This was in todays opeds, and was written by a law professor.

Published on Thursday, January 4, 2007 by the San Francisco Chronicle
A Question of Justice
by George Bisharat

Justice in Iraq has not been served by Saddam Hussein's execution, and more, not less violence, is the likely outcome of this vengeful and unwise act. Hussein was a cruel tyrant, and no doubt was culpable for many heinous crimes -- including, possibly, those for which he was convicted and hanged.

But he was rushed to trial well before the Iraqi legal system, which had crumbled through years of Baath party rule, had regained the capacity to fairly and effectively administer a complex international criminal trial. The case arose from the summary executions of 148 men and boys from Dujail, a Shiite Muslim village northwest of Baghdad, after a 1982 assassination attempt there against Hussein, the Sunni Muslim president. Hussein and his co-defendants were not the direct perpetrators of the killings, but were alleged to be instigators and planners. Hence, the case raised intricate issues of criminal responsibility, and involved special forensic challenges due to the age of the evidence. Such a trial would be a challenge for a healthy legal system, let alone one that had suffered decrepitude and many years' isolation from the international legal system.

Hussein and his co-defendants were brought before a tribunal that had originally been constituted through a 2003 order of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. The CPA -- and the Iraqis -- insisted on Iraqi-led proceedings, instead of a mixed or purely international tribunal, that would have drawn on the expertise of experienced international lawyers and judges. American lawyers provided the tribunal only non-binding advice.

More reliable and fair mechanisms were sacrificed for political goals: to rejuvenate the Iraqi legal system; to speedily dispatch Hussein and thereby deflate the Sunni insurgency seeking his return to power; and, perhaps, to deprive the defendants of the wider pulpit an international tribunal would have afforded.

The result was predictable: a trial seriously marred by irregularities that undermined the integrity of the verdict. Three defense attorneys were murdered during the proceedings, and a fourth was abducted and wounded. Intense political pressure was exerted on the court, leading to the mid-trial resignation of the presiding judge. Prosecutors were recurrently late or failed to provide the defense with evidence, including some that was exculpatory. Human Rights Watch carefully monitored the trial, and reported serious gaps in the evidence against the accused.

The case already echoed the Sunni-Shiite sectarian struggle that is tearing Iraq asunder. Nothing in the administration of the trial diminished that resonance. This year, the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha began on Saturday for Sunnis, and Sunday for Shiites. When the judge representing the Iraqi tribunal was told that Hussein's Saturday execution would violate an Iraqi law barring such actions on holidays, he allegedly snapped: "Sunday is the official beginning of Eid al-Adha." Hussein's executioners, by dialect and skin tone discernibly Shiite, taunted and cursed him in his final moments.

A scrupulously fair trial for Hussein could have edified the legal system within Iraq, and fortified the principle of accountability for violations of human rights everywhere. Instead, it affirms that the institutions of the Iraqi state are still the instruments of sectarian vengeance, only with the tables turned.

People in the region are likely to remember that many of Hussein's most terrible crimes -- including the launching of an aggressive war against Iran that consumed nearly a million Iraqi and Iranian lives -- were committed with the active support of the United States. They will also contrast U.S. sponsorship of the Hussein trial with our government's 2003 role in suspending the investigation of a Belgian court into then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's culpability in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres. Up to 2,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were slaughtered by Israel's Lebanese allies, acts for which Sharon's own government had held him indirectly responsible. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, primarily concerned over possible prosecutions of U.S. officials for war crimes in Iraq, threatened to move NATO headquarters from Belgium if the law establishing that country's jurisdiction for the case were not changed. Soon thereafter, the case against Sharon was put on indefinite hold.

Many will say that the real offense for which Hussein paid with his life was not the mass killings that he likely ordered, but that he eventually crossed the United States. Is that the lesson that we wish the world to draw: It's our way, or the gallows?

George Bisharat is a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law and writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East.