October 13, 2004

REALISTICALLY THERE WAS NOTHING WE SHOULD DO:

In Iraq grave, evidence of regime's horrors (Thanassis Cambanis, October 13, 2004, Boston Globe)

Leaning over the jumble of corpses in their bright purple and turquoise dresses, Greg Kehoe pointed out the blindfolds still tightly drawn around the women's skulls.

Kehoe was striding around Ninawa 2, a trench that held the bodies of 300 Kurdish women and children who were executed 16 years ago by Saddam Hussein's regime. The killers used pistols to shoot their victims in the head at point-blank range on a slope leading up from a dust-blown seasonal riverbed, or wadi.

''We have charted how the bodies were thrown into this grave at various levels," said Kehoe, the top American official working with the Iraqi court responsible for trying suspected war criminals. ''We are pretty confident there was a bulldozer that they just bulldozed those bodies in."

An American forensic team, including more than a dozen archeologists, anthropologists, and technicians, is midway through the grisly process of transforming this mass grave into courtroom evidence against Hussein and his henchmen that meets the strictest international legal standards. This is the first of 10 sites that Kehoe plans to excavate.

Kehoe, a former federal prosecutor, led a group of reporters on a helicopter trip this weekend to this remote desert spot about 200 miles north of Baghdad, showing the meticulous exhumation work at the grave site and the extensive forensic analysis taking place since Sept. 1 at a morgue at the nearest US Army installation, Forward Operating Base Jaguar.

Officials waited until now to publicly discuss their first exhumation because they did not want to endanger workers at the site by revealing its location. Kehoe began assembling his investigative team in June. One immediate focus was the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where Hussein's forces crushed an independence movement in the 1980s with brutal repression that killed thousands of Kurdish villagers.

''I've been doing grave sites for a long time, but I've never seen anything like this, women and children executed for no apparent reason," said Kehoe, who spent five years investigating mass graves in Bosnia for the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia.


Mr. Kerry says that if he'd been president Saddam would still be filling graves.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 13, 2004 9:20 AM
Comments

There is something almost pornographicly obscene about this legal formalism and attention to detail, as if there's not already enough proof that the man is evil. I get the impression that the people doing this are doing it more for themselves, because they (mostly being good little Leftists) can't bring themselves to believe in such monstrous evil without such meticulous evidence.

Posted by: Raoul Ortega at October 13, 2004 11:41 AM

Raoul:

Believing is passe, as are consequences. It's process that matters.

Posted by: mike earl at October 13, 2004 2:30 PM

Maybe, Raoul, but there is another reason. Legal process by definition is not an absolute quest for truth. It is a qualified quest--qualified by procedural and evidentiary rules of general application that have protecting the overall integrity of law enforecement and individaul rights as their objective. It is a trade-off. If just getting to the heart of an individual case was all that mattered, we would have abolished trials, as we know them, long ago.

When we are faced with unspeakable horrors like Saddam, the Holocaust, child-sexual murders, Charles Manson etc., our sense of moral outrage is so strong, we don't care about the general and just want to kill somebody NOW. Think of the OJ trial. Many of the very same people who were driven incoherent by the outcome are unmoved by thousands of criminal acquittals on constitutional grounds.

The international human rights industry wants to extinguish that sense of moral outrage so we will all be content to let them do as they will and not interfere. They are one of the reasons people are becoming less moved by tales of horror and slaughter as time goes by. I don't know if I would call it pornographic, but it is chilling.

Posted by: Peter B at October 13, 2004 2:46 PM

Mr. Ortega;

I must disagree with you on this one. If you read through the article, you will see that the good little Leftists from Europe are staying away, precisely because they don't want to know. I think the forensic people here are doing a very good thing, which is providing large amounts of hard, non-emotional data. It's not sufficient, but I think it's a big help long term to have the documentation that will come out of this effort.

That the Left hates facts is enough for me to support this work at gathering them.

Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at October 13, 2004 3:13 PM

>Mr. Kerry says that if he'd been president
>Saddam would still be filling graves.

"These two Kings said one to another,
'King unto King o'er the world is brother...'"
-- Chesterton, "Ballad of the Battle of Gibeon"

Posted by: Ken at October 13, 2004 4:09 PM

That's the item to struck me the most, Guy.

I didn't need any more proof that Saddam was a bad guy.

I'd like to see more authentication for the charge against the European forensic experts than a brief remark by a not-disinterested party.

Anybody seen any?

Posted by: Harry Eagar at October 14, 2004 5:33 PM
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