J.P. Jones, posting at BabbleFest, has a unique take on how to insure that Saddam gets justice:
Ramsey Clark and some of the other "human rights" activists are afraid Saddam Hussein won't get a fair trial.
Where were they when Saddam and his monstrous children were feeding people into the industrial plastic shredder? And murdering Iraqis by the thousands? And starving children to bribe UN officials and build palaces?
Ironically, one of their chief complaints is that the Special Tribunal isn't operating according to US criminal standards and applying the "beyond a reasonable doubt" burden of proof. Instead, the tribunal is operating according to Iraqi law, which provides for conviction if the judges are "satisfied" that the accused is guilty. The ironic part? That's the standard Saddam imposed on the Iraqi legal system, the same standard Saddam's judges used for thirty years.
So here's a thought: let's quit worrying about LEGAL formalities, and apply JUSTICE instead.
How?
Set Saddam free. In broad daylight. In the town square of any Kurdish village he wants to pick.
The next time somebody talks about voters being deprived of their vote because a black couple in Cincinnati thought someone might check their ID's, or voters in Cleveland were required to follow long-standing state law and vote in the precinct where they live, or people had to wait in line for twenty minutes, keep this photo in mind.
These Iraqis are lined up to vote in the constitutional referendum in the city of Mosul. Note the very long line. Note the barbed-wire barriers. Note that these people are waiting in this line knowing that there are terrorrists on the loose who are in fact willing, and hoping, to kill them for exercising their newly-acquired right to vote. Yet here they are, waiting to vote.
Voter turn-out appears to have been between 60-70%. Despite what the media wants you to believe, the election has not resulted in a clear Sunni-Shiite split destined to result in immediate civil war. In fact, two of the four largely Sunni provinces, by preliminary counts, voted for the Constitution by between 70-80%. That means overwhelming support from Sunni and Shiite voters alike.
I keep hearing people say "you can't give a country democracy" or "you can't impose democracy". Have these people never heard of Japan?
It begins, more and more, to look like the Iraqis "get it". There appears to be widespread and broad-based support for democracy.
What they'll do with it, and what will come of it all, remains to be seen. But for the time being, the Constitutional Refendum looks like a resounding success.
As reported in USA Today, the European Space Agency has suffered another major setback with the loss of a satellite that failed to reach orbit and broke up.
MOSCOW (AP) — A European Space Agency satellite that was to have collected data on polar ice broke up in flight after being launched on a converted ballistic missile, a Russian space agency official said Saturday.
Remnants of the satellite crashed into the ocean, Vyacheslav Davidenko, a spokesman for the Russian Federal Space Agency, told The Associated Press.
The loss of the CryoSat satellite is a major blow to the agency, which had hoped to conduct a three-year mapping of polar sea ice and provide more reliable data for the study of global warming.
The incident also damaged the reputation of the Russian space agency, which is aggressively trying to move into the commercial satellite launch business. German news reports said the satellite cost an estimated $210 million.
The problem appeared to be with the booster rocket that was supposed to lift the CryoSat unit into orbit, Davidenko said.
"The booster unit did not switch on and it resulted in the failure of the satellite to reach orbit," he said. "The remnants of the satellite have fallen into the northern Arctic Ocean."
This major mission failure follows on the heels of the ESA's disastrous Mars lander mission, where the lander separated from the orbiter and headed for the Martian surface, never to be heard from again. And it points out a simple fact that is sometimes lost on the American public: space missions, manned or otherwise, are extremely complex undertakings. There are a multitude of highly complicated procedures and processes, for the most part computer-controlled, which must take place exctly as planned for any space mission to succeed.
We really shouldn't be surprised when a mission fails. We should be surprised that so many go as planned. And we should be astonished at the ingenuity and technical expertise and flexibility that has enabled many missions which experienced difficulties, such as Apollo 13 and the Hubble Space Telescope, to be salvaged short of the worst possible outcome.
