In Courtroom, Hussein Acts Out Old Role With Flourish

Saddam Hussein, front addresses the court as Awad Hamed al-Bander, front, left, part seen, and Taha Yassin Ramadan, right, listen in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone on Monday. (David Furst - AP)

The subject of the immediate charges against him is in essence the extermination of a village. Yet Hussein acts as though he can barely remember the events and would be appalled to have sullied his hands with them.

"Is it my job to investigate Iraqis?" he asked.

He has treated court officials with contempt, sometimes tempered with forced magnanimity. The court, he charged Tuesday, is "a stooge of the occupation."

"I'm your president. I'm your leader for more than 30 years," he told Rizgar Mohammed Amin, the chief judge, who has the authority to sentence him to death. "I never saw you before this court. If I saw you on the street, I wouldn't know you."

Ibrahim has joined the strategy. On Tuesday, he addressed the chief prosecutor, Jaafar Mousawi, as "comrade." When the black-robed Mousawi objected, Ibrahim gleefully reminded him that they were in Hussein's Baath Party together.

"Is it shameful to be called comrade? You are my comrade. You were with me in the party."

Rather than paying for a crime, Hussein implies that he might be hanged at the altar of the global power game that preoccupied him for years. The United States and his other longtime nemesis, Iran, might have finally gotten him, he suggests.

Hussein pointed out that the assassination attempt near Dujail was carried out by members of the Dawa party, a Shiite religious organization, as if that made it obvious that a much more powerful force was at work than village peasants.

"Iran ordered them to assassinate Saddam Hussein. That's why they did it," he said. And while not quite confessing to the executions that followed, Hussein on Monday sounded perplexed that anyone would bother to investigate the event.

"Isn't it Saddam Hussein's right as a president, or the right of any president of Hungary or other country, to follow those aggressors who shot at him?"

The bigger opponent, Hussein has said repeatedly during the trial, is the United States. He said Tuesday that the United States' professed reasons for invading Iraq were false and that "to stay in Iraq a long time, they have the task of a trial."

"Do the American people know what kind of crime their nation committed against humanity?" he wondered aloud.

Then he said, with regal resignation: "I will not complain. I will do that for Iraqis' sake, and the nation, because I am full of faith." He added, "The biggest concern of mine is my people and my nation."

Sometimes, though, he loses his presidential composure. On Tuesday, he observed courtroom decorum for the most part, addressing the judge with a modicum of respect. But after a 10-hour session, the judge's announcement that the trial would resume Wednesday was too much for Hussein.

Proclaiming himself "exhausted," he declared his temporary prison quarters in Baghdad to be unacceptable. "I stayed in the same shirt, I have no underwear, there is no space," he complained.

When the judge stuck to the schedule, Hussein vowed, "I will not be in a court without justice." And as the chief judge left the court, Hussein yelled, "Go to hell, you and all the agents of America."

Special correspondents Salih Saif Aldin in Tikrit and K.I. Ibrahim in Baghdad contributed to this report.