush declared that the trial had been “a milestone in the Iraqi people’s effort to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law.” That’s exactly what the trial was not. To cite only a few examples:

• Three of Saddam’s defence lawyers were kidnapped and murdered one after another. A fourth survived being shot. Clark, a member of Saddam’s legal team, was forced to spend most of the trial outside of Iraq. He was dragged out of the courtroom by guards for filing papers in which he called the trial a “travesty”.

• The US shopped around for the right judge: The first head judge resigned after complaining that he was not allowed any authority over what happened in the courtroom. The second was considered too “soft” on Saddam because he let the defendant speak in court. Suddenly the judge was accused of having been a member of Saddam’s Baath party, and kicked off the case. (If the charges were true, they were almost certainly known and most certainly knowable beforehand, so that’s not the real reason he was removed.) The third and final judge, the one the US considered just right, had family members killed in one of the massacres Saddam is being tried for. This wasn’t considered a disqualifying factor, but a qualifying one.

As a result, Saddam was for the most part silenced in court and any lawyer or witness who tried to speak for him could expect a bullet.

• The verdict was handed down just when Bush needed it: a few days before American Congressional elections. According to several newspaper reports, Iraqi officials complained anonymously that the US had instructed them as to exactly when to produce the verdict and sentence.

British journalist Robert Fisk (The Independent, 6 November) and others have rightfully pointed out the political motives behind the crucial decision about which of Saddam’s crimes were selected for this first trial. Among all the possible charges against him, the one for which Saddam received the death sentence was the murder of 148 men and boys from the Shia village of Dujail in retaliation for a failed assassination attempt against him there in 1982. As grave as this was, Saddam committed far worse. He was scheduled to stand trial for the Anfal campaign against Iraqi Kurds which killed as many as 180,000 people. In the most notorious incident, a 1988 poison gas attack on the village of Halabja left thousands dead. That is the trial the US wanted to overshadow, and perhaps interrupt by Saddam’s hanging. The US, Great Britain and Germany supplied the chemicals, as well as anthrax and other biological warfare agents. At the time, the US blocked a motion in the UN Security Council to condemn Saddam for those killings, and suggested – falsely and knowingly – that Iran was behind it instead.

One piece of evidence that was not shown in court is the famous photo of the man who is now Bush’s Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, shaking Saddam’s hand after a meeting with him in 1983 when the US was arming and encouraging Saddam’s regime to wage war against Iran. According to Fisk, in this trial Saddam was “formally forbidden from describing his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld…. [or] about the support he received from George Bush senior, the current U.S. president’s father.”

This was not a “trial by law” but a settling of accounts between gangsters who have fallen out. What prevailed was armed strength and not law and certainly not justice. The idea that the US could give anyone lessons in justice – after the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as a result of the US-led invasion and occupation the slaughter of civilians in Falluja and the revelations about Abu Ghraib – is a sick joke. The war billed as billed as “Operation Iraqi Freedom” replaced Saddam with a bigger and even more brutal tyranny: the direct rule of US imperialism.

But even more than that, the trial was a cover-up. Saddam’s Baath party seized power in a 1963 coup publicly praised by the US and aided and probably organized by the CIA. For a dozen years after he personally seized the reins of power in 1979, the US, along with the UK, Germany and France, all considered Saddam their favourite Arab leader. Most of his atrocities were committed at the instigation of the US or with its complicity. What the US did not want to come out at this trial – and Saddam didn’t want to reveal either – is that he was a hired killer for the US for most of his career.