Rattlesnake Ridge      

 
      BFF

I watched the grisly, nay ugly, savagery in the footage of Mu’ammar Qaddafi in captivity: at first wounded but very much alive, then dead naked and being dragged about. There is no way he was shot while trying to escape, but that is alright now, everyone wants the new Libya to start with a ‘clean’ slate. Nobody wants the new Libya to start with the usual extra-judicial atrocities that the old dictatorship committed.
Which brings me to the new ‘regime’, which will be what it is until a ‘proper’ government is elected by the people. That is why most Arab regimes are ‘regimes’: unelected, possibly unelectable, and I don’t mean just the republics. Now this killing of Qaddafi also helps the National Transitional Council clean its own slate, given that many of its members served in high positions under Colonel Qaddafi. It saves a lot of embarrassing and inconvenient court testimony by Qaddafi and his lawyers and witnesses. A lot of local names to be talked about: who did what under Qaddafi. With the dictator dead, there is no need to embarrass anyone. Then there is no need to embarrass Western leaders who dealt with the dictator and helped him, for a price of course. (I wonder what Berlusconi and Sarkozy and Tony Blair and many others feel now).
Saddam Hussein was tried for three years before being executed. (I recall the media in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain thought that was extra-legal, as if their own regimes care much for legal niceties: in both these countries people vanish without legal niceties, sometimes forever). But then the new Iraqi government was mostly composed of former exiles and not composed of his former officials. Nobody to embarrass with court testimony.
Cheers
mhg


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