[ppi] [ppiindia] Saddam's musings: Prison humdrum

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      Saddam's musings: Prison humdrum  
      By John F. Burns The New York Times

      TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2005
     


     
      BAGHDAD Saddam Hussein does not like the prison food served by his 
American captors. He has an aversion to being watched 24 hours a day. Something 
about his plight reminds him of Napoleon and of Mussolini. And he has been 
offered family visits but refused them, fearing that the women would cry to see 
how he lives now. 

      These were some of the thoughts of Iraq's former dictator as he bantered 
with fellow defendants, members of his defense team and courtroom guards on 
Monday during recesses at his trial. Unknown to Saddam and the others, 
microphones in the courtroom were still live, and their voices audible to 
Arabic translators working for foreign reporters in a glassed-off gallery 
nearby. 

      After nearly two years in solitary confinement, Saddam seemed buoyed by 
the chance to talk, especially with men who were once part of his ruling 
coterie. As the center of attention from the moment he entered the court he was 
again, if only briefly and on a confined stage, the dominant figure he was 
during his 24 years in power. 

      What he talked about mostly was the humdrum of prison life. Some of it, 
caught only incompletely, was inconclusive but enticing enough to inspire a 
regiment of courtroom psychologists. One passage seemed tinged with the darker 
possibilities. That came when Saddam's chief lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, was 
talking to him about the merits of the prosecution and defense teams. 

      "Mr. President, about what you suggested, I think that if we find a weak 
member in our team we take him off, but if there is a weak member in that team 
we leave him there," Dulaimi said, as recorded by a translator for The Chicago 
Tribune and passed to other news organizations. "It weakens their position and 
strengthens our position." 

      The reference to "that team" was interpreted as meaning the prosecution. 
The Tribune's notes, referring to Dulaimi, said, "He made a little underhand 
cupping motion with his hand as he said the words 'Take him off."' 

      What exactly did Dulaimi mean? Removing a weak lawyer from the defense 
team was understandable enough. But by what means did the chief lawyer imagine 
that he or anybody on the defense team could choose to leave - or not leave - a 
member of the prosecution team in place? 

      The notes threw no further light on the matter. 

      For the rest, Saddam seemed pretty much like any other prisoner. He 
compared notes on conditions at the U.S.-run detention centers with Awad 
al-Bandar, the former chief judge of the revolutionary court under Saddam. 

      "I don't care for the food," Saddam said. "I only eat what I like." Then 
he added, "I walk through four iron gates to get to the area where I can take 
my morning walk." The walking space, he said, was "maybe 9 meters long," or 
about 30 feet. "There's an eye on me 24 hours a day," he said. 

      Saddam then turned to the issue of family visits. "Do you see your 
relatives?" he asked Bandar. The notes added, "Saddam said he was offered 
family visits but he refused, saying something about how the women could be 
crying if they had to endure the circumstances of visiting him." 

      Next, the notes said, "Saddam said something incomprehensible - perhaps 
about his own destiny? - containing the names 'Bonaparte' and 'Mussolini."' 

      Saddam seemed, despite his feistiness in exchanges with the judge, to be 
in a chastened mood, about Iraq and his own state of affairs. 

      He told Dulaimi, the lawyer, to apologize to Ramsey Clark, the former 
U.S. attorney general, who was at the center of a protracted shuffling of 
papers between the chief judge and Saddam. 

      There had been an examination of Clark's credentials as a qualified U.S. 
lawyer, before Clark was formally approved to join the defense team. 

      As overheard by an Iraqi human rights representative attending the court, 
Saddam, without saying why, told the lawyer: "Apologize to Mr. Clark for me. 
This is a third world country. What can we do? It's painful for the image of 
Iraq." 

      At another point, talking to courtroom guards, he slipped momentarily 
into self-disparagement, saying "Saddam is not a lion anymore, so don't be 
afraid of him." 

      +++++++ 
         

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/29/news/sunnis.php

       Executions of Sunnis are alleged  
      By Dexter Filkins The New York Times

      TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2005
     


     
      BAGHDAD As the U.S. military pushes the largely Shiite Iraqi security 
services into a larger role in combating the insurgency, evidence has begun to 
mount suggesting that the Iraqi forces are carrying out executions in 
predominantly Sunni neighborhoods. 

      Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged recently, 
most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives 
have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation. 

      Some Sunni males have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet 
holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies 
apparently made by electric drills. Many have simply vanished. 

      Some of the young men have turned up alive in prison; in a secret bunker 
discovered earlier this month in an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad, U.S. 
and Iraqi officials acknowledged that some of the mostly Sunni inmates appeared 
to have been tortured. 

      Bayan Jabr, Iraq's interior minister, and other government officials 
denied any government involvement, saying the killings were carried out by men 
driving stolen police cars and wearing police and army uniforms purchased at 
local markets. "Impossible! Impossible!" Jabr said. "That is totally wrong; 
it's only rumors; it is nonsense." 

      Many of the claims of murder and abduction have been substantiated by at 
least one human rights organization working here - it asked not to be 
identified because of safety concerns - and documented by Sunni leaders working 
in their communities. 

      U.S. officials overseeing the training of the Iraqi Army and the police 
acknowledge that police officers and Iraqi soldiers, and the militias with 
which they are associated, may indeed be carrying out killings and abductions 
in Sunni communities, without direct American knowledge. 

      But they also say it is difficult, in an already murky guerrilla war, to 
determine exactly who is responsible. The U.S. officials insisted on anonymity 
because they were working closely with the Iraqi government and did not want to 
criticize it publicly. 

      The widespread conviction among Sunnis that the Shiite-led government is 
bent on waging a campaign of terror against them is sending waves of fear 
through the community, just as Iraqi and U.S. officials are trying to coax the 
Sunnis to take part in nationwide elections on Dec. 15. 

      Sunnis believe that the security forces are carrying out sectarian 
reprisals, in part to combat the insurgency, but also in revenge for years of 
repression at the hands of Saddam Hussein's government. 

      Ayad Allawi, a prominent Iraqi politician who is close to the Sunni 
community, charged in an interview Sunday in the British newspaper The Observer 
that the Iraqi government - the Interior Ministry in particular - was condoning 
torture and running death squads. 

      The allegations raise the possibility of the war's being fought by a set 
of far messier rules, as the Americans push more responsibility for fighting it 
onto the Iraqis. One worry, expressed repeatedly by U.S. and Iraqi officials, 
is that an abrupt pullout of U.S. troops could clear the way for a full-fledged 
sectarian war. 

      An investigator for the human rights organization operating in Iraq said 
it had not been able to determine the number of executions carried out by the 
Iraqi security forces. So far, the investigator said, the evidence was 
anecdotal, but substantial. 

      One Sunni group taking testimony from families in Baghdad said it had 
documented the death or disappearance of 700 Sunni civilians in the past four 
months. 

      More than 15 Sunni families interviewed for this article told similar 
accounts of people who identified themselves as Iraqi security forces taking 
their relatives away without warrants. The families said that most of those 
said to have abducted were later found dead. 

      The claims of direct involvement by the Iraqi security services are 
extremely difficult to verify. In a land where rumor and allegation are 
commonly used as political weapons, the truth is difficult to distill. 

      The chief suspects, according to Sunni leaders, human rights workers and 
a well-connected U.S. official in Iraq, are current and former members of the 
Badr Brigade. This is the Iranian-backed militia controlled by the Supreme 
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a principal member of the current 
government. 

      Since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, Badr gunmen 
are suspected of assassinating suspected insurgents and dozens of former 
officials in Saddam's government. 

      Since April, when the Shiite-led government came to power, Badr fighters 
have joined the security services, such as the police and commando units under 
the control of Jabr, the interior minister, who is also a senior member of the 
Supreme Council. 

      "The difference between the Ministry of the Interior and the Badr Brigade 
has become very blurry," the human rights investigator said. 

      It is not clear who is directing Iraq's security services, the government 
officials or the heads of the militias. 

      "You have these people in the security services, and they have different 
masters," the U.S. official in Baghdad said. "There isn't a clear understanding 
of who is in charge." 



      John F. Burns and Mona Mahmood contributed reporting. 

     


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