You charge a criminal for the crimes you have evidence for. Al Capone got done for tax fraud. He is not just a sacrifice for the Bush admin - that kind of trvialises the suffering his people endured under him. Even the thousands he killed are small compared to the millions who died in the pointless wars he started.

I'm just hoping that things cool down a bit over there when he dies. He was such a dominant leader that his followers would be lost without him. But I suspect it isn't about the baath party any more anyway.

142 - that's a lot of people. Did he give them any kind of trial, or was it more of a 'shotgun' approach to justice. I'm guessing it was the latter and that he murdered a lot of innocent people out of convenience.

What about the American Indians they tried wiping them out for their own gains. People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

The rich and powerful are usually immuned from punishment - unless they're put into the official category of "dictator" - although some get away with it.

Saddam knew too much that was the problem.  Who knows how many people Saddam was responsible for killing - but Bush & Co. are certainly catching up quickly.

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Search forum- 'The following edited excerpt from Bob Ellis' essay in SMH asks why our leaders' criminal behaviour is exempt from scrutiny. i think they should be brought to account.
Excerpt.
[Those who watched] may ask: if a head of state can hang by the neck until he is dead for having ordered, or countenanced, or signed off on, or not punished, or failed to countermand the torture and killing of 148 Iraqis guiltless of any great crime, what will happen to the generals, bureaucrats, prime ministers and heads of state who ordered, or countenanced, or signed off on, or did not punish, or did not countermand, the killing of 150,000 Iraqis guiltless of any great crime (the Iraqi Government's estimate of the dead) and the torture of ten thousand more? And how many Americans - Bremmer, Abizaid, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Bush - should on this precedent be charged and hanged?
They may also ask… what was fair about a trial in which three of the defence lawyers were shot and those who survived forbidden to see the prosecution's testimony before it was unveiled in court, … And why this trial wasn't aborted, and another trial begun in The Hague… And why Saddam died so soon. Something to do, perhaps, with his coming genocide trials and the complicity of Germany, France, the US and Britain in the manufacture of his nerve gas, anthrax, cluster bombs and helicopter gunships, and his amiable business relationships with Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush snr, once head of the CIA, in past decades, and how his genocidal methods back then did not greatly annoy them, not so long as he paid his bills.
And these are the freedoms we fought for… The freedom to ask, and not be told … what really happened,… Such were the freedoms Nixon encouraged in Chile when he helped Pinochet to censor, torture and kill those inconvenient to the many, many secrets America wanted to keep.
These are the freedoms we fought for, and will now defend in Iraq for decades if Bush and Howard, brothers-in-arms for "freedom", get their way.'

The death of a dictator


2007/1/7
The China Post



Few would shed tears over Saddam Hussein's hanging. The brutal dictator who ruled Iraq for 24 years was executed last Saturday for "crimes against humanity." His death should have been celebrated by people who embrace democracy and justice, particularly by the Iraqis who were victims of Saddam's tyranny. It should have become a milestone of George W. Bush's war on terror.
But this is not the case. For many Iraqis who hated Saddam before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March, 2003, life seemed better under Saddam. "I wish Saddam was back," an Iraqi who danced the day when Saddam's giant statue fell on April 9, 2003, was quoted as saying in a dispatch from Baghdad by a Western paper. "For all the ills and atrocities of Hussein's rule," the dispatch said, "the country was better off then than it is now."

President Bush's invasion, dubbed "Operation Iraqi Freedom," did not bring the sort of freedom the Iraqi's wanted. It has only brought death and destruction to the ancient civilization. So far, more than half a million Iraqis, mostly civilians, have lost their lives in the war and in sectarian killings between anti-Hussein Shiites and pro-Saddam Sunnis.

For the American invaders, the death toll broke the 3,000 mark on New Year's Day, and the number is increasing day by day. The first Gulf War in 1991, when George W's father was president, cost some 380 American lives. Bush senior pulled out U.S. troops from Iraq right after defeating Saddam's army.

There is no denying that Saddam was a brutal despot, and aggressor to boot. His invasion and occupation of Kuwait prompted the first Gulf War. He was eying Kuwait's oil the same way as America is eying Iraq's. Saddam knew this and he told the world that George Bush's attack on Iraq was not because of his false accusation that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, but because it possessed oil.

It turned out that Saddam was telling the truth. Bush's hubris plus his over-confidence in America's military might has bogged the world's sole superpower down in a costly and unpopular war. He has succeeded in hunting down Saddam and sending him to the gallows, but he has failed to extricate American troops from the Iraqi quagmire and from preventing Saddam's ghost from haunting him.

Far from being "an important milestone in Iraq becoming a democracy," as President Bush so brazenly put it, Saddam's hanging is not an example of Western justice but instead of jungle justice. Saddam's worst crimes were committed when he was an American ally in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, but he was condemned only after he became America's enemy.

Saddam Hussein, the tyrant, dictator and despot, has suddenly become a martyr and hero in the Muslim world, and possibly beyond. In contrast, George Bush is seen as a bully and an aggressor.

A milestone? Probably not. It is a millstone around Bush's neck. The mid-term elections last November spoke volumes of the voter's resentment of Bush, resulting in the GOP's resounding defeat in both houses of Congress. It seems that Bush's nightmare is just beginning, now that Saddam Hussein is dead.

He was - according to the media and our PM - a very cruel and sadistic man - but then so are many men.  While Mugabe gets away with having millions slaughtered in Zimbabwe, Saddam gets executed.  The trial of Saddam was so regressive - you would assume it was a scene from the Dark Ages.

For some reason - the scenes of Saddam being caught in that hole, humiliated on TV, his appearances in Court & finally the hanging - make me feel very sad that his life was used as an example to prove to the world that the US is just as barbaric as those they accuse of the same crimes.

You have to wonder how 3 men could cause such misery and damage - morally and socially.  The changes to society have just happened too quickly in the past 10 years as this psychophant Howard has just allowed his mate Bush to run roughshod over us to become a part in this Iraq/Afghanistan War.

This, I think will be fact.