Kangaroo Court:: The Political Assassination Of Saddam Hussein

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Courtesy Of: Axis of Logic

By Robert Thompson

Dec 28, 2006, 18:11

As a lawyer of over fifty years' standing, when I first heard of the intention to put Saddam Hussein Takriti on trial, I wrote of the danger of his appearing before a Kangaroo Court, which is, as we now know, what has happened.

When one of the succession of presiding Judges showed some sympathy for the principal Defendant, he was immediately replaced by a more servile creature of the puppet government, which wishes above all to kill him with or without any semblance of a fair trial.

In Europe, we hear of the blatant injustices which regularly occur before courts in the USA, and this appears to have been closely modelled on that system. We believe in the principle that every accused person is innocent until proved guilty, even if many of our countries have dubious records in what they accept as proof.

In the one case concerning Saddam Hussein Takriti which has now been displayed to the world, the evidence was uncertain and the defence was clear and worthy of consideration. To justify the death penalty, of which I (in common with most European lawyers) thoroughly disapprove, this Kangaroo Court should have been far mroe rigorous in requiring proper proof and full legal argument, but this would not have satisfied the puppet government's bloodthirsty masters in Washington D.C.

I have never understood how a man with the murderous record of Mr George W. Bush (whether as Governor of Texas confirming death penalties, or as the chief invader of Iraq) can ever claim to be "pro-life". What is even more baffling is how any reasonable person can consider him to have the moral authority to condemn anyone.

As remnants of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party have announced, the judicial murder of this now otherwise insignificant man will create a martyr to be avenged, and all those states which have gone along with this method of trial are likely to suffer revenge attacks. Obviously, the "Court" should have reserved its decision until all other charges are heard against the principal Defendant, and, in any case, the death penalty should have been excluded from the start to satisfy all who genuinely believe in the value of every human life.

It cannot reasonably be argued that this man will quickly be forgotten, and his Defence Team should have been able to call as witnesses all those in the successive administrations in the USA who had organised the sale to Iraq of weapons of mass destruction in their mad desire to do anything to harm the Islamic Republic of Iran, because it had so humbled the USA in the notorious hostage crisis. Incidentally, as many in Europe (including myself) said at the time of that crisis, threats of force and crashing helicopters in the desert were not the answer, and the Carter administration should have argued from the Qur'an and certain Hadithat that Islam has always, since the time of Mohamed, respected diplomatic immunity (as appears from the history of the period), and should therefore immediately have released the diplomatic hostages since they were held illegally under Islamic law.

Coming back to the fate of Saddam Hussein Takriti, this kind of lynch-mob parody of justice can never give any respectability to either the puppet government or to its masters, and is very close to what we came to expect of the Nazis in my youth and which we see nowadays being dished out by the Zionist "state", with its targetted assassinations, recently approved by what claims to be the "Israeli Supreme Court".

On purely practical grounds and to reduce the risk of revenge attacks, the Bush administration should order its servants in the "Green Zone" of Baghdad to commute the sentence to one of imprisonment to give them all time to mend their very tarnished image. On another aspect, I still wonder how, after the attacks of 11th September 2001, the dishonest Neo-cons in Washington D.C. could have failed to warn all concerned that removing such a robust opponent of al-Qaeda from the scene without planning an effective replacement was an extremely dangerous move.

© Copyright 2006 by AxisofLogic.com

Robert Thompson's analyses and writing on Axis of Logic can be found in the Axis section, Letters from France. He offers refreshing perspectives on international relations with a European perspective. He is a French citizen and a retired Avocat (Trial Lawyer) at the Boulogne-sur-Mer Bar, living with his wife in a small village in Northern France. He was born at Leek (North Staffordshire, England) in 1931, and, after reading Jurisprudence at Oxford University, he became an English Solicitor.

He later went to work at the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris. There he was Director in charge of the Legal Department and also Secretary General of the Court of Arbitration, the most important international commercial arbitration centre on the world. While there, he became the I.C.C. Director in charge of relations with the Arab states, where he travelled for professional reasons, and he worked towards legal cooperation with the countries then within the Comecon. Robert can be reached via e-mail at: robert@axisoflogic.com