The Chris Moeller Archives

Iraqi sovereignty finally arrives

Tonight, the Iraqi government will murder Saddam Hussein. Outsiders, including the deposed dictator's legal team, are no longer able to contact him. There will be no television and no press at the hanging. The time and location of his execution will be kept a closely guarded secret up to, and likely well beyond, the actual deed is performed.

He will be killed on the Muslim Holiday of Eid, in violation of Iraqi law, though Iraqi High Tribunal judge Muneer Haddad on Friday assured that "Saddam is not Sunni. And he is not a Shiite. He is not Muslim."-- a discovery that I'm sure surprises you as much as it did me, given the "Butcher of Baghdad's" role in the attack on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon in 2001.

Iraqi law also dictates that the president of the country sign off on any executions, and President Jalal Talabani opposes capital punishment publicly on principal. Yet his office announced on Friday that he would not have to sign these particular orders for a neck-snapping to commence.

The crimes for which Hussein has been sentenced to die are the ordered murders of 148 Shiite men and boys accused of attacking his motorcade in 1982. A second trial for directing the killing of 50,000 Kurds remains in progress, and will likely continue unimpeded by the hanging of the defendant over the weekend. And a third trial for the bloody suppression of a Shiite uprising in 1991 has yet to even start. The trials are taking place in Iraq, where victims testify in fear, court evidence is withheld from the global media, and where three defense attorneys were assassinated during the first trial alone. Hussein will die tonight having never been held in U.N. custody.

Also being murdered in secret tonight will be the possibility of public exposure for those who conspired in Saddam Hussein's crimes-- those, for example, in the CIA who installed him in power, those who gave him his first hit list of 10,000 Communist sympathizers, and those who provided him with the chemical and biological weapons used in his crimes and in his regime's war on Iran in the 1980s.

At the hour of execution in Washington, United States President George W. Bush is likely to pause for reflection, gazing upon two of Hussein's confiscated pistols mounted to the wall of his private study off the Oval Office, a pound of the dictator's flesh perhaps soon arriving to complete the set.

posted by CM @ 7:37 PM