Saddam on trial

Like most people I was shocked at news reports that Saddam had refused to show up for trial!
What is going on??? I thought...
Who's in charge here? Why not just tell him who's in charge and get on with it?

Grotian Moment blog has a collection of responses that make for interesting reading. Essays by David Crane, David Scheffer, Michael Scharf, Ruth Wedgwood, Christopher Rassi, Cherif Bassiouni, and Leila Sadat take on the questions in ways that I would not have considered. Matters that appear simple to casual observers can be more complicated than they seem.

On December 8, 2005, LA Times Reporter Henry Weinstein e-mailed our panel of experts the following question: “I would like your assessments of who, for lack of a better word, “prevailed” in the battle today where Saddam Hussein skipped a session of the trial after declaring that he would not participate in a trial where there was no justice. How do you think the presiding judge handled what happened in the courtroom over the past two days? Did Saddam seem to gain anything from this, or does it look like he backed down?
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Crane: The histrionics we have viewed this past few days is very typical of these tyrants who have been brought low by the law. Regardless of the circumstances, they tend to do this, e.g. Goering at Nuremberg, Milosovic at The Hague, Hinga Norman at Freetown. These are men who all believed they were above the law and used the law as a tool for their own gain...
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Scharf: ...this is a common defense tactic, not just in international trials, but also in highly politicized domestic trials even in the U.S. The most notable example was the Chicago Seven Trial (Abbey Hoffman, et. al), in which the leaders of the anti-war movement were prosecuted on the charge of conspiring to cause riots to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. At one point in that trial, the judge had to gag and bound defendant Bobby Seales to constrain him from making frequent outbursts in an effort to disrupt the trial. This only led to a greater sense that the trial was unfair, which was the very point the defendants were seeking to establish. Interestingly, Ramsey Clark was involved in that trial too, as an adviser to the Defense team. In fact, when the defense tried to call Ramsey as a witness, the judge refused to allow him to testify, and the defense counsel shouted out that the decision was the greatest miscarriage of justice in the history of American jurisprudence, earning the lawyer a contempt citation from the judge. Ramsey Clark is clearly importing the disruptive trial strategies that were perfected in the Chicago Seven Trial for use in the trial of Saddam Hussein, seeking to achieve similar results.
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Sadat:... Saddam does himself a disservice by not showing up, because with the Sunni insurgency, and at least some Iraqis and other Arabs, he is making good points about the legitimacy of the proceedings that he just cannot make if he doesn't appear. In fact, I think that he was doing quite well, although, as Cherif notes, there is also tremendous sympathy for the victim's of the crimes. What does he gain by not appearing?

Long but quick reading. Nothing here for the history books.
No great insights, but a great study in spin if nothing else.