October 19, 2005
Free Saddam!?!
Driving through (where else?) Berkeley the other day I saw the first "Free Saddam!" grafitti. I have been waiting for this.
To tell you the truth I would much rather have Saddam free than Leonard Peltier or Mumia Abu Jamal, mainly because both Peltier and Abu Jamal got completely fair trials and are assuredly guilty as sin. Saddam, on the other hand, was a bastard, but there are two mitigating factors here: One. Saddam, while definitely a genocidal psychotic, was the best Arab leader out there. Two. This court has absolutely no validity. It is a show trial worthy of 1930s Moscow. There is really no way out of this situation besides the death of Saddam (unless he could be retired to house arrest in Southern France, which would not be so bad, because then there is no killing of anybody, and you would have him around for information AND you prevent him from being a martyr, because in keeping him you allow him to age and say silly things from time to time), and it should have been done earlier, as a military action or an "accident" while taking him into custody. Putting on a show trial sends a terrible message to the Arab world, and putting up judges who have had about three weeks of training strikes me as a bad way to go.
So, while I cannot endorse the sentiments of "Free Saddam" I certainly am opposed to this kangaroo court.
Posted by erik at October 19, 2005 8:28 AM | TrackBackSaddam was no threat to the US and pretty amusing to watch on TV. Saddam didnt have WMD's, if he did we wouldnt have went after him. Look at Korea. Saddam ran that nutty place the best he could. We(the US) sure havent made it a better place. All we are doing is making the Oil assholes richer and turning Iraq into a suburb of Iran. We should have partnered up with Iraq and sent them into Iran.
Posted by: at December 5, 2005 9:10 AMAbout thirty years ago, more or less, there used to be something called the Revolutionary Something-or-other Communist Party in the city of Los Angeles. At some point the party, all 12 of them, decided to start the world revolution in a local park and got themselves arrested. The leader, whose name I have long forgotten but let's call him Fred Smith, was sentenced to a jail term for whatever it was they did in that park. Moping with intent to gawk, say.
Signs saying "Free Fred Smith" started blossoming throughout the city. There was one on a freeway underpass that I used to see on my way home.
And one lovely evening I noticed an addition to it. Some gloriously inspired individual had made his way to the center of the freeway and added underneath the sign: "With Every Purchase".
I laughed all the way home.
Cheers,
-John-
Posted by: John Cahill at October 21, 2005 7:28 PMwhen I had related your story to a neighbor down the street, she shook her head in disbelief. She then told me about someone seeing a sign in town saying "free wood" which prompted the person to say, "who's wood?"
Posted by: berkeley10mom at October 20, 2005 9:02 PM