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Iraq-Jordan

U.S. Team Is Sent to Develop Case in Hussein Trial

2004-03-07

WASHINGTON, March 6 â Following a White House directive, the Justice Department is sending a high-level team of prosecutors and investigators to Iraq to take charge of assembling and organizing the evidence to be used in a war crimes trial of Saddam Hussein, administration and Iraqi officials said in recent days. The previously undisclosed directive signed by Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, directs the government to take the initiative in preparing a case against Mr. Hussein that will ultimately be run by Iraqis. The order, issued in January, gives the Justice Department the authority to act as the lead agency in the effort.

This isn't a surprise.

The first officials in a delegation of about 50 lawyers, investigators and prosecutors from the Justice Department are leaving this weekend for Iraq, a Justice Department official said. The group will be assigned to a new office called the Regime Crimes Adviser's Office under the American occupation authority. The office, which is to include legal officials from other countries ~~that we trust completely~~, will be responsible for sorting through tens of thousands of pages of evidence and preparing a report that will amount to a blueprint for Iraqi prosecutors. Cartons of documents collected by human rights organizations with evidence of atrocities by the Hussein government have been airlifted into Iraq in recent weeks.

For his part, Mr. Hussein, who has been under interrogation by American officials since his capture on Dec. 14, has revealed little that could be used in any trial, government officials said in recent days. He has discussed few specific issues and at times comports himself as a ~~dancing queen~~ head of state, the officials said.

The effort to develop a case involves a delicate balancing act for the administration, which is trying to turn over as complete a brief as possible for the Iraqis to use against Mr. Hussein without appearing to dominate the process in a way that could undercut the independence of the Iraqi authorities. "We're trying to balance a bunch of interests here," said one senior administration official. "We intend to bring quite a few resources to the table but not too many so it looks like a completely American process."

Oh heck, make it as American as you want. Our friends won't care and our enemies won't believe us anyway.

Any trials of Mr. Hussein and other senior members of his administration could also carry important political implications in an election year. Administration officials say they expect the proceedings to provide graphic and substantial evidence of the horrific nature of Mr. Hussein's government.

Salem Chalabi, the Iraqi lawyer in charge of the war crimes issue, said in a recent interview that while he understood the administration's political needs, the trials might not occur until late in the year, after the American elections, and that Mr. Hussein might not even be the first defendant. "We need and welcome the Americans' help and role in this," Mr. Chalabi, nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, said in a telephone interview from Iraq. "But no one should misunderstand that this will be an Iraqi process with decisions by Iraqis."

Sure, fine, whatever, just make sure Carla del Ponte isn't within a thousand miles of the case.

Mr. Chalabi, who is in charge of the war crimes portfolio, ... stated, "We'll tailor the trial procedures in such a way that shows we learned the lessons of the Milosevic trial," he said, referring to how Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader and Yugoslav president, has used his war crimes trial as a platform to justify his actions and to try to put his accusers, the Western governments, on trial. "We don't want the tribunal and people like Saddam to be the principal teller of the history here," said Mr. Chalabi, who was educated at Yale and the Northwestern University Law School. "We want to bring very specific charges. And the defendants would only be allowed to bring witnesses and make their cases in connection with those specific charges." Such an approach, he said, would block Mr. Hussein from trying to call witnesses like Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to testify about the United States' earlier cooperation with the Hussein government.

Mr. Chalabi also said the Iraqis might choose to try lesser-ranking officials before Mr. Hussein. "If you try a smaller-ranking person for a war crime like the attacks on the Kurds and he is found guilty, then all we have to do with respect to Saddam Hussein is show the chain of command," he said.

Mr. Chalabi said the Iraqi Governing Council had assembled a list of about 45 Iraqi judges as candidates for the war crimes tribunals. The statute setting up the tribunals calls for three panels of five judges each to try people, and nine judges to serve on an appellate panel. He said those judges who were believed to have been sympathetic to the Hussein government were not eligible. Those who might be prejudiced because they or their families suffered at the hands of the government could not serve as judges but could only be investigators or prosecutors.

Doesn't leave too many candidates, does it?

The case that American officials will draft against Mr. Hussein and his aides will come from three caches of documents, administration officials said. The first is from 18 tons of Iraqi government documents seized by Kurds in 1991 when they overran Baathist Party offices in northern Iraq. Those documents were brought out of Iraq by Peter W. Galbraith, a former American ambassador to Croatia. A second cache of 22 cartons of documents and testimony of atrocities collected by Indict, a London-based human rights group that is now defunct, was airlifted to Iraq a few weeks ago by Pierre-Richard Prosper, the State Department's special ambassador for war crimes. The third batch is the collection drawn from hundreds of thousands of documents seized by American forces after Mr. Hussein's ouster.

Posted by:Steve White

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