The already muddy questions surrounding US efforts to bring Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to justice for past crimes — options include giving him amnesty; letting a new Iraqi government try him for past crimes with US-funded dossiers; or letting a new international court, formed specifically to deal with Iraqi war crimes, deal with him (see " Trial by Errors, " News and Features, February 28) — were made murkier last week when the Pentagon released a draft list of new war crimes subject to military tribunals.

Among the crimes listed in the draft — which extends military-tribunal orders issued two months after 9/11 and revised in March 2002, and which must be approved by President Bush — are two that have been associated directly with Saddam in the past: " Employing poison or analogous weapons " and " Using protected persons as shields. "

Plans by the Bush administration to use military tribunals have already drawn fire. Amnesty International, among other groups, observes that such tribunals are " executive bodies which would flout international fair trial standards, and would have the power to hand down death sentences with no right of appeal. " And Human Rights Watch notes that the tribunals " fail to meet the core human rights requirement of appellate review by an independent and impartial court. "

Announcement of the new draft rules for crimes punishable by a military tribunal once again puts the United States squarely at odds with world sentiment on international justice. Though gaps in the purview of international-justice organizations make appointing a venue to try Saddam for his crimes against Kurds in the late 1980s problematic, any new war crimes committed by the Iraqi ruler should be adjudicated by the newly established International Criminal Court (ICC).

There are, of course, two impediments to trying any possible new war crimes committed by Saddam through the ICC. The first impediment is that Iraq, as one of seven nations that have not signed the Rome Treaty that authorized the ICC, is not under the court’s jurisdiction. The second impediment is that the United States (along with China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, and Yemen) has also rejected the ICC and its jurisdiction. The US military-tribunal plan, then, is a means by which the Bush administration can avoid putting Iraq’s leaders on trial before an accountable international body, before US judges (as happened with deposed Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega), or before Iraqis themselves.

As with any battle plan, however, the military tribunal may not survive contact with an actual battlefield. What would happen, for instance, if Saddam surrenders not to US troops, but to soldiers from one of the other countries in the Bush administration’s " coalition of the willing " ? Will those nations flout international law and hand over Saddam to a US tribunal? Or will they hold the Iraqi dictator to use as a lever for moving the US away from its unilateralist position on international justice?

If Saddam refuses to take the US up on its amnesty offer, such questions may become all too real — and provide yet another sticking point between the United States and its allies.