What Shifting Sands Reveal

Murder in Baghdad:

A judge and a lawyer with the special tribunal that will try Saddam Hussein and former members of his government were shot and killed Tuesday by gunmen outside their home here, Iraqi officials said.

It was the first time a member of the tribunal is known to have been assassinated, though a number of criminal and civil judges have been killed here in recent months.

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The judge, Parwiz Muhammad Mahmoud al-Merani, 59, was killed a day after the Iraqi special tribunal announced the first charges in the approaching trials of former senior officials in Mr. Hussein's government. His son, Aryan Mahmoud al-Merani, 26, who also worked at the tribunal as a lawyer, was killed with him, according to officials at Iraq's Interior Ministry.

Three men drove up and fired automatic weapons at the two men around 9 a.m. as they stood outside their family home in Adhamiya, a largely Sunni Arab neighborhood that has been a center of insurgent activity.

Reading this story reminded me of Ramsey Clark's explanation of why he's decided to rise to the challenge and be a member of Saddam's legal team:

International law requires that every criminal court be competent, independent and impartial. The Iraqi Special Tribunal lacks all of these essential qualities. It was illegitimate in its conception ? the creation of an illegal occupying power that demonized Saddam Hussein and destroyed the government it now intends to condemn by law.

The United States has already destroyed any hope of legitimacy, fairness or even decency by its treatment and isolation of the former president and its creation of the Iraqi Special Tribunal to try him.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that a group of Iraqi scientists has completed some specialty training

Surrounded by the tiny skulls and bones of children, Iraqi scientist Iyad labors under armed guard to unearth the grim truth from a mass grave.

Bent double and wiping the sweat from his forehead, he works meticulously to remove the dirt caked on the skeletons.

But this is no grim atrocity site in an Iraqi desert -- it's Dorset, a genteel southwest England county known for its rolling green hills and picturesque villages.

Iyad is one of 33 Iraqi scientists who have been trained in Britain to dig up the hundreds of thousands of bodies thought to have been dumped in mass graves across Iraq during the rule of Saddam Hussein.

Here's the sort of thing they'll be uncovering on their return home:

Crews have excavated two grave trenches, and officials say there could be as many as 12 in the general area. Kehoe said the bodies were apparently bulldozed into the graves.

"Unlike bodies that you've seen in many mass graves -- they look like cordwood -- all lined up," he said. "That didn't happen here. These bodies were just pushed in."

The first trench contains the remains of women and children, and the second contains the remains of men only. More than 100 bodies have been found from the first location and a similar number from the other.

Officials say it is enough to determine a pattern for the killings.

Kehoe said the victims appear to be Kurds, based on the dress and the personal belongings found.

He believes they were probably killed in early 1988, though it might have happened in late 1987.

Many of the victims wore multiple layers of clothing and carried small personal items like jewelry and medication. One child was found with a ball in his hand.

The women -- four or five of whom were pregnant -- and children appear to have been killed with a single small caliber gunshot to the head.

Some of the women were blindfolded, but Kehoe says 95 percent of the men were blindfolded and had their hands either tied to the man next to them or tied behind their back. Al-Hatra is in Nineveh province, the location of Mosul and Tal Afar.

That's a report from a US investigation of a mass grave in Iraq. The return of the Iraqi team to their home land will be welcome - the exhuming of the bodies has been a slow process made more so by the refusal of many European nations to lend their expertise:

Kehoe said his team has removed 120 bodies from a trench believed to contain as many as 300 bodies.

He said that because of limited funds and resources, his team can excavate only one mass grave at a time. European teams who worked on Bosnian mass graves are not helping because of their concerns that Saddam could face the death penalty, he said.

To be fair and balanced we'll toss in another Ramsey Clark quote here:

Finally, any court that considers criminal charges against Saddam Hussein must have the power and the mandate to consider charges against leaders and military personnel of the U.S., Britain and the other nations that participated in the aggression against Iraq, if equal justice under law is to have meaning.

No power, or person, can be above the law. For there to be peace, the days of victor's justice must end.

More thoughts here.