This ain't no 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' moment, that's for damn sure. Lest we forget, the journey to this day of reckoning for our erstwhile ally in Babylon has been one fraught with legal absurdities. A legal process overseen by a Green Zone run by Republican ideologues, a puppet government that blatantly interfered with the judicial process, and judges that refused even the most cursory rights of the accused. Not to mention the assassinations, boycotts, and high theater of judge and defendant screaming at each other.
Joshua Holland has been providing excellent coverage of this story for weeks now, including picking through the outrageous actions of the Maliki-approved judiciary that has taken over the final proceedings:
A few points about the trial. As I've written before, the proceedings were expected to last months longer. The verdict was first pushed up to October 16, and then pushed back to today, ostensibly to give the judges more time to review the evidence.
This week, we learned from an article in the Washington Post that at least part of the reason the trial took less time than anticipated was that the presiding judge cut short the evidentiary phase before all the defense witnesses could be heard:
As the defense was laying out its own evidence near the end of the trial, the new chief judge, Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman, shut down testimony with some defense witnesses still waiting to take the stand. "We are done with witnesses. . . . If those 26 were not able to make the case, then 100 will not," Abdel-Rahman declared.
If all those prosecution witnesses weren't enough to achieve the desired outcome, what good would a bunch of defense witnesses be?
Meanwhile, over at The Arabist, in "Media Culpa" an anonymous reporter fills in the other side of the story: The role of the American media in collaborating to create an atmosphere of legitimacy for a sham trial:
It was our fault. We brought him down. He seemed to be a perfectly good judge and by all counts was doing a better job than some of his predecessors.
He just made a little slip and we pounced on him. ...
For two days the government went out of their way to say the judiciary was independent and they would respect that.
And then on the third day they fired him.
The funniest part was the American advisors to the court, a rather righteous bunch of characters, who’s main role, as far as we can tell, is to convince the media that the trial isn’t really a travesty of justice. It’s an Iraqi process.
So the night the judge is fired we called them up and they swore up and down that the old judge would be there the next day. And the next day he wasn’t and they were spinning it along explaining how it was all within Iraqi laws. ...
Anyway, what do I care, all that matters is the quote.
As Riverbend says in her reaction,
When All Else Fails...execute the dictator. It’s that simple. When American troops are being killed by the dozen, when the country you are occupying is threatening to break up into smaller countries, when you have militias and death squads roaming the streets and you’ve put a group of Mullahs in power—execute the dictator.
--Ethan Heitner |
Monday, November 6, 2006 10:57 AM
