In a related tangent, from the Saddam Execution and the oppision voice of folks like AI & Human Rights Watch
A Defense of DickerIn an item yesterday, we faulted Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch for his statement, in objecting to Saddam Hussein's execution, that "the test of a government's commitment to human rights is measured by the way it treats its worst offenders. History will judge these actions harshly." This prompted a defense of Dicker from reader Bob Koelle:
I think you seriously mischaracterized Richard Dicker's remarks. What he said is common pabulum, but not inaccurate.
I don't think history will long remember how Saddam was executed. But Dicker's not making an inverse statement--the worse the criminal, the better the treatment he should receive. That's nonsense. He's talking about having a "floor" of acceptable behavior for everyone, regardless of how vile he is. For example, while one could be happy to see Timothy McVeigh walk to the gas chamber, it would be unseemly to have a jeering crowd throwing rotten fruit at him as he went.
That's not out of respect for McVeigh, but out of respect for the solemnity and seriousness of putting someone to death. Such solemnity and seriousness is also a protection for the executioners' souls. These events should not be fun, even if you believe in their necessity.
In Dicker's case, I suppose he wouldn't want anyone put to death. That amounts to the lowest common denominator that he would apply to anyone. Why do you suggest that he wants to elevate Saddam? Were you speaking tongue-in-cheek? I suppose his choice of pabulum was clumsy; replace the words "worst offender" with "most vulnerable" and it's more correct. Why not just attack his poor choice of verbiage than make an absurd claim of a "monstrous moral inversion"? Up to a point, we agree.
Opposition to capital punishment is a respectable point of view, if (in our opinion) a wrongheaded one. And it would have been better if Saddam had been put to death in a more solemn manner--although, as reader Carl Friddle writes, "if Iraq has not yet reached the pinnacle of human dignity, whose fault is that, exactly?"
It's also true that Dicker's statement would have made sense if he had said "most vulnerable" instead of "worst offenders," and, yes, it is true that prisoners of the state are vulnerable by virtue of others' having seized control over their lives (and notwithstanding the deservedness of this condition).
But there is a huge difference between "worst offenders" and "most vulnerable," even if the two categories overlap. "Worst offenders" excludes the very sick, the very old, infants, children and others who are unable to fend for themselves--unless they also happen to be mass murderers.
We assumed that Dicker chose his words advisedly. But does it reflect better upon him if he did not--if he can casually and unconsciously draw an equivalence between a mass murderer and society's "most vulnerable"? It seems to us that this would indicate at best an intellectual slovenliness that reflects a complete lack of seriousness about human rights.
Saddam as Guinea PigIn a Los Angeles Times op-ed, militant atheist Richard Dawkins objects to Saddam's execution on the novel ground that it deprives the world of a guinea pig:
His mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars.
Imagine, in fancy, that some science fiction equivalent of Simon Wiesenthal built a time machine, travelled back to 1945 and returned to the present with a manacled Adolf Hitler. What should we do with him? Execute him? No, a thousand times no. Historians squabbling over exactly what happened in the Third Reich and the Second World War would never forgive us for destroying the central witness to all the inside stories, and one of the pivotal influences on twentieth century history. Psychologists, struggling to understand how an individual human being could be so evil and so devastatingly effective at persuading others to join him, would give their eye teeth for such a rich research subject. Kill Hitler? You would have to be mad to do so. Yet that is undoubtedly what we would have done if he hadn't killed himself in 1945. Saddam Hussein is not in the same league as Hitler but, nevertheless, in a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data. One hopes that Dawkins will take a stand against those who are trying to prevent the U.S. from extracting information from al Qaeda enemy combatants--
information that not only is of scientific interest but stands to save lives in the short term.
WSJ
