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Saddam Hopes To Drag US Through The Mire
 by Ian Mather, The Scotsman, May 14, 2006

When the trial of Saddam Hussein resumes tomorrow, his large defence team will be delighted finally to have their day in court.

To many this will come as a surprise. During the first six months of the trial, the prosecution has been setting out its case. But it is the defence that has been hogging the headlines.

Saddam has ranted, prayed, refused to enter court and got involved in shouting matches with the judge, while prosecution witnesses, their faces often covered and their voices altered, have been fearful.

But now that the defence is about to have a free rein it is the turn of the White House to be afraid. The defence intends to call more than 60 witnesses, and is expected to try to drag the top level of US and other western governments into the case.

Saddam and seven other defendants are charged only with ordering the killing of 148 Shi'ites in Dujail in 1982. By Saddam's notorious standards, that is a modest charge.

The US administration is hoping that by restricting the charges to one specific event, the defence will not be able to find a way of bringing out in court details of the earlier links between Saddam and Bush administration top officials such as US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

In Washington, where it is impossible to keep secrets for long, the defence may have already got its hands on material collected from Saddam's administration and confiscated by the US forces in Iraq.

This could verify in embarrassing detail what is already known in outline, that the US provided weapons and intelligence to Saddam in the 1980s, some of it useful to Saddam in Dujail.

Much will depend on the extent to which Judge Raouf Abdel Rahman, a Kurd, manages to keep control. But the past six months, which have seen the chief judge replaced twice, does not inspire confidence.

A second line of attack by the defence will be to try to portray the tribunal as an American, not an Iraqi, court.

One of the five international lawyers advising Saddam's defence team, Dr Curtis Doebbler, says: "Behind almost every action there are Americans pulling the strings."

Even the narrowly defined charge against Saddam may run into difficulties. Saddam's chief defence strategist, Abdel Haq Alani, an Iraqi lawyer based in Britain, says that in the Dujail case, the defence will argue that those killed in the village had been found guilty under Iraq's laws and that Saddam's only role was to sign their death warrants.

Last week, Saddam's team began its counterattack. Ramsey Clark, a former attorney general under US president Lyndon B Johnson and an adviser to the defence, complained that Saddam's defence team had not received "the central documents to prepare the defence, which we have asked for time and time again".

Nobody doubts that Saddam will be found guilty, and he will probably be executed. The key question the Iraqis, and the Americans, will have to decide is whether to hang him after the present case or allow future trials - including one where he faces the charge of genocide for the murder of tens of thousands of Kurds in the late 1980s - to proceed.

The longer the process, however, the more risk of turning him into an even bigger icon for the insurgency, in which case the Americans may come to wish that the former dictator had been killed in the war to liberate Iraq.

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Source: http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=719932006
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