Court, Saddam fall silent with tale of beatings, electric shocks

BAGHDAD, Iraq — In a proceeding that's been punctuated by antics and outbursts, the first witness Tuesday during Saddam Hussein's trial did something that even the judge has been unable to do: She silenced the defendants.

The woman, who was identified only as Witness A, gave her testimony in a box covered by a beige curtain, her face visible only to the judge and the prosecution. Her voice was digitally altered to protect her identity.

As she spoke, the courtroom sat silent and listened to her describe being tortured at the hands of the former regime.

It was the fourth day of the trial, but it was the first session that drew attention largely to the prosecution's case rather than the defense's noisy efforts to stall the proceedings. In all, five witnesses testified.

Although the witnesses told compelling stories and blamed Saddam for their suffering, none presented evidence directly linking the former dictator to the killings of nearly 150 people in the city of Dujail, as he's charged with in this case.

By the end of the nine-hour session, Saddam was threatening not to show up for today's hearing, complaining that he hadn't been allowed to change his clothes and underwear in three days.

Saddam said, "I will not be in a court without justice." And as the chief judge left the court, Saddam yelled, "Go to hell, you and all the agents of America."

Saddam and seven co-defendants are charged with ordering the killings shortly after a 1982 assassination attempt on the former dictator. If convicted, they could be executed.

Although the testimony Tuesday seemed to fall short of establishing that Saddam ordered the atrocities, the witnesses seemed to effectively paint a revolting picture of Saddam's regime executing a terror campaign on Dujail.

The five witnesses largely told the same story, anonymously. They said they weren't part of the assassination attempt but nonetheless were summoned by Saddam's henchmen. And that they were questioned and tortured before they were imprisoned at Abu Ghraib for two years.

After that, they were sent to the al Samawa Desert, where they were kept under guard for another two years before they were returned home, they said. And they had to scrounge for food in the trash at times while they were there.

Witness A began her testimony by quoting from a Shiite Muslim prayer, stoking the sectarian tensions that are plaguing the country — and the trial. The victims are largely Shiite; Saddam's regime was mostly Sunni Muslim. The judge reprimanded her.

The woman said she was 16 when the assassination attempt occurred, and that shortly afterward she was summoned to a room in Dujail. There a guard forced her to take her clothes off, "lifted her legs," beat her and administered electric shock.

She said she and her family were transported to Abu Ghraib eventually, where she and children in the prison watched guards humiliate the male prisoners. At one point, she saw someone beat her brother with cables.

She stopped her testimony and let out a long wail. "Oh, my Lord," she said.

The courtroom was silent. Saddam remained expressionless.

The defense continued to try to use the trial to score political points.

After Witness A testified about conditions at Abu Ghraib prison, where she recalled lice crawling on prisoners' scalps and using pieces of cardboard as shoes to go to the bathroom outside during the winter, the defense found an opening.

"I agree that things in Abu Ghraib were, until recently, bad, but did they use dogs on you? Did they take photographs?" said one defense attorney, alluding to U.S. troops' abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the prison.

"No," she replied.

As the last three witnesses — all men — testified, Saddam and his co-defendants became more animated. During what was supposed to be the questioning of a witness in the afternoon, Saddam gave a 15-minute diatribe, talking about the war, his cell and what he said was the silliness of some evidence so far. He pointed at the judge and the prosecutor as he spoke.

"The biggest concern of mine is my people and my nation," he said. "Do the American people know what kind of crime their nation committed against humanity?"

He also ended Tuesday's session in an angry rant in which he complained of being exhausted and mistreated. "We've spent days in the same shirts and underwear," Saddam said. "We can't take a bath or have a cigarette."

"I will not return. I will not come to an unjust court," Saddam screamed at Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin as the proceedings came to an end for the day. "Go to hell!"

Far from acting as a deflated tough stripped of power, Saddam, who studied law in Cairo, Egypt, decades ago, has exuded the haughtiness of a man who says — and appears to believe — that he is still the president of Iraq.

"I didn't say 'former.' I said I am the president of the Republic of Iraq," he admonished the judge on the first day of the trial, Oct. 19. "If you are an Iraqi, then you know." The trial was then adjourned for more than a month and resumed last week.

On Tuesday, as he started a disjointed cross-examination of a witness, Saddam lectured the courtroom lawyers on procedure as though he were still the country's leader. "Pay attention, young men," he said.

And he appears to revel in that role. Most of the co-defendants stand to respect him when he enters. His half brother and former secret police chief, Barazan Ibrahim, kisses his head in respect.

He has treated court officials with contempt, sometimes tempered with forced magnanimity. The court, he charged Tuesday, is "a stooge of the occupation."

"I'm your president. I'm your leader for more than 30 years," he told Rizgar Mohammed Amin, the chief judge, who has the authority to sentence him to death. "I never saw you before this court. If I saw you on the street, I wouldn't know you."

Ibrahim has joined the strategy. On Tuesday, he addressed the chief prosecutor, Jaafar Mousawi, as "comrade." When the black-robed Mousawi objected, Ibrahim gleefully reminded him that they were in Saddam's Baath party together.

"Is it shameful to be called comrade? You are my comrade. You were with me in the party."

Rather than paying for a crime, Saddam implies that he might be hanged at the altar of the global power game that preoccupied him for years. The United States and his other longtime nemesis, Iran, might have finally gotten him, he suggests. Saddam pointed out that the assassination attempt near Dujail was carried out by members of the Dawa party, a Shiite religious organization, as if that made it obvious that a much more powerful force was at work than village peasants.

"Isn't it Saddam Hussein's right as a president, or the right of any president of Hungary or other country, to follow those aggressors who shot at him?"

The trial was scheduled to resume today, with two more witnesses slated to testify.

The judges managing the case are allowing several witnesses, who fear reprisal if they are seen participating in the trial, to testify behind curtains and have their voices altered. The defense team complained that the voice-altering devices make it difficult to understand the witnesses.

Defense attorneys were told the witnesses' identities, but they were instructed by Amin that they are not to publish their names and must refer to the witnesses by the letters that each one was assigned.

Also

Gunmen killed three police officers and wounded six today when they burst into Al-Jumhuriya Hospital in the northern city of Kirkuk and freed a wounded man who had been arrested for plotting to kill a judge in the Saddam trial, police said. The wounded suspect was arrested with seven other Sunni Arabs on Nov. 26 for allegedly plotting to assassinate the investigating judge, Raed Juhi.

Additional information from Reuters, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune