Trial, Execution & Aftermath (Read Part 1 here)
Michael A. Newton & Michael P. Scharf
Enemy of the State: The Trial & Execution of Saddam Hussein
St. Martin’s Press. 320 pp. $7.99 (Kindle)
Will Bardenwerper
The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards and What History Leaves Unsaid
Scribner. 247 pp. $26
Lisa Blaydes
State of Repression: Iraq Under Saddam Hussein
Princeton University Press. 354 pp. $35
Ali Khedery
“Why We Stuck with Maliki—and Lost Iraq”
The Washington Post, 3 July 2014;
Frontline Documentaries: “Losing Iraq,” July 2014 & “The Rise of ISIS,” October 2014, updated 2015.
James Risen, et al.,
“The Iran Cables: Leaked Iranian Intelligence Reports Expose Teheran’s Vast Web of Influence in Iraq”
The Intercept, November 2019
By Gary Kern
The Arraignment
On the morning of 1 July 2004, Saddam Hussein was taken by helicopter from Camp Cropper to Camp Victory and escorted, probably by Humvee, to a building he knew as the Baghdad Clock Tower, which put on display all the gifts he received as president. Recently, however, it had been converted from museum into courtroom, and he entered dramatically to television cameras, reporters, and a newly assembled team of jurors. He was dressed in an outfit that would mark his public transformation: a dark suit and a starched white shirt without tie; his black hair combed, his whitening black beard trimmed, his leaner body looking almost dapper.
This transformation had been effected by his keepers at the prison. Notified two weeks in advance, they had requested special funds, obtained his measurements and those of his eleven co-defendants, and purchased new suits, shirts, belts, shoes, and socks for the lot, plus stylish sunglasses with brand names, probably knock-offs. (FBI Special Agent George Piro bought the suit; another agent clipped the beard and hair.) The purpose was not to pamper Saddam but to show the world that the prisoners fared well in American hands. This was no Abu Ghraib. At the door, as cameras snapped, Saddam stood handcuffed between two burly guards. Tense at first, since he might have expected to face a death sentence, he loosened up when the handcuffs were removed in the courtroom and he learned for sure that he was only being arraigned for a trial. Thereupon, as in his first interrogation, he tried to take charge.
Asked to state his name by Judge Ra’id al-Saedi, a sturdy thirty-five-year-old graduate of Baghdad Law School, sixty-seven-year-old Saddam replied: “I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq.” The judge sought to correct him: he was the former president of Iraq. Saddam replied that he was still the current president—by the will of the people. Then he asked the judge by what authority he presumed to try him. Judge Ra’id explained that he presided over the Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT), also known as the Iraqi Special Tribunal, a court established under the US-led occupation.(More specifically, it was established by the Iraqi Governing Council under the Coalition Provisional Authority.) Saddam inquired: “So you represent the coalition?” The judge answered that no, he was an Iraqi citizen representing the Iraqi judicial system. He proceeded to read the charges against Saddam: gas attacks on Kurdish villages, mass murders to suppress uprisings, political assassinations, and the invasion of Kuwait. Saddam scoffed: “I don’t want to make you feel uneasy, but you know that this is all a theater by the criminal Bush.”
