(with apologies to Franz Kafka)

This evening it was announced that Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death "for Crimes against Humanity." The conviction was predicated upon demonstrable proof of his role in the killing of some 148 people in a small town of Dujail some thirty-five miles north of Baghdad.

One hundred and forty-eight people--a "Crime against Humanity?"

This either elevates the event of the killing of 148 people to a crime "against humanity," or it demeans the very meaning of the term from its original intention.

Make no mistake: In no way does that statement diminish the horror and tragedy of the deaths of 148 innocents. At the same time, by putting this into the framework of a crime against the human race, it rather diminishes the true meaning and intent of such a crime. In fact, it is almost a hasty stamp--a seal of disapproval--added to a clumsily orchestrated trial, which, inclusive of the deaths of assorted attorneys, and the concurrent deaths of at least ten times than number of Iraqis during these august proceedings, was, as everyone knows (except perhaps for some of the Shiite Iraqis) as artificial and as a contrived and cynical display as that of the character of Joseph K in "The Trial," a work of that name by Franz Kafka.

In the surreal plot of Kafka's book, the accused is never quite told what crime it is of which he is found guilty; yet during the disjointed development of the plot-line, the main character is seen to initiate some acts which border on the criminal, thus compounding the confusion, as was the case with Saddam Hussein.

In the all-too-real plot line of the conflict raging in Iraq, where the enemy is similarly ill-defined as an "insurgent" and during which atrocity it has been objectively determined that some 650,000 Iraqis have died, and not of natural causes (in relation to which the deaths of a paltry number of "insurgents" would negligibly diminish this tally) as well as well over a million Iraqi children died over a ten year period prior, and at least a dozen or a lot more Iraqi civilians died as a direct result of premeditated American soldiers' executions--and where this grand total was equally as directly orchestrated by our American leader, exactly who is morally allowed to indict whom, pray tell?

Perhaps it was best stated by one of my familial ancestors:

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."