Theatrics dominate televised hearing

Several defendants voiced complaints, and the trial was put off a week.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A combative Saddam Hussein lectured the judge and lashed out at his treatment by American "occupiers" as his murder trial resumed Monday and then adjourned for a week to allow a co-defendant to replace a murdered lawyer.
The televised hearing lasted less than three hours but was long on drama. One of the deposed dictator's seven co-defendants complained of death threats. Another claimed that doctors were injecting him with poison. A third demanded treatment for cancer.
Throughout the second day of proceedings, Saddam took notes on a legal pad and at times interrupted lead judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin. When Amin came back from a recess, Saddam refused to stand until the judge admonished him to do so.
Chief Prosecutor Jaafar Mousawi pleaded with the bench to start calling witnesses to the crime -- the murders of 146 people after a 1982 assassination attempt on Saddam in the village of Dujail. It is the first of at least a dozen cases for which the former leader could be tried by the Iraqi High Tribunal.
But after hearing videotaped testimony from just one witness, Amin adjourned the trial until next Monday to give former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan time to find new counsel.
One of Ramadan's lawyers was killed and another was wounded in a drive-by shooting in the Iraqi capital three weeks ago, and on Monday he rejected a court-appointed substitute.
Security issues have weighed on the trial since its inaugural session, on Oct. 19, ended with a 40-day recess. The defense team shunned the court after the attack on Ramadan's attorneys and the Oct. 20 abduction and slaying of another defense lawyer. But their boycott ended last week after the court agreed to pay for bodyguards of the lawyers' choosing.
Two hours before Monday's session, a mortar landed harmlessly in the fortified Green Zone where Saddam's old Baath Party headquarters has been turned into a courtroom. Reporters and others entering the building had to undergo multiple inspections, including 360-degree body scans.
On Sunday, police in the northern city of Kirkuk arrested 10 Sunni Arab men reportedly planning to assassinate the court's chief investigative judge, Raid Juhi, on the orders of an associate of Saddam's.
Polarizing force in Iraq
The trial has proved a divisive undertaking in Iraq, with Shiite Muslims and Kurds who were the main victims of Saddam's repression approving of the process and Sunni Arabs who benefited from his rule condemning it. Hundreds of people in Dujail, a mostly Shiite village, demonstrated Monday in favor of Saddam's conviction and execution, while Sunnis in Tikrit, his hometown, rallied in his favor.
Defense lawyers contend that the tribunal, founded under a U.S. occupation decree and recognized only last month by Iraq's interim National Assembly, is illegal under a Geneva Convention statute forbidding occupying powers from creating courts.
To help make that case, the defense team brought former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and former Qatari Justice Minister Najib Nauimi into court Monday as advisers. They were shown on TV but their Iraqi defense colleagues were not -- a move apparently aimed at protecting the Iraqi attorneys from attacks.
Nauimi tried to read a written challenge to the court's legitimacy and a statement from Clark about security. The judge cut him off, saying those issues would be addressed later.
Former president's antics
Saddam came ready to test the judge and provided much of the theatrics, as he did on the trial's first day.
Wearing a dark gray suit and white open-collared shirt and cradling a Quran under his right arm, the deposed leader swaggered into the room behind the other defendants six minutes after a bailiff had shouted his name. To those around him, he cheerfully uttered a traditional Arabic greeting, "Peace be upon the people of peace." During a break, he joked with guards.
When the judge asked him to sign papers giving Clark and Nauimi power of attorney, the former president seized the moment to deliver a Quranic verse and a litany of protest.
At times, Saddam acted as if he were still president, voicing controlled outrage over what he perceived as indignant slights.
"They brought me here and I was handcuffed," he complained to the judge. "They cannot bring the defendant in handcuffs."
The 68-year-old defendant said he had been obliged by "foreign guards" to walk up four flights of stairs because of a broken elevator.
"I will tell the police about this," the judge said in the firm but polite tone he maintained during several tirades by Saddam on the first day of the trial.
"I don't want you to tell them," Saddam bellowed. "Order them! You are Iraqi. You have sovereignty. They are in your country. They are invaders. They are occupiers."
One witness's testimony
The only witness heard Monday was Wadah Ismail Sheik, an intelligence officer who was sent to Dujail in 1982 to investigate the attempt on the president's life. Sheik, 54, died of lung cancer last month, four days after court officials had videotaped his testimony in a Baghdad hospital.
The video showed him seated in a wheelchair and attached to intravenous tubes and a heart monitor. As the video played silently on a courtroom screen, the judge read out the dying man's testimony: From the number of bullet casings at the scene, Sheik calculated that no more than 12 people had been involved in the assassination attempt; yet about 400 people were arrested and put in a detention center run by him.
Sheik said he received no instructions from Saddam, and noted that the killings occurred later, at other facilities. Co-defendant Barzan Ibrahim Hasan, the president's half brother and intelligence chief, "was the one directly giving the orders," the witness said.
But he noted that Saddam had awarded decorations to intelligence officers who took part in the killings.
After a lunch break, the defense took the offensive.
Defendant Awad Hamed Bandar, the chief of Saddam's revolutionary court, shouted that "someone who is here inside this courtroom" had threatened to kill him. Mohammed Ali Azzawi, a Baath Party official in Dujail, wiped tears from his eyes and said he had been "injected with two poisons." Hasan declared that for three weeks the court had been ignoring his appeals to be hospitalized for cancer in his spine. "This is indirect murder," he said.
Defense lawyers asked for an adjournment of at least a month. They got a week.
Even that was too much for some Iraqi politicians. Ali Dabagh, a leading Shiite lawmaker, said the judge gave the defendants "too much leeway."