SADDAM HUSSEIN'S GAME ISN'T OVER YET By Jack A. Smith
The Bush administration may yet regret that U.S. troops were not ordered to murder Saddam Hussein on sight rather than capture him alive to stand trial.
President George Bush is counting on the show trial of the former Iraqi leader to advance his reelection campaign this year and to deflect public attention from the failing occupation and the untruths he told about Baghdad's alleged weapons of mass destruction in order to justify ordering a preemptive invasion of Iraq.
But by now he is also well aware that in a fair trial Hussein may be able to turn the tables and gravely implicate the U.S. in the very crimes for which he is accused as well as offer proofs that the invasion was unjust and illegal.
Further, as the French news agency AFP reported Dec. 18, "Iraqi legal experts warned of the huge difficulties in finding decisive evidence of Saddam Hussein's guilt in crimes committed by his regime in Iraq." Indeed, "Experts said at a Washington meeting organized by the [right-wing] American Enterprise Institute that any trial of [Hussein] could simply get bogged down over lack of evidence."
According to Kanan Makiya, founder of the anti-Hussein Iraq Memory Foundation, which is sifting through 6 million pages of Iraqi documents seeking the "smoking gun" that will convict the former president, "It is one thing to say we all know about what Saddam did. But it's another to prove it in a court of law."
The capture of President Hussein on Dec. 13 near Tikrit provided Bush with an immediate but temporary boost in sagging public opinion polls. They had been gradually declining for months as a result of the Iraqi armed resistance to the occupation. The CBS News Poll reported a jump in Bush's approval rating from 48% Dec. 3 to 59% Dec. 15 but declining to 57% by Dec. 22. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey reported that by Dec. 16 Bush's ratings has jumped 9 percentage points to 63%, the highest since June. Newsweek showed that between Dec. 12 and 19 the rating moved from 45% to 53%.
Bush gloated about the capture. In a public comment Dec. 15 he established a crude tone that was replicated by the corporate mass media when he declared, "The world is better off without you Mr. Saddam Hussein. I find it very interesting that when the heat got on, you dug yourself a hole and crawled into it."
The White House turned the capture into a circus of triumphalism as news reports, with barely concealed jocularity, focused on the Iraqi leader's shaggy beard and bedraggled, bewildered appearance, parading him like a human trophy and even showing video clips of his medical examination intended to depict him in a humiliating situation.
This may have amused some Americans who have been trained by their government for 13 years to view the Iraqi leader as a beast, but it was considered extremely insulting throughout the Middle East and other parts of the world. According to Moroccan journalist Khalid Jamai, "No Arab and no Muslim will ever forget these images. It was disgraceful to publish those pictures. It goes against human dignity to present him like a gorilla that has come out of the forest, with someone checking his head for lice." Writing in USA Today Dec. 16, historian Stanley Weintraub said "the U.S. will pay a price in the Islamic world for our public debasement."
In Rome, Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Vatican Council for Justice and Peace, sharply criticized Washington for its campaign to publicly humiliate the deposed leader. Martino also noted that the Roman Catholic Church opposed the death penalty for Hussein, countering the former Texas hanging governor's suggestion that Hussein deserved execution.
The U.S. claims that a local citizen informed them about Hussein's whereabouts but there has been no report that the proffered $25 million reward was provided to this alleged informant, as was the $30 million given to the informant who turned in the Iraqi president's two sons. The Washington Post implied that the information was the product of torture when it quoted a military officer as saying, "This guy was in interrogation. He wasn't willingly giving stuff up," thus presumably he did not deserve a reward. One officer was reported to have laughed at the suggestion that a reward would be given under the circumstances.
Newsweek reported that "Weeks ago, U.S. forces decided to identify anyone who might have current knowledge of where Hussein wasŠ and then to go after them with a vengeance, rounding up their families and friends ‹ women, children, grandparents, everyone. Many of the key clues came from involuntary interrogations of informants."
Hussein's trial will be held in Iraq probably during the final months of the election campaign. At first there was speculation the trial might be conducted in The Hague under UN jurisdiction in an ad hoc Tribunal similar to the International Criminal Court. This was evidently vetoed by the Coalition Provisional Authority and the puppet Iraqi Governing Council.
Why? For one thing, a trial in Iraq insures that it remains under Washington's control. For another, the U.S. invasion was illegal under the UN Charter and it might prove difficult for the aggressor country to put the president of the invaded country on trial. Further, an international tribunal would follow UN rules and cannot impose the death penalty. Also, under these rules Hussein probably would be granted a full opportunity to air his case, which will be quite sensational should he ever be allowed to make it. The last thing Washington wants is for Hussein to in effect put the U.S. on trial the way former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has done with great skill at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
A possible harbinger of events to come at the Iraq trial took place in The Hague at Milosevic's trial when former NATO Commander Wesley Clark, who led the unjust, illegal war against Yugoslavia, testified last month. The ICTY unaccountably capitulated to the U.S. government demand to censor Clark's testimony, made in closed court, before the transcript was released to the public. There has also been no report of the content of Milosevic's questioning, if he was allowed to do so in Clark's case.
If such things can happen at a UN court just because Washington invokes the pretext of national security, the Iraqi trial is going to be very strict about testimony that can possibly damage the Bush administration. Efforts obviously will be made to inhibit Hussein's ability to make his case.
So far, the U.S. has not allowed the prisoner to have legal counsel. Milosevic, a lawyer, is handling his own defense, but Hussein will require an assertive legal expert at his side if he is receive a modicum of a fair trial. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, a staunch opponent of the war against Iraq, has offered to defend Hussein, but he is persona non grata in Baghdad these days.
Since the entire world will be watching the impending trial very closely, including human rights groups such as Amnesty International (which has publicly called on the U.S. "not to mount a political show trial"), Washington will have to avoid the appearance of legal malfeasance. However, the Bush administration simply cannot allow Hussein to introduce certain devastating charges against the United States in his defense.
Such charges fall into two categories: (1) Matters pertaining to the legality and rationale for the current war. (2) Matters pertaining to the history of U.S.-Iraqi relations in the last 30 years.
Regarding the current war, Hussein's defense can easily prove that the war is illegal under international laws subscribed to by the United States, and, quoting from such sources as Pope John Paul, unjust as well. And the missing weapons of mass destruction plus Bush's false charges about Iraqi connections to Al-Qaeda would also be brought up in great detail. Additionally figuring in the trial, if allowed, will be Hussein's secret offer to the Bush administration just before the invasion to meet all the U.S. demands and a great deal more, including concessions on oil, Israel, disarmament and much else ‹ if the invasion was cancelled. The offer was spurned. Most Americans know nothing about the overture.
Even more embarrassing for Washington are the revelations Hussein will make, if permitted, about his long and close relations with the United States until the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 ‹ an event he was led to believe Washington intended to ignore. The principal revelations concern secret U.S. backing (along with funding from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) for Iraq's unjust war against Iran in the 1980s that took over a million lives on both sides before it ended in a stalemate. It was during this time that poison gas was deployed against the Kurds in northern Iraq, a circumstance, Hussein will tell the court if allowed, that was shrugged off by Washington at the time (indeed, the U.S. sold Iraq the chemicals that were used in the attacks). There are dozens of other compromising episodes of collusion between the United States and Saddam Hussein that will be introduced if the trial is fair, including contacts by top members of the current administration when they were officials in the Reagan and (first) Bush governments. The American people are ignorant about almost all of this.
It is not for nothing that Hussein said to the American soldiers upon his capture, "My name is Saddam Hussein. I am the president of Iraq and I want to negotiate." Negotiate? The man clearly still has cards in his hands, and the game isn't over.