Saddam: Where Is The Crime?

(CBS/AP)  A defiant Saddam Hussein admitted in court Wednesday that he ordered the trial of 148 Shiites who were eventually executed in the 1980s, but insisted that doing so was legal because they were suspected in an assassination attempt against him.

"Where is the crime? Where is the crime?" Saddam asked, standing before the panel of five judges.

"If trying a suspect accused of shooting at a head of state, no matter what his name is, is considered a crime, then you have the head of state in your hands. Try him," Saddam said, arguing that his co-defendants should be released because he was the one in charge.

His dramatic courtroom speech came a day after prosecutors in his trial presented a presidential decree with a signature they said was Saddam's approving death sentences for the 148 Shiites, their most direct evidence against him so far in the four-month trial.

Saddam did not admit to signing the approval in his comments.

Saddam and seven co-defendants are on trial for the executions of 148 Shiites, as well as the arrest and torture of others and the confiscation and razing of their farmlands, following an attempt to kill Saddam in the town of Dujail on July 8, 1982.

The prosecution has argued that the crackdown that followed the assassination attempt went far beyond the actual attackers, presenting documents that show entire families were arrested, tortured and held for years, including women and children as young as 3 months old.

In other developments:

Mortar shells fell on three houses Wednesday in the mixed Sunni-Shiite town of Mahmoudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad, killing three civilians, said police Capt. Rashid al-Samaraie. Another house was hit in Qadisiyah, another religiously mixed neighborhood in western Baghdad, killing a woman, police said.

Leaders of Sunni, Kurdish and a secular political party decided Wednesday to ask the Shiite alliance to withdraw its nomination of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari for another term, political officials said. Al-Jaafari's critics believe the 58-year-old former exile is an obstacle to a unity government.

The U.S. military said an American soldier of the Multinational Division-Baghdad was killed by small arms fire Monday west of Baghdad. The death brought to at least 2,292 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an AP count.

Before Wednesday's attacks, the government issued a statement declaring that 379 people had been killed and 458 wounded as of 4 p.m. Tuesday in the sectarian violence tied to the Askariya bombing.

President Bush decried the latest surge in sectarian violence Tuesday and said that for Iraqis "the choice is chaos or unity." "The people of Iraq and their leaders must make a choice," Mr. Bush said before leaving for a trip to South Asia. "The choice is chaos or unity, the choice is a free society, or a society dictated by evil people who would kill innocents."

The 148 people eventually sentenced to death in the case included at least 10 juveniles, including an 11-year-old, according to the documents. The death sentences came after what the prosecution called an "imaginary trial" before Saddam's Revolutionary Court.

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