Quote:
http://channels.attbusiness.net/inde...2a2c706bf36708
The first witnesses in the Saddam Hussein trial offered chilling accounts Monday of killings and torture using electric shocks and a grinder during a 1982 crackdown against Shiites, as the defiant ex-president threatened the judge and tried to intimidate a survivor.
Throughout the daylong session, Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin struggled to maintain order among boisterous defense outbursts. Saddam and his co-defendant and half brother, Barazan Ibrahim, gestured and shouted together, "Long Live Iraq!"
"I am not afraid of execution," Saddam proclaimed at one point.
Saddam told Amin he hoped "that you will endure my frankness."
"How can a judge like yourself accept a situation like this?" Saddam asked. "This game must not continue. If you want Saddam Hussein's neck, you can have it. I have exercised my constitutional prerogatives after I had been the target of an armed attack.
The trial's first witness, Ahmed Hassan Mohammed, delivered a rambling, nearly two-hour account of the events in Dujail in retaliation for an armed attack on Saddam's convoy.
Mohammed, who was 15 at the time, said he himself was tortured. "They blindfolded me, but I was so young, it kept falling." At the Baghdad detention center, he saw "a machine that looked like a grinder and had some blood and hair" on it, and "I saw bodies of people from Dujail.
When Mohammed objected to some of Saddam's remarks, the former president snapped: "Do not interrupt me, son."
Saddam's repeated outbursts found a receptive audience among some Sunni Arabs who watched on television. His shows of defiance tapped into Sunni resentment of the new order in Iraq, in which their once-ruling minority community is now dominated by the Shiite Muslim majority and the Kurds.
"These are the real men of Iraq, not those who hide behind their bodyguards," Jinan Mushrif, a 49-year-old Baghdad housewife, said with a laugh.
|
-------------------------
Though he has been in jail for almost two years, Saddam still has the authority to intimidate people, like the Judge presiding over him.
And the charisma to impress housewives in Baghdad.
This is an interesting moment in the History of the ME. I could be wrong, but I don't think that region or the Arab-Muslim people have ever had a major trial of a national leader.
I think I can safely conclude that the Arab press is not making the circus out of this that the Western Media would if it were a Western Leader tried. This is the ME's Trial of the century. Imagine if it was GW on trial. Everybody would have an opinion and not be afriad to voice it.
Currently, the collective wisdom in the Arab world is to just blame it all on Jews and Americans.
I predict the Saddam Trial is the moment in time, when the decent and conscientous people of the Arab world start to acknowledge the unpleasant realities of their govts and extremists. And they begin to voice, on a collective scale, criticisms of the status quo and a desire to change for the better.