Whatever happened to jurisdiction...?

in trying saddam hussein??? Does jurisdiction have anything to do with his trial?

 

what?

 

It says somewhere in the Constitution that "America has the right to intervene when a leader of another country puts his country's people in danger/kills them/something along these lines" ... or something like that.

but the Constitution isn't the law of the world.

 

big difference between the murder of millions of jews and what was allegedly going on in iraq.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1250880,00.html

Attempts too...



Who is trying him?

The Iraqi higher criminal court, which was formerly known as the Iraqi special tribunal (the name some still call it). It was set up under the US-UK occupation by the Iraqi governing council with a remit to prosecute the crimes of the 1968-2003 Ba'athist regime, both in Iraq and by Iraqis in neighbouring countries. The Iraqi national assembly recently voted to change the court's name and some of its practices in order to bring into more into line with the rest of the country's judicial system.

Unlike in the case of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader, and other areas such as Sierra Leone and Rwanda, where the UN has set up or helped set up tribunals, the court will operate under a national jurisdiction. It will, however, be dealing with international law, and the US and Britain have spent millions giving training to the Iraqi judicial teams based on the experiences of the UN tribunals.

The fact that it is a sovereign national court, backed by an elected national assembly, is hoped to remove the opportunity for Saddam to claim - as Mr Milosevic did - that the court has no legitimacy and therefore cannot try him.

Why in Iraq and not at the international criminal court?

The international criminal court was set up to hear such cases as Saddam is likely to appear in, but its jurisdiction extends from its foundation in 2002 and it cannot be used to hear charges relating to events before that date. There was also a political motive to trying Saddam in Iraq, as the new state attempts to demonstrate to its citizens that it has a functioning judiciary. Putting the court in Iraq was thought to be a way to keep the events close to the people who had been the principal victims of the Ba'athist regime.

http://hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1845886#post1845886

 

Really? So, a Kurds life is not as valuable as a Jews life?

 

Evidently not to Winston Churchill who also gassed them in the 1920's and referred to them as less than human.

Perhaps he too should be tried summarily and henceforth villified in the history books.

Then again, how about the considerably greater number of Iraqis of all ethnic groups we decimated under thousands of tons of bombs and previous to that through Washington led sanctions? Are their lives any less precious?

*Awaits more excusatory justifications for our nations' war crimes from the armchair warrior faction

 

Kurds are still under attack in Turkey - why don't they invade there? Because they didn't invade Iraq to try Iraq for a gassing that happened years ago.

 

The war should have been fought years ago so we would not be fighting it now.

 

Why aren't you writing your Congressman to invade Turkey than? And Syria. And Iran.

Oh wait. You're not the fuckin' international police.

You did fight this war years ago - the first gulf war.

 

We help countries escape from tyrranical dictators and bad situations. How can this be a bad thing?
We did fight the war, but we obviously did not finish it. Now we are finishing it.

 

It's not. But when you kill thousands of innocent people in the process, the picture doesn't look so rosy. Does it?

I somehow doubt this will happen anytime soon.

 

No we don't. If that were the case the U.S. military would be fighting wars in at least 20 different countries at any given time.

 

Yes, you're right.