Insider's Preview Of Saddam Trial
Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is scheduled to go on trial Wednesday for a bloody massacre in a Shiite town in 1982.
CBS News correspondent Lara Logan, one of the few reporters who will be allowed into the courtroom in Baghdad, says the trial will be held in a secret location inside the heavily fortified government "Green Zone" in the capital.
The massacre that will be the focus of the proceedings got very little international attention when it took place, Logan reports. More than 20 years later, the people of Dujail still come to a makeshift memorial to mourn, clutching worn copies of the execution order signed by Saddam Hussein that lists over 140 men from the town.
The faces of the dead hang on the walls of the memorial like family portraits in someone's home. They represent the first case for which Saddam Hussein is to be tried for crimes against humanity, but what people in Dujail now simply call "al karitha" — the disaster.
One woman told Logan that more than 400 people were executed, so executing Saddam once is not enough. He should be executed 400 times, she said.
It all began on Dujail's streets back in 1982, when Shiite gunmen fired on Saddam's motorcade. The punishment that followed was brutal, with whole families tortured and imprisoned for years, Logan says.
She spoke with a man whose farm was among the many destroyed in retribution. His father and brother were both killed. "I would drink Saddam's blood and then burn his body," he tells Logan.
Others wished Saddam much worse.
But, Logan says, Dujail was always enemy territory for Saddam, a Shiite enclave just 60 miles from his hometown of Tikrit, where CBS News found many people who are still loyal to the former Iraqi dictator.
Former Brigadier General Abdul Salam, who served in Saddam's army for 26 years, said people here call the trial a disaster.
"Of course it will be very bad reactions for some people," he says.
How will he feel?
"Of course, very bad, because this man was my leader."
Saddam will look less like a leader and more like an ordinary convict when he's brought to court Wednesday shackled in chains amid what Logan says "we're promised is going to be the highest security ever seen" in Baghdad.
"I'm not even allowed to take a notebook and a pen with me into the court," Logan told The Early Show co-anchor Hannah Storm Tuesday. "Those will be supplied. And I can't give you too many details because the threat level is considered to be so high.
"But I can tell you that the building is supposed to be somewhere near Saddam's old palace, from where he ruled this country, and where he kept his gifts. And millions and millions of dollars have been spent fortifying the building for security."
Saddam could face the death penalty.
"If he's convicted," Logan says, "once all the appeals have been exhausted, the rules do allow for him to be executed within 30 days of that."