Varför skjuta Saddams slaktarpojkar till småbitar, frågar sig en del:

“The whole operation was a cockup,” said a British intelligence officer. “There was no need to go after four lightly armed men with such overwhelming firepower. They would have been much more useful alive.” (Se MSNBC: Excessive Force?)

Länken via Billmon som reflekterar:

"Now I have absolutely no moral qualms about turning Uday and Qusay into the devil's firewood. Whatever happened to them in that house in Mosul was just an infinitesimal fraction of the torment they deserved. One can only hope that Lucifer will make good the deficiency.

But there's no question that a public trial, either in Iraq or at the Hague, would have done far more to exorcise the Hussein family's own demonic presence here on earth -- and, by the way, helped bolster the humanitarian case for invading Iraq. (---)

A good war crimes trial strips the tyrant of his aura before it executes or imprisons him. In a strange way, it humanizes him, reversing the process by which he dehumanized both himself and his victims."
(Se Dead men don't testify)

Efter Bagdads fall rapporterade Robert Fisk i The Independent:

"The 60 secret police headquarters in Baghdad are empty, even the three-square-mile compound headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

I have been to many of them. But there is no evidence even that a single British or US forensic officer has visited the sites to sift the wealth of documents lying there or talk to the ex-prisoners returning to their former places of torment. (---)

Take the Qasimiyeh security station beside the river Tigris. (---) The names of the guards at the Qasimiyeh torture centre in Baghdad are in papers lying on the floor. They were Ahmed Hassan Alawi, Akil Shaheed, Noaman Abbas and Moham-med Fayad. But the Americans haven't bothered to find this out. (---)

Were they monsters, these men? Yes. Are they sought by the Americans? No. Are they now working for the Americans? Yes, quite possibly – indeed some of them may well be in the long line of ex-security thugs who queue every morning outside the Palestine Hotel in the hope of being re-hired by the US Marines' Civil Affairs Unit.(---)

At the end of the Second World War, German-speaking British and US intelligence officers hoovered up every document in the thousands of Gestapo and Abwehr bureaux across western Germany. The Russians did the same in their zone. In Iraq, however, the British and Americans have simply ignored the evidence."
(Se Robert Fisk i Independent)

Varför inte ställa bröderna Hussein inför rätta? Billmon, som inte är särskilt konspiratorisk, föreslår en förklaring:

"But when the prosecutor's own hands are dirty ... ah, well, that changes things, doesn't it? Then the goal of the process isn't to reveal, but to conceal -- and as quickly and efficiently as possible. Cromwell and the French Convention put their tyrants on trial; Lenin had his shot in a basement. This tells you something about the differences between their revolutions.

It's understandable, really, why the Bush administration would prefer to remove the Husseins from history, rather than put them back in it. The Hussein brothers may not have known as much as their father about the full history of America's relationship with Iraq, but they probably knew enough to make a public show trial a very, ah, revealing affair."

Billmon länkar till följande exempel:

• One awkward find was a cache of missiles that were made in the United States...
• Iraq's bioweapons program got its start with help from Uncle Sam two decades ago...
• The good news is that we supplied the Iraqis with American equipment...

Ikväll klockan klockan nio: kanadensisk miniserie om Nürnbergrättegångarna (del 2).
Imorgon, i Vetenskapens Värld klockan 12 (P1): om konspirationsteorier

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