Wagging the Dog

Wag the Dog (1997) , a movie by Barry Levinson, tells the story of a press campaign being run by operatives of the President of the US to distract public opinion from an evolving scandal in the run up to the presidential elections.

While many of us at the time brushed it off as just a movie, years later one cant help but see it happening in real life. Be it the blatant bias seen on news channels like Fox (watch the movie Outfoxed for more on this) or the current war on "natural justice" that the US government ran right through the occupation of Iraq and the murder of its president.

And through all of this people have remained silent. Many in the US even believed that Bush was right to occupy Iraq and few know the real story about the trail of its president.

Some facts from an Article by Praful Bidwai

The US rejected the legitimate and reasonable demand for an international tribunal, similar to that established for trying Slobodan Milosevic. Washington knows the Iraqi legal system can't deliver justice. Recently, Iraqi judges have summarily pronounced harsh verdicts after 15-minute trials. As The New York Times reported: 'Almost every aspect of the judicial system is lacking, poorly serving not just detainees but also Iraqi citizens and troops...'

SICT was set up by the occupying powers, which rigged its rules of procedure to favour the prosecution. Most of its judges were imparted special legal 'training' in Britain, an occupying power. SICT wasn't even remotely sovereign, independent, impartial or legitimate. This is the opinion of the United Nations' Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, WGAD, established by the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1991. WGAD received its mandate from the General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council.


WGAD's final opinion, delivered in September, determined that 'the deprivation of liberty of Saddam Hussein is arbitrary, being in contravention of Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ICCPR, to which Iraq and the US are parties.'

The accused were denied the elementary right to defend themselves. Hussein didn't have unimpeded access to his lawyers, nor adequate time or facilities to prepare his defence. WGAD says that 'the presence of US officials' at his meetings with lawyers 'violated his right to communicate with counsel,' mandated by ICCPR's Article 14(3).


Two of Hussein's lawyers were assassinated, in October 2005 and June 2006. This 'seriously undermined his right to defend himself through counsel of his own choosing.'

SICT's first chief judge, Rizgar Mohammed Amin, resigned because of political pressure to prevent a fair trial. Judge Abdel-Rahman, who delivered the final verdict, was totally biased. He abruptly, arbitrarily ended the trial in June 2006. He made 'statements incompatible with impartiality and the presumption of innocence enshrined in Article 14(2) of the ICCPR.'

According to WGAD, Hussein couldn't 'obtain the attendance and examination of witnesses on his behalf under the same condition as witnesses against him.' His right to do so, guaranteed by the ICCPR, was 'undermined by the failure to adequately disclose prosecution evidence to the defendants, the reading into the record of affidavits without an adequate possibility for the defence to challenge them', and the trial's sudden termination.


WGAD says it's impossible 'to verify whether (the concerned) judges meet the requirements for judicial office, whether they are affiliated with political office, whether their impartiality... is otherwise undermined.' Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both say the trial was a mockery of justice.

One of Hussein's defence lawyers, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, was ejected from court for saying that the trial failed to meet international legal standards.

Even before the trial ended, Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki demanded that Mr Hussein be hanged. More recently, he declared the hanging would take place before the end of the year, thus usurping the judiciary's prerogative to set the date. The final procedural clearances were obtained in unseemly haste and secrecy.


More to come on this....