You've Got to Be Kidding Me

As if enough hasn't been bungled in Iraq already, the clock is ticking on how long the US can legally hold Saddam Hussein without charging him with a crime. The Guardian reports:

Nada Doumani, a spokeswoman for the ICRC, told the Guardian: "The United States defines Saddam Hussein as a prisoner of war. At the end of an occupation PoWs have to be released provided they have no penal charges against them."

OK, this is completely insane. We've been holding Saddam for over 6 months. You're telling me nobody has written up a case against him? I think you could walk anywhere in Baghdad and find someone willing to press charges against him. You had to wait THIS LONG!? How can you be so inept as to get the world body politic upset over HOLDING SADDAM HUSSEIN?

The real political football here is not that we're holding Saddam, but everybody else:

Doumani's comments came as the international body, the only independent group with access to detainees in U.S. custody, becomes increasingly concerned over the legal limbo in which thousands of people are being held in the run-up to the transfer of power at the end of the month.

Saddam and other senior officials of the old regime are the only Iraqi detainees to have been given POW status. Hundreds of other Iraqis have been seized since the war often, according to critics, on flimsy suspicion and held for long periods without charge, usually without their families knowing for weeks where they are.

Once again, this government believes itself to be above international law, able to detain anyone they choose for as long as they choose.