Hussein the Rabbit

By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t Columnist

Sunday 31 December 2006

It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

- William Shakespeare

My cell phone has been buzzing with regularity all day, alerting me to the arrival of text messages from my conservative friends. "Saddam is dead woohoo" reads the latest one, and that pretty much describes all the others. Somehow, a lot of people are finding meaning or gratification in the fact that Hussein met his fate at the end of a rope Saturday morning.

I just can't get there. A portion of my ambivalence derives from my basic objections to the death penalty itself. My opposition to state-sponsored executions is not grounded in softhearted ideals, sympathy for the condemned, or the tenets of Catholic morality I learned as a child, but in the simple fact that death is an easy out. Justice is better delivered to the fiends of the world not by taking their lives, but by extending and prolonging their lives in absolute confinement.

The more brutal the crime, I believe, the greater is the imperative to ensure long life. Let them stew in their wretched state; let them stare at gray walls for decades in contemplation of what they did; let them face the awful truth that tomorrow will be as grim as yesterday, and that the sun no longer shines for them. I wish Timothy McVeigh were alive today, wreathed in steel bars and drowning in an ocean of time. So it is with Hussein, damned murderer of thousands, who yesterday morning was gifted freedom he did not deserve.

Beyond that is the rank absurdity of this whole farce. The so-called trial of Hussein was an affront to the fundamental principles of jurisprudence - more of a reality show than an exercise in the law. Much of the testimony offered against him would have been thrown out of the meanest municipal court in this country as hearsay. Three of Hussein's attorneys were assassinated, and the appointed replacements had no experience at all in international law. Hovering over it all was the fact that the entire process took place while the country was in the grips of a foreign occupation, presided over by a government held together by spit, baling wire and sectarian motivations.

Saddam Hussein has been used by three consecutive American presidential administrations the same way that plastic rabbit is used at the dog track. Like those speeding dogs, we have raced after him for years, never quite noticing that we are running in circles and doomed to arrive back where we began.

Some important and uncomfortable truths died with Hussein Saturday morning. The refrain of "Saddam gassed the Kurds in Halabja" has been with us for years, standing unchallenged in any mainstream political conversation. Yet Stephen C. Pelletiere, in a January 2003 New York Times article titled "A War Crime or an Act of War," revealed some information that cuts against this grain.

Pelletiere was the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and served as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000. He also headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the United States would fare in a war against Iraq, and the classified report created from this investigation contained voluminous details of the Halabja attack. >>cont

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