He had warned the White House in his briefings.ĮMILE NAKHLE: In the end, they did not listen, really. They had planned to go to war way back, right after 9/11. You know, we are the superpower, the only superpower. Of course, we can remove Saddam with no problem. Except there was because we did not think about Monday morning. RENEE MONTAGNE, BYLINE: The trial of Saddam Hussein opened today in Baghdad.ĪMOS: That chaos was the backdrop for Saddam's trial two years after his regime was toppled, seeping into the judicial process that was supposed to be a model. Iraq had become a volatile mix of violence, a growing insurgency hostile to the U.S., a brewing sectarian war. The grievances of Iraq's Sunnis, Shias and Kurds played out in the Iraqi courtroom.įEISAL AL-ISTRABADI: Saddam wasn't supposed to be a defendant in that trial.ĪMOS: The plan was to start with lower-level officials, says Feisal Istrabadi, Iraq's first U.N. ISTRABADI: This was supposed to be a practice run for the judges because they were applying international law for the first time. You know, trying a murder case is not the same as trying a mass murder case.ĪMOS: But Iraq's Shia Muslim leaders were in a hurry, he says. They demanded the trial start with a mass murder indictment of 148 Shia men in the town of Dujail. MONTAGNE: The former Iraqi dictator faces charges of crimes against humanity for ordering a mass killing of Shiite men in 1982.ĪMOS: Bill Wiley, a Canadian war crimes investigator, was observing the trial for United Nations when American officials tapped him to be an adviser to Saddam's defense team. It was a last-ditch move to make this a legitimate trial with a credible defense.īILL WILEY: Because the defense lawyers were generally pretty bad. I ended up writing a lot of the defenses for Saddam and the other accused.ĪMOS: Still, the evidence was overwhelming, direct orders signed by Saddam presented in court. The verdict guilty, with more indictments to come - a genocide charge for gassing an entire town of Kurds in the 1980s, dropping chemical weapons from helicopters, then the murder of 90 members of the Dulaim tribe, all Sunni Muslims. But instead of an orderly court process, the Shia-led government seemed intent on revenge rather than justice.
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