December 21, 2003

Making Saddam a Non-Person Better Penalty

Now that "we got him," what shall we do with him?

Since drawing and quartering is frowned upon, fate of the Butcher of Baghdad is a quandary.

Certainly we must have a public trial. So say the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and assorted European Union buttinskys.

They insist the trial must be fair, in a country that prohibits capital punishment and is far enough away that Iraqis won’t interfere.  

Principal drawback to World Court involvement is that it is entering its third year of a trial for Slobodan Milosevic – he of  Kosovo "ethnic cleansing." Justice delayed is justice denied.

The Iraq Provisional Council declares it will conduct a war crimes trial for Saddam. It already has constructed an ornamental enclosure to keep Saddam properly anchored in court.  

Iraqi judges are boning up on the war-crimes trial of defeated Nazis at Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II.

Judges for that epochal trial were drawn from the ranks of the victors. Included was one appointed by Stalin. The later had deliberately starved to death nine million anti-communist peasants – half again more than the number of Jews executed by Hitler.

Of the 22 defendants at Nuremberg, 10 were hanged. Herman Goering committed suicide in his cell with a concealed cyanide pill. Three were given life sentences, four received lesser incarceration. Three were acquitted.

Several war criminals fled. Adolf Eichmann, head of the "Final Solution" gas chambers, was found years later in Argentina by Israeli secret agents. He was spirited to Israel to be tried and hanged.

Israeli law prohibiting capital punishment was suspended in order to execute Eichmann. His remains were cremated and the ashes scattered over international waters.

No one thinks relatives of the millions of Kurds and Shiites murdered by Saddam will permit him to be transferred to the tender mercies of anti-capital-punishment Europeans.

Saddam’s hideous crimes against humanity will be cataloged publicly as soon as his American captors turn him over. Then he will be executed publicly – amidst dancing in the streets and celebratory gunfire.  

He undoubtedly will be denied another spider hole in Iraq for his remains. Scattered ashes at sea is his fate.

We place great merit these days in "closure" for the families of murder victims. Saddam owes tons of closure for his misused nation.

I suggest something worse than death – solitary imprisonment for the rest of his life in a 10x10 cell on some uncharted island. No visitors. No conversation with guards. No letters, newspapers or books. No radio, television or music records.

Just a pill box of cyanide and endless years contemplating the hideous crimes that brought him to such a sorry state.

One is reminded of the "Man In The Iron Mask" imprisoned by French King Louis XVI in 1687 for  reasons never stated.

The prisoner was kept incommunicado in a prison many years until his death of old age. He was required to remain silent and wear a black velvet mask to keep his identity unknown even to his guards.

The devastating penalty of becoming a non-person also was related in a story by Rev. Edward Everett Hale of Boston and chaplain of the U.S. Senate.

Titled "The Man Without a Country," it was  published anonymously in an 1863 edition of Atlantic Monthly. Thereafter it was widely reprinted.

In the article, Philip Nolan, a young Navy officer during the Revolutionary War, became angry at a slight reprimand. He declared: "Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!"

Nolan was convicted of treason for the remark and sentenced to spend the rest of his life aboard U.S. Navy ships at sea. Crews were ordered never to mention the United States in his presence.

Nolan eventually died aboard ship, heartsick that he never again heard news about his native country. A generation of Americans shuddered at Nolan’s frustration before it was accepted that Rev. Hale’s story was only a moral lesson.

Both tales illustrate the devastation of being denied human companionship and communication – and having to live with the consequences of misdeeds.

PARTING SHOTS

Famous last words: "I’m president of Iraq and I want to negotiate." Where is presidential candidate Howard Dean when we need him?

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Saddam had $750,000 in U.S. money with him in his spider hole. When the going gets tough, the tough get American bucks.

By Lindsey Williams, columnist for Sun Coast Media Group newspapers