Saddam Hussein Sentenced to Death 1003
indraneil writes "Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death along with his half brother. Three Baath party officials charged with Hussein in the killings of 148 Shiite civilians have been sentenced to 15 years in prison, while a fourth has been cleared.
He is to be hanged inside 30 days from now. Saddam Hussein has been given 10 days to appeal against the decision.
His lawyer has warned to a bloodbath if the sentence is carried out."
Re:A show trial in every sense. (Score:3, Informative)
The chief judge in Saddam Hussein's genocide trial was replaced Tuesday amid complaints from Shiite and Kurdish officials that he was too soft on the former Iraqi leader, a move that could raise accusations of government interference in the highly sensitive case.
Now, it's pretty obvious that Saddam wasn't a nice guy. It's just that this trial seems to be so politically well-timed with an outcome that was predetermined from the beginning.
A brief history of Windows in the Middle East (Score:3, Informative)
Also, in 1979 Saddam became president of Iraq, he didn't like Apple Macs [wikipedia.org] at all, so he too saw the Iran's Mac Revolution as a problem. MS realized this and provided Saddam [wikipedia.org] with all sorts of developer tools like ASP.Net and Visual Studio so he could build his own programs and spread the use of Microsoft products throughout the Middle East. And programs he wrote. Ugly programs with bad Error handling and buffer overflows [wikipedia.org].. Yet, he used them and MS didn't really care, since it was made using their products. Microsoft also saw a big threat in the USSR where everyone ran Linux (I think it was Debian [wikipedia.org]), so MS was pretty happy with Saddam back then.
In 1980 Saddam believed he had written enough programs to convince Iran that Macs are far inferiour so he started a war [wikipedia.org], obviously with the backing of the software giant Microsoft. The problem was that the Mac fanboys in Iran weren't sitting on their laurels either and wrote software in Mac OS that was just as effective as Saddam's. After eights long years of dire struggle Saddam abandoned his pursuit to convince the Iranians to revert to MS Windows.
This whole thing cost him lots and lots of money; MS products aren't cheap (even when they're on discount) and neither are MS programmers. So suddenly he saw his power threatened - what if he ran out of money to buy the updates? Thus, he came up with a plan: "We fought 8 hard years against the Mac fanboys of Iran to protect you guys from the horrors of converting to Apple Macintoshs" he said addressing the other countries in the Middle East, and pointed out that especially Kuwait profited from the war while contributing nothing, except for lending money to Iraq. "You Kuwaitis would all be Mac users now! I think it would be fair if you dropped the $30 billion we owe you, so we can rebuild over here." Kuwait refused and Saddam saw no other way than to take over Kuwait.
Now this went too far for MS who saw a very lucrative and loyal customer in Kuwait so they went in personally with their MCSE certified programmers and fought back [wikipedia.org] Saddam's guys - way back to Baghdad. There they stopped and, I guess for old times sake, let him continue be president though from now on with only 640KB of RAM per PC and under constant surveillance.
They installed Webcams all over Iraq. Obviously Saddam didn't like that one bit and started throwing stones at the cams while cheering when he knocked one down. He did that every once in a while, when he got bored running programs with such a limited amount of RAM. Everybody was playing Doom while he had to resort to Nibbles.
Fast forward to today: now we have all sorts of people fighting each other in Iraq. There are hordes of Mac fanboys [wikipedia.org] running around on the streets causing havoc and violently opposing anyone they see as Micro [wikipedia.org]
Re:But it's not justice (Score:3, Informative)
The bit in the UN Charter that says that the only exception to peaceful resolution of conflicts is self defense when attacked by armed forces of another country, unless explicitly authorized by the Security Council. The UN charter IS international law.
20 guys from Saudi Arabia, in 4 aircraft, hardly constitute an Iraqi armed force.
You do remember that the Security Council decided against invading Iraq at the time, and that the US was condemned by the Security Council for its unilateral invasion, don't you? Oh, I guess you conveniently forgot. Did you also forget the protests all over the world? No one likes this war, especially not now since the conflict is dragging on and middle-eastern stability is worsening, not increasing. When will the US admit it screwed up - AGAIN?