Two different perspectives on the big news of the day
Newsweek interviewed Ali Al Massedy, the videographer of the Saddam hanging:
“I saw fear, he was afraid…He was saying things about injustice, about resistance, about how these guys are terrorists”…On the way to the gallows, according to Ali, “Saddam said, ‘Iraq without me is nothing.’”…
body guards…swarmed around Ali, snapping digital pictures on camera phones and cheering. “Saddam finished, Saddam finished,” a guard who gave his name as Mohammed told Newsweek. Ali looked somewhat stunned as he exited, carrying the camera. “All Iraqis will be happy,” he says. “This is the most important day for me [as a cameraman,]” he said. “This page [in history] is over, this page is over. All Iraqis will be happy from the north to the south to the east to the west.”
For a different perspective on the injustice of the Saddam “show trial” and “show execution”, go here.
UPDATE
Oops, it turns out that that there are a lot of negative reactions in the US to punishing Saddam for these crimes.
December 31st, 2006 at 5:37 am
“But even bad players deserve fair trials, honest judgments and justly-applied punishments. ‘
I am a prosecutor by profession, so it goes against my whole life to say this, but why? The purpose of a trial is to establish whether the crime was committed, whether the accused committed it, and the penalty to be applied.
Saddam Hussein spent years slaughtering people. He was openly and notoriously the dictator of Iraq, these things were done in his name and at his command.
Was the person Samir grabbed that night Saddam Hussein?
Do we have some rope?
I know that these spectacle trials, like Nuremberg, have an additional purpose of clarifying the extent of the crimes and the defendants’ direct responsibility, for historical purposes. That’s nice. But really, I wouldn’t shed a tear for justice if he’d been shot in the hole and left for the jackals.
I notice the world has gone on just fine without Uday and Qusay having a trial, and that Himmler’s and Hitler’s guild is widely accepted despite their evasion of court.
These lawyers raise the trial to a fetish object, of intrinsic value. Nonsense.