The show trial of Saddam Hussein
This Salt Lake Tribune editoral makes clear why it is a show trial:
If they had taken Adolf Hitler alive in 1945, they would certainly have put him on trial. But what if they had ignored Hitler’s responsibility for starting World War II and his murder of 6 million Jews, and simply put him on trial for torturing and executing a couple of hundred people whom he suspected of involvement in the July 1944 plot to kill him?
You would find that bizarre, would you not?
Well, Saddam Hussein’s trial started Oct. 19 and that was the sort of charge chosen by the Iraqi government and its American supervisors. After only three hours the trial was adjourned until Nov. 28, mainly because most of the witnesses were too frightened to show up, but by then the prosecution strategy was entirely clear.
The former Iraqi dictator was not being tried for invading Iran in 1980 and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, nor for using poison gas on Iranian troops and on rebellious Kurds in Iraq itself (notably at Halabja in 1988, when at least 5,000 Iraqi Kurd civilians died). He was not facing trial for invading Kuwait in 1990, nor for slaughtering tens of thousands of Iraqi Shias in the course of putting down the revolt that followed his defeat in that war.
He was only being tried for the deaths of 143 people from the mainly Shia town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, after an assassination attempt against him during a visit to that town in July, 1982. It was a very peculiar choice, and the explanation offered by one of the five judges on the Iraqi Special Tribunal – “The Dujail case is the easiest to put together as far as evidence-gathering and preparation is concerned, [because] there are documents that have been seized and verified concerning the case” – doesn’t hold water.