SADDAM (CONT)

Or the Iraqis might have heard from Saddam and others about the CIA's participation in the coup of 1963 that first brought the Baath Party to power, the CIA providing it with lists of hundreds of suspected communists and leftists to be picked up, tortured and disposed of. Saddam back then was one of the young Baath torturers.

But let's return from such delusional speculation to the current status of the Special Iraqi Tribunal. Deep in the bunkered, barricaded confines of the Green Zone, the last redoubt of the American occupiers and Iraqi would-be rulers, prosecutors and defense attorneys argue over chilling evidence of Saddam's genocidal killings while the judges and defendants sit and listen. They hear of entire families gassed, shot in the neck or the back and left for dead or buried alive.

It's a Kafkaesque play within a play. For just outside the Green Zone, across Baghdad and throughout many other parts of Iraq, there is a reign of terror that in its randomness and horror far surpasses the dread of Saddam's era.

It's a play that--with Saddam no longer playing the starring role--has been performed to ever smaller audiences.

Certainly millions of Iraqis--particularly the Kurds--will be glued to their television sets to watch the verdict handed down against Chemical Ali and his confederates. But there was no print media present for most of the recent sessions. Foreign media were even less interested. Almost all the NGOs that once followed every turn of the proceedings to ensure that they bore at least passing resemblance to accepted legal practices are no longer there. At times, there are hardly any spectators at all.

These trials were supposed to provide dramatic justification for the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq. But with the mayhem unleashed in the country today, no one buys that script any longer. Instead the tribunal has become an increasingly irrelevant sideshow, its procedures denounced by the same human rights groups that once denounced Saddam.

That being the case, it's very unlikely the tribunal will run its full course. The U.S. government is said to be cutting back on financial, material and staff support.

There's not much point in playing to an empty house.

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