One By One, Saddam, Defendants Testify
The trial of Saddam Hussein and fellow members of his regime resumed Sunday, with the judge calling in each defendant individually to present his testimony.
The session began with defendant Mizhar Abdullah Ruwayyid, a low-ranking level official from Saddam's former ruling Baath Party, who was called in and stood alone in the defendants pen as chief judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman questioned him.
The questioning appeared to represent a new phase in the trial. Since the tribunal began Oct. 19, the prosecution has been bringing forward witnesses and presenting documents they say show the role of Saddam and his seven co-defendants in a crackdown launched after a 1982 assassination attempt against the then-Iraqi leader in the Shiite town of Dujail.
"The trial is beginning to take shape since the recess, with Saddam Hussein testifying instead of boycotting the court," says CBS News Foreign Affairs Analyst Pamela Falk, "and a formal charging document is anticipated after this stage of the trial, meaning that the trial is actually proceeding faster than some analysts had expected."
The defendants are on trial for the deaths of 148 Shiites in the crackdown, as well as illegal imprisonment and torture of Dujail residents. They face possible execution by hanging if convicted.
Before the session, court officials said they intend to bring each defendant out to present his testimony. It was not clear whether they would be questioned by prosecution lawyers or whether this meant the prosecution had finished presenting its own witnesses and evidence.
In other developments:
Tom Fox, a 54-year-old member of Christian Peacemaker Teams from Clear Brook, Va., was the fifth American hostage killed in Iraq. There was no immediate word on his fellow captives, a Briton and two Canadians who were last seen without Fox in a video dated Feb. 28 and broadcast Tuesday on Al-Jazeera television.
Sunday's session was the first since March 1, when Saddam boldly aknowledged to the court that he was responsible for sending to trial the 148 Shiites who were eventually sentenced to death by Saddam's Revolutionary Court. But he insisted his actions were not a crime, since the Shiites were suspected in the attempt on his life.
Abdel-Rahman asked Ruwayyid to relate to the court what he was doing on the day of the assassination attempt against Saddam, whose motorcade was fired on as he visited Dujail on July 8, 1982. Ruwayyid said he was working as a telephone operator and that he held only a low-level position in the Baath Party at the time.
"I have no relation with the July 8 incident and I was not involved in any detentions that followed," he said.
Abdel-Rahman asked him about handwritten letters proseuctors presented last month, saying they were from Ruwayyid informing to police on Dujail families allegedly linked to the Shiite opposition in the wake of the shooting. Many of the families listed were arrested and several were eventually killed.
Ruwayyid denied the letters were his. "The state and the security services did not need the help of a small employee like me," he insisted.
Prosecutors then questioned Ruwayyid. It was not clear how many defendants would be heard Sunday and whether Saddam would be among them. After more than hour of testimony, Ruwayyid left the courtroom, and the next defendant, Ali Dayeh Ali, was called in to speak.
The court was silent as the defendants spoke. The defense team, including former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clarke, was present.
The session came a day after former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, on trial for the past four years on charges of crimes against humanity before an international court in The Hague, died in prison in the Netherlands. Milosevic, who suffered from chronic heart ailments, apparently died of natural causes, the U.N. tribunal said.
It was not immediately known if Saddam and his co-defendants knew about Milosevic's death. Their main source of news is their defense lawyers.
The trials of Saddam and Milosevic are significantly different. The Yugoslav leader's case was heard by a U.N court, while Saddam's is before an Iraqi tribunal, a point insisted on by Iraq's new leaders, who rejected an international trial.
The Iraqi court has also sought to carry out a swift trial to avoid the years-long process that Milosevic's death has abruptly ended, before a verdict could be reached. Iraq's new Shiite-dominated leadership has repeatedly said its constituents are eager to see a verdict.
So Saddam and the other seven were put on trial specifically for the Dujail incident, because prosecutors belived it presented the strongest case with the most documentation. Much larger, more famous cases; a 1988 poison gas attack on the village of Halabja that killed some 5,000 Kurds, or the 1991 crackdown on Shiites and Kurds that followed the first Gulf War, will be held off for later trials.
Last month, prosecutors began presenting documents they say directly pin Saddam to the Dujail crackdown, including a memo approving death sentences against the 148 Shiites signed by Saddam.
But to convict the former Iraqi leader, they will likely have to convince the five-judge panel that Saddam was aware that the crackdown went well beyond the actual authors of the assassination attempt and aimed to punish a large civilian population.
Families, including women and young children, were swept up in the arrests and spent years in prison, and large swaths of farmland owned by Dujail families were razed. A string of Dujail residents have testified they were tortured in prison.