Yeah, that trial is looking like a reeeeeally good idea now:

Saddam Hussein boycotted his trial for a second day on Thursday and his defense team also stayed away, saying the new chief judge wanted only to see the former Iraqi leader quickly hanged.

The chairs normally occupied by Saddam and his seven co-defendants were empty as Chief Judge Raouf Abdel Rahman heard two prosecution witnesses recount their torture by Saddam’s security forces after a failed bid to assassinate him in the Shi’ite town of Dujail in 1982.

“We are not ready to be participants in a farcical trial without any legal basis that has already decided to convict President Saddam and execute him,” Saddam’s chief counsel, Khalil al-Dulaimi, told Reuters in the Jordanian capital Amman.

Dulaimi accuses Abdel Rahman of bias and has demanded his removal. He said on Thursday he also wanted the chief prosecutor and a second prosecutor to be withdrawn from the U.S.-sponsored court, saying they, too, were biased against his client.

Anyone who thinks this serves any purpose beyond a Festivus-style airing-of-grievances needs to go get a clue. It’s not like he’s going to be found not guilty; shit, we helped him for some of his atrocities in the past anyway, that won’t be acknowledged in the “court” but it’s the truth. Just because the guy is scum doesn’t mean this isn’t a show trial.

That we’re even bothering with this shows the addictive qualities of hypocrisy. It’s bad enough we use all that high-minded rhetoric about spreading freedom while our own government & its allies commit atrocities. Yet, deciding that a dictator who just months before capture was being targeted for “decapitation strikes” suddenly deserves a trial strikes me as a whole higher order of Screwy.

First of all, you can’t have it both ways: either attacking heads of state is breaking down a critical barrier that can never be resealed, or it is & has been A-OK all along, there is no “here, sit him down while we go find someone with a gavel”. Also, going by how the trial itself has been conducted the Iraqis haven’t quite figured out the point of a trial yet — since when could the defendant just walk off because they didn’t like the judge? Why is the judge someone who has a personal interest (the official charge is that Saddam ordered a chemical attack on a Kurdish town, the judge himself had relatives die in that attack) in the outcome?

There’ve been reports that Saddam has been making comments from the defendant area about how the US had been friendly with him at the time, during which his microphone is conveniently cut off. I don’t get it: if you want to silence someone, you don’t stick them in a courtroom, you put a few bullets in their head; honestly, just WTF was to be expected? We claim to have such pure & unquestionable motives while sticking a former Useful Thug in a show-trial in a country we basically handed to a group just as bad, yet we expect him not to point out the contradiction?? Is there ANY direction to this mess AT ALL that makes sense?