Saddam offers lively defense in trial of village massacre

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Cross-examined for the first time in his trial for crimes against humanity, Saddam Hussein Wednesday presented a spirited although rambling defense of his orders to execute Shiite Muslim villagers in Dujail, and questioned the court's legitimacy.

Saddam set the political tone early, by condemning Iraq's controversial Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry, accused by his fellow Sunni Arabs of spawning death squads and torture chambers.

Many Sunni Arab politicians have accused the ministry of operating death squads that target Sunnis. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has called on Iraqi leaders to put the ministry outside the control of officials who have ties to sectarian militias.

"Don't venture into political matters," Judge Rauf Rashid Abdul-Rahman warned Saddam.

"If you're scared of the interior minister, he doesn't scare my dog," Saddam replied.

His savvy take on contemporary politics took some observers by surprise.

"He seems very well-informed about what's going on in Iraq right now," said Layla Sadat, a professor of international law at Washington University in St. Louis. "He was quite canny at trying to present current events in Iraq as a way of casting doubt on the trial."

The feisty sparring by Saddam, his defense team, prosecutors, and the judge, which ranged well beyond the scope of the case, marked another day in which drama for a televised audience appeared to trump jurisprudence.

Prosecutors' bombshells

Prosecutors dropped several dramatic bombshells. They played a videotape of the young former dictator vowing to kill thousands of his enemies, years before the Dujail massacre, and presented photographs of the doe-eyed faces of 28 juveniles, one as young as 12, allegedly executed on Saddam's orders as retribution for an attempt on the dictator's life in the village in 1982.

Saddam and seven co-defendants face a potential death penalty on charges of crimes against humanity in a case stemming from the execution, detention, torture and banishment of hundreds of Shiite villagers in Dujail.

The defense team, represented by outspoken Lebanese and Egyptian legal consultants, played to anger in the Arab world by attempting to show abuses committed during the U.S. military occupation — a move that got defense attorney Bushra Khalil tossed from the courtroom under the threat of a contempt charge.

Abu-Ghraib raised

On her way out, she held up large photographs of naked Iraqi detainees at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison. "I want to show you what Americans do to prisoners," she said.

The resumption of the oft-delayed trial, which began in October and last convened in mid-March, came a day after the special tribunal prosecuting Saddam announced it had completed a second investigation into atrocities allegedly committed under his rule.

With a flood of news releases and media appearances, prosecutors formally indicted Saddam with genocide in the so-called Anfal case, a late 1980s campaign by the Baghdad government to crush rebellious Kurds by killing thousands with chemical and conventional weapons.

Prosecutors hoped the Dujail case would produce a swift sentence because the charges are less complicated than others such as genocide. But the trial has faced many setbacks, including the chief judge's resignation and killing of two defense lawyers.

Saddam, the only one of the eight defendants to appear in the defendants' dock Wednesday, wore his signature black suit over a dark sweater and white shirt buttoned all the away up to his neck, in the conservative style of middle-class Arab merchants. As president, Saddam favored silk ties and custom-tailored suits.

When it came his turn to talk, Saddam dodged and weaved around questions and lambasted the court and the Kurdish judge, whom he accused of being biased.

"Your title and position are illegal and illegitimate," Saddam told the judge. "How can you judge the president of Iraq who stood as a spear against all who plotted against Iraq?"

Several times throughout the day the brutal depiction of Saddam's regime startled observers. At one point, the prosecutor marveled at how Saddam could spend only two days deliberating before signing execution orders.

Testy response

When Mussawi presented the names of the 28 young boys executed after the Dujail incident, Saddam countered testily that he "would never kill an Iraqi child," and questioned the authenticity of the evidence. "I don't recognize the identification cards," Saddam said. "They are faked. I don't believe any document released now."

But the prosecution used the videotaped harangue by a much younger Saddam to paint his leadership style in less benign shades.

"Anyone who's against the revolution, if there were 1 or 2 or 3 or 4,000 of them, I'd cut off their heads," Saddam said in the tape. "My heart wouldn't hesitate. People like that won't get any sympathy from me. If an ant died, I would feel sorry for it. But if people are traitors, I'll kill them no matter who they are."

He added, "Those who die during interrogation are worth nothing. An enemy could easily die during interrogation."

Also

Iraqi acquitted: An Iraqi cameraman working for CBS News was acquitted of insurgent activity, a year after being wounded and detained by the U.S. military after a car bombing. A three-judge Iraqi panel ruled there was insufficient evidence against Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, 25, who was filming the bombing aftermath when apprehended.

Car-bomb explosions: Two car bombs exploded in the capital, killing a woman and injuring 28. A suicide car bomb exploded at a joint U.S.-Iraqi military checkpoint about 20 miles south of Fallujah, killing at least one Iraqi soldier and four civilians, and wounding seven others.

Police said they found the bodies of two men in Baghdad and a handcuffed, blindfolded body of a person who had been shot in Iskandiriyah.

Gunmen killed two security guards and wounded three others at the Iraqna mobile telephone company in Baghdad. Two Sunnis were killed in the mostly Shiite southern city of Basra, police said. A police recruit was shot and killed at Ramadi bus terminal, police said.

Additonal information from The Washington Post, Reuters and The Associated Press