Originally posted by: Jaskalas
Originally posted by: TekDemon
Originally posted by: Antisocial Virge
Originally posted by: Wreckem
Originally posted by: compuwiz1
[gomer pyle] surprise surprise surprise[/gomer pyle]
He earned it, and deserves it.
And they really cant claim it was a kangaroo court because three were three death by hangings, a life sentence, three fifteen year sentences, and an aquittal handed out.
How many trials do you know about where the defense team does not get to make final statements and the judge is kicked out like 3 weeks before the decision?
Edit: I also remember statements from officials before it even started that amounted to " We have to get this trial over quickly and the execution soon after."
Yeah, seriously. The credibility of the court got worse and worse as the trial proceeded. Seriously, how can you maintain credibility when they removed the judge just because it seemed like he might not automatically decree Saddam the worst person in the universe, lol.
Well, I won?t shed a tear for him when he?s gone.
Well, it doesn't really matter if you thought the man was a great guy. Even if he was a heavy-handed dictator who used fear to control the populace-it might actually be one of the few ways to rule in a region filled with religious strife. One of the few ways you can stop your country from turning into a terrorism festival where bombs go off all the time and Sunni and Shiites kill each other for utterly ridiculous reasons.
Saddam basically forced a secular way of life to prevail, and for people to put their religious differences aside. No, it wasn't democracy, and no-he probably didn't give people a lot of leeway about anything, and innocent people were probably doomed in the process.
At the end of the day though, looking at the ridiculous sectarian violence that's going on 24/7 now in Iraq, you really have to wonder if Saddam wasn't just doing the only thing he could to keep Iraq together in one piece.
So no, he wasn't a nice man, but that doesn't neccessarily mean that anybody else would have done any better at ruling Iraq. And right now you could easily count off tons of rulers who use similarly heavy handed tactics all the time, and nobody does anything about them.
Finally, if you actually wanted the history books to respect his guilty verdict-it would be MUCH better to have him tried in an impartial court, where the President of Iraq didn't replace the judge 3 weeks before the end of the trial, and where the President of Iraq didn't used to be in the very underground faction (read: terrorists) Saddam is on trial for having supressed. If you tried him in an impartial court (you know, one where his defense wasn't being assassinated until every good lawyer ran the other way) that wasn't basically rigged to guarantee a guilty verdict, then at least the history books could reflect that he was legitmately found guilty. But now, if he actually dies, the books will note that this verdict might very well have been nonsense-and we'll never really know if he was legitimately guilty of what he's on trial for.
Maybe you think democracy is the right thing for the whole world, but if a country is filled with violent religious extremist loonies, democracy might actually *not* be a good idea. But even if you do believe in democracy that strongly, do you not believe in a fair trial at least?
Being tried by the opponents that tried to kill you years ago, and who you tried to kill, is probably *not* the most fair way to be tried. Ahem.
P.S. And by the way, NONE of you, rather, NONE OF US, not even me, knows what really went down when Saddam was in power. People are saying that he skimmed money off UN programs, but I don't exactly know what they're basing this off of. Because if it's just based on what the US accused him of to withold aid it's kind of hard to take that accusation particularly seriously, especially when the US also accused him of having WMD's to invade his country to begin with. Could he have been skimming money? YES. Do you actually KNOW what the hell happened? NO.
I don't really understand why people feel so damned convinced of how evil this man is when everything you know about the man is mostly just whatever his opponents have accused him of.
Personally, I'd let the man live. Why? Because even if he's guilty, staying alive would already be punishment enough-the man's lost his sons (killed by US troops in shootouts), his ENTIRE FRICKIN' COUNTRY, all his money, everything he's basically ever loved or cared about is dead or in total chaos and destruction. So to kill him is fairly pointless-which probably explains why he basically expected death and doesn't even really care anymore. So if you kill him, all you're doing is making a mockery of the current Iraqi justice system, a mockery of justice itself, casting doubt on his guilt, and finally-you're galvanizing his supporters and making him a martyr. Yes, he still has supporters.
So don't kill him, what's the point? Pretty much the ONLY reason why this court is insisting on killing him is because they're out for blood.
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