Transitional Justice Forum

Saddam trial: news & media resources

Posted by Helena Cobban at 15:12 | TrackBack

Around a month ago, I signed up for "Google News Alerts", which promised to send me every day every news item Google could sweep up that contained those two search words. The daily collections of these have been coming to me ever since. I think they provide a good-- though not exhaustive-- portal to media reporting and media-based on the course of the trial over the past month, so I have collated them all and asted them all in at the end of this post.

Does it confuse blog readers to receive these feeds in "normal" (i.e. oldest-first) chronological order? Anyway, that's how I've collected them. You'll need to click here to download the collection.

There are many items that would have been very useful to have here. For example, I don't see in the Google collection any of the reporting from the New York Times, which has been significant, being directly represented here; though it does have some NYT pieces linked to at the International Herald Tribune. And there is this PBS interview with the NYT's John Burns. Nor do I see very much from even English-language media in the Middle East-- and of course, none from the non-English media, anywhere.

There are a few items from Xinhuanet and other Chinese English-language media. I find it interesting that the Chinese media are reporting the story a little-- I wonder if also in Mandarin, or only on their English-language feeds? Items like this , from Xinhua, have a bare-bones simplicity to them.

The most interesting piece of commentary I've found on the Google collection so far is this one, from The Guardian's Jonathan Steele, who is actually in Baghdad.

Steele notes something about the way the trial is being broadcast on Iraqi t.v. that I haven't seen referred to anywhere else:

The state-run and US-authorised television channel al-Iraqiya was taking no chances. Whenever the courtroom had a break, the screen was filled with a propaganda commercial showing Saddam's face. Blood slowly pours across it. Pictures of the former president in court bringing his hand down firmly to make a point are intercut with archive footage of a prisoner lying on the ground while a man uses a baseball bat to smash his wrists. In the style of Shia religious mourning a voice wails a poem that taunts Saddam with God's judgment: "Where will you hide from all your crimes?"

This is scarcely, I think, the way that the work of a serious court ought to be presented to the national public?

Steele goes on to present some reflections about the work of the court so far from a couple of politically significant Iraqis:

Baghdad's liberal intelligentsia finds the court performance troubling. "I couldn't watch it. It was a catastrophe," Aida Ussayran, a feisty human rights activist who spent 27 years in exile in Britain and now serves as deputy minister of human rights, told me. "It's so unimpressive and weak. If you've got evidence, you should know how to express it properly." Wamidh Nadhmi, a political scientist, takes a similar view. On the first day his mood was one of shame and depression, he said, for being so forcefully reminded that Iraq was the scene of such atrocities so recently. But the defendants were making logical points as they probed inconsistencies in the witnesses' statements. "Apart from people who had family members killed or, on the other side, were convinced Ba'athists - in other words people with a black and white attitude to Saddam - I think the trial is puzzling most Iraqis. They are confused. They are not used to seeing an open confrontation of opposing positions," he said.

Random conversations bear out his analysis.

I also want to bookmark this significant piece of opinion writing, from longtime neo-conservative intellectual Charles Krauthammer, writing in the Washington Post yesterday.

Krauthammer seems almost apoplectic in his anger at the way the trial has been handled. He writes:

Of all the mistakes that the Bush administration has committed in Iraq, none is as gratuitous and self-inflicted as the bungling of the trial of Saddam Hussein.

Although Hussein deserves to be shot like a dog -- or, same thing, like the Ceausescus -- we nonetheless decided to give him a trial. First, to demonstrate the moral superiority of the new Iraq as it struggles to live by the rule of law. Second, and even more important, to bear witness.

War crimes trials are, above all and always, for educational purposes. This one was for the world to see and experience and recoil from the catalogue of Hussein's crimes, and to demonstrate the justice of a war that stripped this man and his gang of their monstrous and murderous power.

It has not worked out that way. Instead of Hussein's crimes being on trial, he has succeeded in putting the new regime on trial. The lead story of every court session has been his demeanor, his defiance, his imperiousness. The evidence brought against him by his hapless victims -- testimony mangled in translation and electronic voice alteration -- made the back pages at best...

... There hasn't been such judicial incompetence since Judge Ito and the O.J. trial. We can excuse the Iraqis, who are new to all this and justifiably terrified of retribution. But there is no excusing the Bush administration, which had Hussein in custody for two years and had even longer to think about putting on a trial that would not become a star turn for a defeated enemy.

Why have we given him control of the stage?

Finally, let me just draw your attention again to TJF's collection of our own recent writings on the Saddam trial: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.