The US Response to Saddam’s Execution

I watched with a Saudi friend as an US spokesperson answered questions about Saddam’s execution. We were watching an Arabic channel, and I couldn’t hear what the US spokesperson was saying over the Arabic translation of what he was saying, but my friend tried to translate:

Saddam was convicted of crimes against humanity in a fair and just trial, the kind of fair and just trial that he never gave any of his victims. The US acted strictly as enabler, allowing Iraqi justice and Islamic Sharia justice to return to Iraq after decades when Saddam had imposed nothing but injustice on Iraq and Iraq’s neighbours.

The US would not have proceeded at all as the Iraqis did, but this was their country, and they proceeded strictly in accord with Iraqi law and Islamic Sharia law. The Iraqi constitution, the Iraqi courts, and the top cleric of the Muslim religion had all ordered that Iraqi law and Sharia law dictated the time and manner of Saddam’s execution, and their orders had been followed to the letter.

Bush, had he been at all imperialistic and imposed US customs on Iraq, would have given Saddam much more time for legal appeals and would have had him executed under a completely different protocol, but the US is not an imperial power and makes no demands at all on the legitimate Iraqi government. Once the US had enabled justice to return to Iraq in 2003, Saddam was handed over to the legitimate Iraqi government, and after that everything proceeded strictly according to Iraqi and Islamic Sharia law.

The spokesperson painted a verbal picture of Bush standing before a basin of water, saying and performing the lavabo.

My friend asked me if I believed the US spokesperson.

I said, ‘As a Westerner, I know the telltale signs that indicate when a Western government spokesperson is lying or not lying. In the case of this US spokesman, out of the entire press conference, the only times he was lying were when his lips were moving.’