The Week

Haven’t you noticed that everyone in the Washington bubble thinks Bush is in a bubble?

Saddam Hussein, his bushy beard and off-the-rack suit making him look like a crazed accountant, shouts and points during his Baghdad trial. The media, like a motion sensor, follow his antics. Too bad, considering the testimony that has been offered by ordinary Iraqis about a massacre of 148 Shiite men and boys in Dujail, north of Baghdad, in 1982. Jawad Abdul-Azziz Jawad had three brothers killed by security forces. Ahmad Hassan Muhammad lost seven brothers; one brother was given electric shocks in the presence of their 77-year-old father; he saw a young boy thrown out of a window, and a meat grinder with blood and human hair under it. “You people of Dujail, we have disciplined Iraq through you,” a Baathist officer told him. The judge must control his courtroom; he is not there to produce an opera, but to present the truth, to Iraq and the world. The Dujail massacre is only the first chapter. Put Saddam, like his predecessor Eichmann, in a glass booth, and let the facts be presented to a candid world.

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Arnold Schwarzenegger

Haven’t you noticed that everyone in the Washington bubble thinks Bush is in a bubble?

Saddam Hussein, his bushy beard and off-the-rack suit making him look like a crazed accountant, shouts and points during his Baghdad trial. The media, like a motion sensor, follow his antics. Too bad, considering the testimony that has been offered by ordinary Iraqis about a massacre of 148 Shiite men and boys in Dujail, north of Baghdad, in 1982. Jawad Abdul-Azziz Jawad had three brothers killed by security forces. Ahmad Hassan Muhammad lost seven brothers; one brother was given electric shocks in the presence of their 77-year-old father; he saw a young boy thrown out of a window, and a meat grinder with blood and human hair under it. “You people of Dujail, we have disciplined Iraq through you,” a Baathist officer told him. The judge must control his courtroom; he is not there to produce an opera, but to present the truth, to Iraq and the world. The Dujail massacre is only the first chapter. Put Saddam, like his predecessor Eichmann, in a glass booth, and let the facts be presented to a candid world.