Monday, June 13, 2005
My heart bleeds, part 468
Here we go again. Two days ago, it was the complaints that Saddam's rights as a human being and president of Iraq are being violated; today, this:
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Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein should be tried in another country, preferably Sweden, rather than Iraq, one of his defense lawyers said on Sunday.Saddam committed all his crimes in Iraq, against the people of Iraq, and against his neighbors in Kuwait and Iran. He deserves nothing more and nothing less than to be tried by his own, and serve his sentence inside the country that he himself turned for a quarter of a century into a prison. The only decent argument in favor of offering Saddam a holiday in a Scandinavian penitentiary is not one that his defense team would have in mind, namely that it would make it more difficult for any Baathist terrorists to try to spring their leader out of jail. Swiftly carried out death penalty would solve any such problems, but since the (real) Iraqi President has ruled out this option we are left with the problem of making Saddam the heaviest guarded prisoner in the world and the expectation of countless hijackings and kidnappings organized in a bid to trade him out of jail.
"We invite the Iraqi government and the prosecutors to hold this trial, if there is to be a trial, not in Iraq where it's not safe to hold the trial, but to hold it either in the Hague or in Sweden or in Austria or even in Switzerland," British-based lawyer Giovanni di Stefano said.
"I would favor Sweden more than any other country -- where we are likely, more than not, a) to obtain a fair trial, and b) in the unlikely event that our client is tried and convicted, he can go straight to a detention center in Sweden," he told the Swedish public television station SVT.
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