Some American lefties are screaming about the possibility that Saddam Hussein will be sentenced to death two days before the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 7 -- far ahead of what everyone thought the schedule would be.

The matter was first touched on in The Nation in an Oct. 18 article (reprinted at Common Dreams). An excerpt (speaking is Scott Horton, an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Law School and chairman of the International Law Committee at the New York City Bar Association. He frequently visits Iraq):

"For sure. That November 5 date is designed to show some progress in Iraq. This is the last full news-cycle day in the US before the elections. It'll be Monday. And the American public will see Saddam condemned to death and see it as a positive thing.

"When you look at polling figures," Horton said," there have been three significant spike points. One was the date on which Saddam was captured. The second was the purple fingers election. The third was Zarqawi being killed. Based on those three, it's easy to project that they will get a mild bump out of this.

"After all, almost every newspaper reserves space for Iraq reporting every day. This just assures that they will have a positive news story to feature. I find it amazing not that journalists don't editorialize on this, but that they report the story without even noting that this is right before the midterm elections. That's pretty amazing to me!

"This is not coincidence," he continued. "Nothing in Iraq that's set up this far in advance is coincidental. Look at Michael Gordon's book Cobra II. One of the points he drives home is how everything in the battle for Baghdad was scripted for US media consumption.

"In fact, in my experience, everything that comes out of Baghdad is very carefully prepared for American domestic consumption. ..."

In an Oct. 23 post on Alternet, blogger Joshua Holland is beside himself over this:

Of course, if anyone deserves the death penalty it's Saddam Hussein. Let's be clear on that point.

But the importance of Saddam the human being pales next to the significance of Saddam the dictator -- the leader who ordered the gassing of the Kurds, who drained the "Marsh Arabs'" marshes, who put down his opponents with remarkable cruelty, who ordered whole villages to be razed and under whom torture was almost as prevalent as it is in Iraq today. In order to get vengeance against Saddam the flesh-and-blood man -- and for the sake of the American electoral calendar -- Saddam the dictator will never see justice.

He'll be murdered. That's what extrajudicial killing is, and the trial of Saddam Hussein has always been a sham, a case of "victor's justice." ...

The occupation's supporters -- George Bush's "dead-enders" -- concede only that the process I've described is less than perfect. In fact, it's a sad joke -- a kangaroo court at which any self-respecting kangaroo would scoff. And it's not necessary for a conviction; Saddam Hussein would be found guilty of horrific crimes against humanity in any fair judicial proceeding.

The alternative would have been to ship his ass to The Hague, where a hundred mutilated bodies aren't showing up every day, and where Saddam's three lawyers, one of the prosecuting judges and his son and another judge's brother-in-law wouldn't have been gunned down in the streets. And there he could have gotten a fair trial that would have demonstrated to the world some of the best principles of liberal democracy: judicial independence, the right to a rigorous defense and the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise.

And then he would have been thrown in a cell to rot away for the rest of his years, a living testament to how far the mighty can fall when they commit brutal abuses against their own citizens.

He had a follow-up post on Oct. 25.