corrente

Prime-Minister-du-Jour Allawi may wind up regretting his notion of pushing for a "trial" of Sadaam before "the" elections. (If you saw much of the coverage of the Rose Petal Appearance of the two potentates yesterday you might have noted how it was occasionally hard to determine just which country's elections were being referred to at any given time.)

The proposal, however, has brought some voices bubbling back up out of the Memory Hole into which they had fallen. One of those voices belongs to a Chalabi, and--dig this!--he's the one who comes off sounding like the voice of reason, sanity, and respect for something resembling the rule of law:

(via AP via Jackson MS Clarion-Ledger)

JIM KRANE
Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The former director of the Iraqi war crimes tribunal said that interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has taken over the court and could rush forward with "show trials" of Saddam Hussein and other former Iraqi leaders to boost his popularity before presidential elections scheduled for January.

In an e-mailed statement Thursday, Salem Chalabi, the former chairman of the Iraqi Special Tribunal, urged the international community to prevent Allawi's government from politicizing the trials.

Allawi has said he wants the trials to begin sooner than the one or two years the court argues it needs to delve into tons of documents and prepare to prosecute Saddam and the top members of his regime. Allawi replaced Chalabi with a member of his own party - though Chalabi insists the move was illegitimate.

In August, Iraq's Central Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant on murder charges for Chalabi, and the court said it wanted Chalabi's uncle, prominent exile politician Ahmad Chalabi, on counterfeit charges.

Those charges have since been dropped,

Did you hear about that? Me neither. Dang, we gotta start following the news more...

but the murder investigation into the death of a Foreign Ministry official continues, Chalabi said.

"These murder charges were concocted in order to discredit me and the Iraqi Special Tribunal," he said.

Chalabi said his ouster was a violation of the court's U.S.-written founding law, which appointed him for a three-year term and holds the tribunal as independent from the government.

He said the investigations were not ready for indictments or trials that would meet minimum legal standards.

One question never, ever asked: What laws is Sadaam charged with violating? Pre-war law? What specific statute? You think that Sadaam, any more than Bush, being in control of the entire apparatus of government, didn't have some clause in there saying "If the President sez it's legal, then dammit, it's okay"? That would seem to bring up a problem with the notion that you can't have an ex post facto law--you can't charge somebody with something that wasn't illegal at the time it was done even if the law changes later.

Or is it postwar, Occupation "Provisional Authority" law? That brings up another set of challenges. If it's going to be a kangaroo court, which seems inevitable, where the charge consists of "You're a naughty, naughty man, dammit!" let's just admit it and get on with the theater and not tarnish the notion of "law" by pretending it's a trial.