Word: hussein
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...This isn't how the trial of Saddam Hussein was meant to turn out in the imagination of U.S. officials back in the winter of 2003, when he was found in that Tikrit spider-hole. J. Paul Bremer, the American administrator of Iraq, had hoped seeing Saddam on the dock would allow Iraqis to exorcise the demons he had unleashed upon them during his long reign. More recently, as the country descended into a sectarian war, some U.S. and Iraqi officials clung to the hope that the trial would remind Shi'ites and Sunnis how they had once been unified...
...documents spoke for themselves. Beginning in February, lawyers prosecuting Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity began showing a series of papers that silenced even Hussein and his raucous defense attorneys and co-defendants...
...There was a memo dated June 16, 1984, with Hussein's signature approving the death sentences of 148 Iraqi Shi'ites from Dujail, where gunmen tried to kill Hussein in 1982 with an attack on his motorcade.? There were the death certificates of some 100 Dujail villagers whose families were sent to a desert prison.? Some of the documents were hand written, like the lists showing vehicles that carried 399 detainees from a Baghdad jail to what amounted to a concentration camp in southern Iraq in 1984. Some of the prisoners sent to the camp were children below...
...early days of the proceedings, Hussein was at turns hostile, glib and dismissive toward the court as prosecutors pressed their case against him for the systematic brutalization of Dujail following the assasination attempt. There were of course the periodic outbursts from Saddam, his lawyers and his co-defendants, chiefly Hussein's half brother Barzan Ibrahim.? But as often as not the proceedings in the early part of the trial went forward quietly, with Hussein acting bored. He'd sit for long stretches with his head resting on one of his hands. Sometimes, as court was in session, he'd zone...
...even the horrific testimony of victims seemed to affect him. One after another, people who'd been tortured by Hussein's henchmen offered stories of victims being hung from their feet and given electric shocks.? In one session, Hussein nearly shouted down the first witness who appeared in court to detail the atrocities...