Trials of trying Saddam, revisited

Ways back in mid-december 2003, right after Saddam Hussein was captured, I wrote here:

No doubt about it: the trial of Saddam Hussein has many, many political aspects to it. It certainly won’t be the simple, gloating “victory lap for the Coalition” that many in the US media now think it may be.

Time has proven me right. Indeed the chaotic jousting over who gets to make the key decisions in this case that I predicted back then has continued till today, and is currently escalating.
Today, the NYT’s John Burns is reporting that:

The Iraqi tribunal preparing the trial of Saddam Hussein has been thrown into turmoil by the dismissal of nine senior staff members and a threat to dismiss 19 others, including the chief investigative judge.

Burns said that the issue burst into public view Tuesday when one of Ahmed Chalabi’s aides,

confirmed that Mr. Chalabi had begun to press for the removal of former members of Mr. Hussein’s ruling Baath Party from the tribunal’s staff of judges, prosecutors and administrators. Mr. Chalabi contends that the 28 men he has cited for removal are ineligible under Iraqi law to work at the tribunal because of their party affiliation.

Burns also reports that Chalabi contends that the “Iraqi” Chief Judge of the Special tribunal, Raid Juhi, should be among those dismissed– but had agreed to hold off from pushing for this.
Today, AP confirms that nine, relatively low-level employees of the court have indeed now been dismissed– and adds that, “The cases of 19 others, including the chief investigative judge [Juhi], are under review.”
This, at a time when the eminent Egyptian-American international law expert Cherif Bassiouni has just published an open letter to Iraqi PM Ibrahim al-Jafaari urging him, among other things to, “Erase the American Footprint” from the trial process. Pointing out the many ways in which the “Iraqi” Special Tribunal is in fact a US creation, Bassiouni writes:

A large segment of the public in Iraq and the broader Arab world suspects that the tribunal is an attempt by the United States to divert attention from its own abuses in Iraq (and at the Abu Ghraib prison, in particular) and to justify the invasion by focusing on Saddam