Hussein Verdict Near After Trial With 'Serious Shortcomings'

BAGHDAD, Nov. 3 -- The Americans serving as legal advisers for Saddam Hussein's trial likened it to the judgment at Nuremberg. But as the trial nears its conclusion, with announcement of a verdict scheduled for Sunday, they admit the reality turned out messier.

From the day the proceedings opened 12 1/2 months ago, spectacle attracted more attention than substance. Images of Hussein's co-defendants coming to court in their underwear and sitting with their backs to judges, and of Hussein himself shouting with his finger perpetually thrust in the air, stole the scene from the aging, downtrodden Iraqis testifying to wrongs done them by their country's former leader.

Outside the courtroom, the onset of sectarian killing between Sunni Arabs and Shiite Muslims, the majority sect that now rules Iraq, made the U.S.-backed quest to convict Hussein increasingly irrelevant for many Iraqis. The alleged crime for which he and seven others were being tried occurred more than two decades ago, in 1982, when an attempt to assassinate Hussein in the Shiite town of Dujail unleashed a lethal campaign of retaliation against its residents.

"What Saddam did to Dujail is the same as this government is doing now," said Naeem Khalid, a 42-year-old taxi driver in Baghdad's Karrada district. "At least what Saddam did was in self-defense."

Nevertheless, when the Iraqi High Tribunal announces the verdict for Hussein and his co-defendants, the ruling will be of tremendous importance, Western legal experts say.

"It was quite a messy trial, as the whole world knows," said Michael P. Scharf, a professor of international law at Case Western Reserve University who advised Iraqi officials during the trial. But "all the arguments about a fair trial are pretty much moot if the evidence is not in question," he added.

The trial is the first of its kind against a former leader to be conducted in his own country, by his own people. As in the Nuremberg trials, when the World War II Allies prosecuted leading Nazi figures for war crimes, world opinion and history will judge whether the new Iraqi government and its U.S. patrons conducted a fair trial or a victor's vendetta.

In addition, Hussein's trial may also set an unintended but potentially crucial legal precedent for the Bush administration, Scharf said. By cracking down on Dujail in response to one assassination attempt and in a bid to discourage others, Hussein was dealing with a continuing threat, like President Bush after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Scharf said.

"The biggest question of our time, that we're living through right now, is where do you draw the line on war in terror? This is the first trial in modern time to address that issue," Scharf said by telephone from the United States.

"It's a question the United States is facing right now in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay," Scharf said. The findings "are going to be just as applicable to the United States as to Saddam Hussein."

In Baghdad, U.S. officials close to the trial deny that the announcement of the verdict, set for two days before U.S. congressional elections, was timed to give a boost to the Republican Party.

"If we had that kind of power to set dates like that, the trial would have been concluded in about five months," said one of the officials, who all spoke on condition they not be identified further. "The fact of the matter is: No way."