Theatrical Saddam Trial Adjourned

A defiant Saddam Hussein pleaded innocent to charges of murder and torture as his long-awaited trial began Wednesday with the one-time dictator arguing about the legitimacy of the court and scuffling with guards.

The first session of the trial lasted about three hours, and the judge ordered an adjournment until Nov. 28.

Saddam and his seven co-defendants could face the death penalty by hanging if convicted for the 1982 massacre of nearly 150 Shiites in the town of Dujail. They are being tried in the former headquarters of Saddam's Baath Party.

After presiding judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin, a Kurd, read the defendants their rights and the charges against them — which also include forced expulsions and illegal imprisonment — he asked each for their plea. He started with the 68-year-old ousted dictator, saying, "Mr. Saddam, go ahead. Are you guilty or innocent?"

Saddam — holding a copy of the Quran he brought with him into the session and held throughout — replied quietly, "I said what I said. I am not guilty," referring to his arguments earlier in the session.

Amin read out the plea, "Innocent."

The confrontation then became physical. When a break was called, Saddam stood, smiling, and asked to step out of the room. When two guards tried to grab his arms to escort him out, he angrily shook them off.

CBS News correspondent Lara Logan reports for CBSNews.com that when the guard tried to grab Saddam again, he

It ended with Saddam walking independently, with the two guards behind him, out of the room for the break.

Many Iraqis and others across the Middle East were glued to their television sets to watch the first-ever criminal trial of an Arab leader.

The proceedings were aired with about a 20-minute delay on state-run Iraqi television and on satellite stations across Iraq and the Arab world. However, technical quality was poor, with the sound cutting out frequently and the picture going blank several times.

But a too-busy President Bush did not watch, even as the White House hailed the trial as a key step in Iraq's transition to a functioning democracy.

"Saddam Hussein is facing Iraqi justice," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "The trial is a symbol that the rule of law is returning to Iraq. We hope this trial will help bring some closure for the Iraqi people to their country's dark past."

Americans today do not believe that the overall result of the Iraq war has been worth the costs – just 32 percent said it was in the latest CBS News poll conducted in October, 2005. But until now, Americans had consistently rated the specific act of removing Saddam from power as more worthwhile than the war's results, generally. But that is not the case any longer: in that recent poll only 34 percent saw removing Saddam as being worth the costs.

In May of 2003, 65 percent of Americans surveyed supported the ousting of Saddam.

Nidhal Al-Sultan was a soldier in Iraq for most of the 1980s but has no mercy now for his old commander in chief as he went on trial Wednesday in Baghdad.

"I'd like for him to be executed," said Al-Sultan, 47, who came to the United States with his family in 1997. "With the bad guys, if you don't play their game, they will keep harming you. If you have a criminal and you're not punishing him, he will keep doing his crimes."

Al-Sultan was among Iraqi expatriates across America who closely watched television news Wednesday.

The Dujail trial is the first of about a dozen cases prosecutors intend to bring against Saddam and members of his inner circle in an attempt to hold them accountable for a 23-year regime that saw tens of thousands of Iraqis killed and imprisoned. The slayings that are the subject of Saddam's trial took place after an attempt on Saddam's life there, CBS News correspondent Charlie D'Agata reports. Although Saddam promised only the guilty would be punished, scores were killed.

And

CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk said the outcome of Saddam's tribunal, the rest of which is being strategically delayed until November so evidence can be reviewed, may be obvious. Saddam will likely be found guilty because "there is 'smoking gun' evidence of his responsibility for the 1982 massacre of civilians, including children, in Dujail."

Other cases likely will tackle his regime's Anfal Offensive that killed 180,000 Kurds, a poison gas attack on Halabja that killed 5,000 and a crackdown on rebellious Shiites and Kurds in 1991.

The five-judge panel will both hear the case and render a verdict. The identities of the judges have been a tightly held secret to ensure their safety, though Amin's name was revealed just before the trial began. The courtroom camera repeatedly focused on him, without showing the others.

At the trial's opening, Saddam — looking thin with a salt-and-pepper beard and wearing a dark gray suit and open-collared white shirt — stood and asked the presiding judge: "Who are you? I want to know who you are."

"I do not respond to this so-called court, with all due respect to its people, and I retain my constitutional right as the president of Iraq," he said, brushing off Amin's attempts to interrupt him. "Neither do I recognize the body that has designated and authorized you, nor the aggression because all that has been built on false basis is false."

The judge tried to get Saddam to formally identify himself almost a dozen times, but Saddam repeatedly refused. After several moments, at the judge's request, Saddam sat down.

For a while, it seemed as if the judge was in danger of losing control of the courtroom as he and Saddam argued back and forth, Logan reports.

Later, Amin read the defendants their rights and the charges against them, and told them they face possible execution if convicted. Saddam slumped low in his chair, occasionally writing notes on a yellow pad throughout the hearing.

The chief prosecutor, Jaafar al-Mousawi, then outlined the case.

Saddam's lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, responded by asking for the names of witnesses who will testify for the prosecution — names that have been kept strictly secret to prevent reprisals against them. Amid said al-Dulaimi could ask the prosecutors for the names but did not say if he would order them handed over.

Saddam and his fellow defendants were seated in three rows inside a pen made of white iron slats, a scene — were it taken out of context — that made them look more like worshippers in the pews of an Anglican church.

But the bars, neck high as the men sat on black chairs, rose as a symbol of their status as some of the most-wanted criminals in the world and the kind of obstructed view of the world they will have for the rest of their lives.

Starting the session, Amin called the defendants into the room one by one. Saddam was the last to enter, escorted by two Iraqi guards in bulletproof vests guiding him by the elbow. He glanced at journalists watching through bulletproof glass from an adjoining room. He motioned for his escorts to slow down.

After sitting, he greeted his co-defendants, saying, "Peace be upon you," sitting next to co-defendant Awad Hamed al-Bandar, former head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court.

The other defendants include Saddam's former intelligence chief Barazan Ibrahim, former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan and other lower-level Baathist civil servants. Most were wearing traditional Arab robes and complained they were not allowed to have headdresses, so court officials brought out red headdresses for them. Many Sunni Arabs consider it shameful to appear in public without the checkered scarf, tied by a cord around the forehead.

Wednesday's combative atmosphere evoked images of the war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, accused of committing atrocities during his rule in the Balkans in the 1990s. Like Saddam, Milosevic has argued with judges and denied the court's legitimacy.

The difference is that Milosevic is being tried at a U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, while Saddam is facing a tribunal of his people. The Iraqi tribunal is partly funded by the United States and organized by a government dominated by Iraqi ethnic groups he once oppressed.

Saddam was ousted after U.S.-led forces swept into Iraq in March 2003 and marched in to Baghdad. He fled the capital and was on the run for nearly eight months until American forces found in him hiding in a cellar in a rural area outside his hometown of Tikrit north of Baghdad on Dec. 13, 2003.

He has been held since in a U.S. detention facility at Baghdad International Airport.