There he sat, the former dictator, the Iraqi Oppressor, the Butcher of Baghdad, having his day in court. And he was smiling, even chuckling.
He wasn’t exchanging pleasantries with his defense counsel or making his initial greeting to the court – he was listening to the first witness describe the brutal attack on his village of Dujail. People from ages 14 to 70 were taken away and tortured for more than three months after an assassination attempt on the president of Dujail. Another witness testified how Iraqi helicopters and bulldozers came in and attacked both people and the fields. And for a brief instant, Saddam smiled and laughed.
I haven’t found a shot of the moment on print web sites but I saw it with my own eyes on a news report last night. The voice-over actually pointed out that Saddam laughed in response to a description the witness made of how people were tortured in prison.
It was an evil, contemptuous smile, one that fits the evil man he is.
When I was in Baghdad, the Iraqi pastor we visited with insisted on showing us a documentary that had come out on one of the local Iraqi channels there shortly after Saddam was captured describing the torture that had been carried out in Saddam’s prisons. It was actually video discovered that the Saddam’s Feyadeen had recorded of prisoners being tortured in the Iraqi intelligence prisons.
I’m specifying that this is the intelligence prison, because there’s a difference. These weren’t criminals as we know them – though no one deserved the torture that these people went through. These were “criminals” of a political nature who had spoken out against Saddam, or had been at the wrong place at the wrong time and were now suffering the consequences of Saddam’s wrath. I couldn’t watch but a second and had to turn my eyes away. These were men, skin and bones, tied up on the floor being beaten to death, kicked and hit with objects. One man passed out, and they continued to hit and kick, inflicting as much damage as possible.
In this AP news report, Ramsey Clark got his 10 minutes again…
“Reconciliation is essential,” Clark told the court. “This trial can either divide or heal. And unless it is seen as absolutely fair, and as absolutely fair in fact, it will irreconcilably divide the people of Iraq.”
Is he serious? I am all for a fair court of law but let’s look at what’s already happened in this so-called “fair trial”:
- Saddam continues to interrupt, to show contemptment and condescension toward the judge.
After the defense lawyers left, Saddam, shaking his right hand, told the judge: “You are imposing lawyers on us. They are imposed lawyers. The court is imposed by itself. We reject that.”
Saddam and Ibrahim then chanted “Long live Iraq, long live the Arab state.”
- Instead of trying to prove their client’s “innocence,” Saddam’s defense team seems more concerned with interrupting court proceedings and arguing points of the trial rather than the charges Saddam and the other co-defendents are facing.
Clark then said all parties were entitled to protection, and the measures offered to protect the defense and their families were “absurd.” He said that without such protection, the judicial system would collapse.
Al-Nueimi then spoke about the legitimacy issue, arguing that court is not independent and was in fact set up under the U.S.-led occupation rather than by a legal Iraqi government. He said the language of the statute was unchanged from that promulgated by the former top U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and was therefore “illegitimate.”
- The raucus exchanges between the defense and the witnesses is absurd, and while this is an Iraqi court, and certainly not an American one (though Saddam continues to insist it is so) order isn’t going to be maintained as long as Saddam and his goons are allowed to stand up and speak whenever they feel like it.
As the testimony continued, Saddam’s lawyers objected that someone in the visitors’ gallery was making threatening gestures and should be removed. Ibrahim leapt to his feet, spat in the direction of the gallery, and shouted, “These are criminals.”
Somewhere in their crazed psychotic minds, Saddam and his co-defendents still maintain that they are in control of Iraq. But the Iraq they know and the Iraq that is to come are two different Utopias. Saddam’s Iraq was a country that bowed down to him and him only. It was a country serving his needs and his needs alone. His concern wasn’t for the Iraq people but for one Iraqi alone – himself.
The Iraq that is coming is a country for a people who are a lot like us, parents who want the best life for their children, people who want to aspire and live out their dreams of being doctors or teachers or even lawyers, who do not see violence as the only way but who understand that democracy alone is what will prevent tyrants and rulers from grabbing hold what is definitely not theirs to grab hold of.
I will never forget the woman I met in the Iraqi church the Saturday before we left. She told me “we were hoping the U.S. military would come and do the same thing here, as they did in Afghanistan.” This statement was astounding to me because I automatically thought “you wanted our military forces to come? Did you understand the risk, the potential of civilian deaths and the havoc that might happen as a result?”
But of course, she did understand. Because she and other Iraqis have seen violence of a worst kind; they know what evil looks like. His face was on every street corner, every merchant’s shop, and his name brought fear when you said it – not respect.
Saddam is having his day in court. He is being the gift he so often denied others – the chance to be heard, the chance to state his case. And in the end, justice will be served because the free wind of democracy can’t be stopped.
It can only move forward.
Related posts:
