Sir/ma'am:

You assert that this tribunal would be closed to the world public. And yet, in the CNN article you link to at the bottom of the article, we have this quotation: "Another Governing Council member, Younadem Kana, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the court's proceedings would be open to the Iraqi public -- possibly even broadcast on television." If you have specific evidence that either the Bush administration, Paul Bremer, or the IGC itself have said anything about secret trials, I'd very much like to see it -- I work with a number of people in the Amnesty International office in Pittsburgh and I think they'd have a great deal of fun with it.

Furthermore, the same piece states that "the court's legal framework draws on Iraqi and international law, including that of Rwanda's genocide tribunal and the legal code used to create the U.N.'s International Criminal Court -- a body the Bush administration opposes." Good Lord! If the people drafting this thing really could sit down and discuss using ICC rules, that really discredits the idea that the Bush administration had that much influence over the proceedings. And, finally, to debunk the quote you twisted about "foreign experts," the thing in the Yahoo article reads: "Back in Iraq, the vote to set up a special tribunal heralds the setting up of a court that would be staffed by Iraqi judges and based on Iraqi law but could also use foreign experts, Governing Council member Mowaffak al-Rubaie told AFP." *Could also use.* Nobody said anything about closing the trial to others, and in fact the quote I mentioned earlier would directly contradict that idea. You should be proud of yourself -- the main Indymedia site has picked up your distortion and even put quotes around it.

Before anyone yells at me and tells me I shouldn't be here, let me point out that I am a committed activist and that I've been against the war and occupation from the beginning. It just makes me frustrated and more than a little angry to see our breath and our credibility against forces as evil as Bush wasted on distortions based on bad research or willful deception. How can we hope to take the wool off anyone's eyes with people like you simply replacing it with their own? The rest of us -- the serious ones -- spend our days finding the real horrors of this war, and if those aren't enough for you, you're just about the least effective journalist ever to sit at a keyboard.

Well said Will. As a wise man once said "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society". Using tactics of spin and sensationalism to further our cause does nothing to help our cause. I would, however, caution that this is a proceeding that needs to be scrutinized severely. Were this court to be given their authority and be overseen by an independent UN commission, I would feel much more certain that it was not yet another form of Bush administration chicanery. The truth, as it usually does, will lie somewhere between the most extreme viewpoints.

My poster for the showtrial.