As Trial Begins, Chilling Testimony Confronts Saddam
By Richard Bodreaux Los Angeles Times
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The first witnesses to take the stand against Saddam Hussein confronted him Monday with chilling testimony of an aerial assault on their village, mass arrests, torture by electric shock and executions after the Iraqi leader survived an assassination attempt there.
Two witnesses, men now in their 30s, stood glaring at the deposed leader a few feet away as each outlined his memory of the horrors experienced in their youths. Saddam and some of his seven co-defendants, on trial for the murders of 146 villagers, repeatedly disrupted the proceedings and furiously dismissed the charges.
In the tumultuous day-long hearing, leadoff witness Ahmad Hassan Mohammed recalled that after his arrest he peeked through his blindfold in a torture chamber and saw a machine that “looked like a grinder’’ with hair and blood on it.
Jawad Abdul-Aziz Jawad, who followed him to the stand, told how Iraqi troops used helicopters to fire on their homes in the village within hours of the 1982 assassination attempt in Dujayl and later sent bulldozers to destroy the palm groves and orchards that were the village’s livelihood.
“There were mass arrests -- women and men,’’ Mohammed said in a rambling, tearful account often disrupted by outbursts from the defendants. He said he was taken to a field of half-buried bodies. “I recognized them,’’ he said. “They were my neighbors.’’
Mohammed sparred angrily with Saddam, betraying no fear of the man who one held the power of life and death over millions of Iraqis. He pressed on when the former president tried to butt in, at one point drawing a sharp rebuke.
“Do not interrupt me, son!’’ Saddam exclaimed.
Both witnesses identified themselves on camera on the third day of the televised trial, despite the violence surrounding the case.
Two defense lawyers have been killed since the Oct. 19 opening of the trial, which has been recessed twice. Three of the five trial judges remain nameless and off-camera.
The next nine complainant witnesses have asked to testify off camera -- two of them from behind a curtain so that even those in the courtroom cannot see their faces.
Neither of Monday’s witnesses offered evidence directly linking Saddam to the slayings of the people from Dujayl, a predominately Shiite Muslim village 35 miles north of Baghdad that was a flashpoint of opposition to his Sunni Arab-led Baath Party.
Instead, Mohammed painted a harrowing picture of the former regime’s dungeons as experienced by a 15-year-old boy.
He said intelligence police knocked at the door of his family’s home the day after the assassination attempt. They took him, his parents, seven brothers, four sisters and a niece to Room 63 of the Hakmiya intelligence headquarters in Baghdad, a large hall filled with Dujayl residents.
“Every few minutes the door was opened and they threw in people,’’ he said.
Relatives were tortured in front of one another, he said, and vats of acid and rubber hoses were used. His brother Moshen was interrogated with the aid of an electrically charged whip in front of his father, Mohammed said. And it was there he recalled seeing the bloody grinder.
Seven of his relatives died in captivity, he said. Beaten but spared with his life because of his youth, he was banished with others to a desert prison camp for four years.
Saddam and his co-defendants are accused of ordering or carrying out the roundup, interrogation and torture of about 1,500 villagers in Dujayl after a small group of gunmen opened fire on the presidential motorcade on July 8, 1982. They are also charged with criminal destruction of tens of thousands of acres of village land.
Some of the slain villagers were shot dead in the immediate aftermath; most were executed without trial. The Dujayl case is the first of about a dozen being prepared against the 68-year-old ex-president and former aides by the new Iraqi High Tribunal.
Under Iraqi law, judges question each witness first, and then allow the prosecution, the defense lawyers and the defendants, in that order, to cross-examine. The first witnesses in this trial are “complaining’’ witnesses, victims of the repression in Dujayl who were called by the prosecutor.
In practice Monday, Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin struggled to keep control as defendants, witnesses and lawyers shouted at one another.
The strongest testimony of Monday’s hearing was against former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan and Barzan Ismail Hasan, Hussein’s half-brother and former head of the intelligence service.
Both witnesses Monday placed Hasan in the village right after the incident. “He had red cowboy boots and blue jeans and a sniper rifle,’’ said Mohammed.
Jawad, 10 at the time, said he also recalled seeing Ramadan in the village. He said his father pleaded with the vice president and won a reprieve from the destruction of his orchard.
As the testimony wore on, the former president, his aides and their lawyers began to reveal more of their defense strategy. After losing a 95-minute battle to delay the trial on procedural grounds, they attacked the credibility of both witnesses.
For the first two days of his trial, Saddam had essentially ignored the charges against him and used the courtroom as a political stage, clashing with the chief judge and playing to his supporters in Iraq’s insurgency.
Saddam was full of bluster again Monday. He threw down a notebook and pounded a table. He ridiculed the court as “made in America.’’ He told the chief prosecutor: “Hey, you in the glasses, don’t you recognize your leader of 30 years?’’
He said he was not afraid to be hanged, the maximum sentence he faces. And he appeared to threaten the judge, saying: “When the revolution of the heroic Iraq arrives, you will be held accountable.’’
But for the first time, Saddam addressed the charges against him, defending his decision to send Hasan and other officials to Dujayl to investigate the attempt to kill him.
“Isn’t it Saddam Hussein’s right as a president, or the right of the president of ... any other country to follow these aggressors who shot at him?’’ he asked the court.
Khalil Dulaimi, Saddam’s lawyer, repeatedly asked both witnesses how they could remember so many details from their childhood.
Hasan called the leadoff witness a liar and yelled: “He should act in the movies!’’
“I remember all this,’’ Mohammed responded. “I wrote it down so that people would never say it was made up.’’
