Saddam’s Capture, Trial, and Execution
By Abdul-Majid Jaffry
Renton, Washington

The Second World War began in September, 1939 with Germany’s attack on Poland. A few days later Great Britain and France invaded Germany. The conflict that lasted for six years came to an end in September, 1945 with an Allies victory. While the war was still in full swing, as early as in 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet had already started discussing the mode and means to punish the Germans once they were defeated. Churchill called for the summary execution of the Germans. However, a court of law was created and a legal basis of the trial was established by the victors.
It is the victors who write the history of the vanquished, it is also the victors who decide the fate of the humbled. According to many jurists and historians the Nuremberg trials were acts of vengeance not a means to serve justice; a political, not a legal act.
Sixty years later another nation was subdued with a strategy of “shock and awe” bombing. But this time it was not a Western nation that the forces of the USA and Great Britain defeated. The victorious heroes felt no need to show even a semblance of respect, at least outwardly, that was accorded to the defeated German leadership.
The Western media portrayed Saddam's capture as the triumph of US high-tech innovation and old-fashioned ingenuity, but independent reports tell a different story. According to the British Sunday Express, Saddam was actually captured by Kurdish forces who bargained with the United States before agreeing to hand over the drugged leader. American version that Saddam emerged from the hole to announce in English: "I am Saddam Hussein. I am president of Iraq and I want to negotiate" is also repudiated.
What followed was deplorable. The clip, the first view in captivity, showing a ruffled and untidy Saddam docilely submitting to a medical exam, with a doctor running his gloved hand through his hair looking for lice and sticking a tongue depressor in his mouth, and photos of Saddam clad only in his underwear as a prisoner of war were a far cry from the manner the Western prisoners of the war were handled by the Allied forces.
The defeated and starving Germany was in no position to oppose the Allied forces’ demands in the Nuremberg trials of German leaders. However, in Iraq the feeble US installed sycophant Shiite administration was too eager to comply with the US wish and for its own sake too keen to remove the old enemy from the scene to consolidate its place in the new Iraq
Unlike Churchill’s suggestion of summary execution of German war leaders, the US opted to execute Saddam but only after a show trial. Saddam’s execution meant the Western powers’ only tangible victory in Iraq. Saddam’s hanging also means a dictator was made to pay for his crimes, accomplishing the US most cited war aim after failing to unearth Iraq’s weapon of mass destruction.
Khalil al-Dulaimi, Saddam’s chief lawyer, and other commentators have said that the date on which the verdict was pronounced live to the world, November 5, 2006, was purposely selected and hastened by the Bush Administration to influence the U.S midterm election which took place two days later and widely viewed as a referendum on Bush's Iraq policy. This has been called a November Surprise. Does anyone with an iota of understanding of working of Iraq believe that the Saddam trial was run by and for Iraqis? How could a court created by the occupation forces to serve their interests provide a fair trial?
The trial, described as the most important since the Nuremberg trials after World War II, set many bizarre firsts in judiciary: Four of the five Judges who presided over the trial resigned, removed or assassinated. One of the Judges who resigned publicly acknowledged unbearable political interference. Four defense lawyers were assassinated during the trial. Two of the Judges publicly condemned the accused before the trial began. Defense lawyers were denied confidential visits to their clients after the start of the trial. And many more underhanded acts produced the legal comedy (or tragic comedy) for the world to watch for over a year.
No high profile trial in recent history has been so widely condemned as Saddam’s trial. A whole host of international organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and UN bodies, including the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and the High Commissioner for Human Rights, have all said in unison that Saddam was not given a fair trial. Perhaps most embarrassing of all was the decision by the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, not to support the judicial tribunal expressing his own concerns over its fairness and propriety.
Any effort to give the impression of a fair and impartial judicial process was essentially destroyed at the execution. Mocking and insulting gibes at the gallows and the timing of the execution say it all; it was an exercise in vengeance raher than an attempt to obtain justice.
The high drama didn’t draw a curtain at the end of the trial; the climax came at the gallows. As the trial had set many firsts, the execution also set its own examples. Perhaps, this was the first execution where the executioners, in the presence of prosecutor, jurist and the higher ups of the Iraqi government, taunted the condemned man with the noose around his neck. The unruly execution scene was not of a judicial event but lynching, complete with derision and hooting by a cheering crowd. Saddam, who never bowed his head until his neck snapped, sarcastically asked the crowd: "Do you consider this bravery?"
It was not only the perverse lynch-style execution that was censured by the civilized world but its spiteful timing that was equally deplored. Eid al-Adha marks Prophet Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son for God. Muslim countries often pardon criminals to mark the feast, and prisoners are not executed at that time.

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Editor: Akhtar M. Faruqui
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