Yesterday, Ali Hassan al-Majid, a relative of Saddam Hussein and a notorious war criminal responsible for the deaths of more than 5,000 Iraqi Kurds, was hanged after being convicted of crimes against humanity for ordering the use of chemical weapons on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988.
James Joyner comments:
Excellent news, in that it would seem a strong indication that the Iraqi government has internalized the rule of law and respect for the fact that this is a state-sanctioned punishment rather than a revenge killing. At very least, they've learned enough to lie about it.
Iraq is a country that is struggling to hold itself together in the face of lingering terrorist violence, but that hasn't stopped them from trying a man responsible for the deaths of more than 5,000 people in court.
The 9/11 attacks killed far fewer people, and the United States isn't experiencing anything even remotely comparable to the violence Iraqis have become acclimatized to, and yet trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the alleged 9/11 conspirators in civilian court, for a crime that killed more than 2,000 fewer than the bombing of Halabja, has Republicans so hysterical that they're willing to abandon due process all together. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, along with Republicans Susan Collins, John Ensign, and Robert Bennett, has proposed a bill that would require the Justice Department to consult with intelligence services before detaining and charging terrorist suspects, as though the Fifth Amendment were optional. Apparently, the right sees America's centuries-old democracy as weaker and more fragile than the one in Iraq.
I don't mean to reflect Joyner's cynicism, but let's take Joyner's worst case scenario and assume that al-Majid's trial wasn't fair and that Iraqis have only learned to "lie" about "internalizing the rule of law." By Joyner's standard, we haven't even learned to do that.
-- A. Serwer
