Count me out

1. Free Saddam? Well, probably not. But when three of his defense attorneys are murdered during the trial, and the chief judge is forced to resign because of political pressure, a.k.a. fear... well, it's not exactly a high point in the history of jurisprudence. As the Human Rights Watch page to which you linked points out, the Iraqi tribunal doesn't even have a requirement for proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

You say that my objections are useless, and the real question is whether international and Iraqi law allow the court to sentence Saddam to death. You've got it ass-backwards. From a practical standpoint, it doesn't matter if the legal right exists. What, are EU troops going to extradite the judges to the Hague and put them on trial? What matters are issues of perception, and while I agree that the court system is a brave exercise in creating Iraqi institutions, it could certainly have been done better. Sentencing Saddam to death without an actual verdict, and not requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt, lowers the percieved legitimacy of the trial.


2. Execution=taxes=gun control. Riiiight.

What is totalitarianism? Here's a not-bad definition, from Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry: to·tal·i·tar·i·an·ism
1 : centralized control by an autocratic authority
2 : the political concept that the citizen should be totally subject to an absolute state authority

You can't, in any logically consistent way, support the death penalty without agreeing to the concept in part 2 above.

Execution is an exercise of absolute state authority, in a way that taxes or gun control simply aren't. Death is absolute.

If a state claims or exercises absolute authority over its subjects, then it's a totalitarian state.
If a state does not claim or exercise absolute authority over its subjects, then it's not a totalitarian state.

There are a lot of things totalitarian states do that other states do, too -- send mail, build roads, shoot fireworks on national holidays. What makes a state totalitarian is absolute state power over its subjects.

On a side note, did you just quote H.L. Mencken for moral authority? Niiiice.

And if you do, in fact, "want to see the plan," the Human Rights Watch link provided a few posts ago has some decent ideas on how a better-structured trial court would have looked.