On 19 Dec 2003 at 11:00, Nomen Nescio wrote: > Let's face it: not even the Nazi war criminals were treated > in the way Saddam has been treated.
So far he's avoided being treated like Mussolini.
At 11:35 AM 12/19/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
Oh no, he got a shave and a dental examination, the horror, the horror.
While James has been wrong about 90% of this discussion (:-), I have to agree with him here - while the US was clearly propagandizing that they had him in their absolute control, they were also initially treating him in a quasi-civilized manner. The dude's been hiding in a hole in the ground, so checking him for lice is reasonable treatment. (I'm puzzled by the comment about the shave, though - all the "fair and balanced" news coverage still shows him with the beard....)
On the other hand, various spokescritters keep saying that they're going to stop treating him in a civilized manner, and that while they're not quite going to torture him, they're going to put him in a high-stress sleep-deprivation environment. I'm not sure if they're going more for the Vietnamese tiger cage model, or the Israeli army Palestinian Detainee model, or the Soviet purged general model, but it's No More Mr. Civilized until he confesses his crimes against the society.
And in due course he is going to get an execution, which is exactly what the nazi war criminals got.
In general, between the times the Nazi war criminals were captured and the times they got tried and hanged or shot, the US mostly treated most of them in a civilized manner, except during the active parts of the war where sometimes they wanted operational information. Apparently not the case here.
