Sobbing witness recalls torture

BAGHDAD — The first woman to testify in the murder and torture case against Saddam Hussein told a horrific story yesterday of being stripped naked, subjected to electric shocks and beaten with cables.

Her weeping was evident, even though she was hidden behind a blue screen and spoke through a voice modulator. She called on God, then continued her painful description of being tortured at age 16 by Saddam’s henchmen.

“He said take off your clothes,” the woman, identified only as “Witness A,” said before breaking into sobs. “They hit me with the pistol and forced me to take off my clothes, and he lifted my legs upward and beat me with cables and asked me to talk. I was like a feast.”

“There were about five officers, I am an Iraqi woman,” she cried.

The witness was one of many arrested in the farming town of Dujail after a 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam. More than 140 residents were killed in the ensuing massacre.

The former president sat impassively through much of the testimony, but exploded at the end of the day, saying he refused to return to an “unjust court.”

“Are you deliberately hauling defendants before the trial when they are exhausted?” he shouted at the judge, complaining that he had not been able to change clothes or shower in days.

“This is terrorism,” Saddam yelled. “I will not return. I will not come to an unjust court. Go to hell.”

During the day, “Witness A,” her voice electronically distorted to disguise her identity, described being held with another girl and fed only bread and water for days.

“After all that torture, do you think we could eat?” she asked.

She went on to describe how she and others, including her younger brother, were taken to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, repeatedly tortured and abused, then dumped in the desert.

Witness A began to describe how a fellow prisoner was left to give birth without help so that the child died between her legs, but Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin interrupted, asking her to stick to her own case.

Judge Amin, under pressure from Iraq’s Shi’ite majority government to push on with the case against Saddam and seven co-defendants but trying to maintain international and national legal standards, has repeatedly told witnesses not to stray from the facts of their own cases.

He has also silenced Saddam and others when they have tried to disrupt the court, halting the live video feed through which the trial is being watched nationwide.

Iraqis are divided on the merits of the trial. Some clearly want Saddam to sit and listen to those who suffered, then face the death penalty; others feel the court, set up under U.S. occupation, is not legitimate.

Still others have quit watching altogether.

“I watched 10 minutes, then stopped,” said Nabeal Younis, a senior lecturer at the international studies center of Baghdad University. “I want to see a real trial that will give people confidence in the courts, in the laws and institutions. This trial is not real.”

But for Saddam’s victims who are coming face to face with the ex-dictator for the first time, the process appeared very real. And even though Witness A could not directly link Saddam with the abuses she suffered, she would not let the former dictator relinquish responsibility.

“He is the president of the country, he should be the protector of the people. When people are tortured in prison, who ordered that?” demanded the woman, who said she was held for four years.

Two other witnesses testified yesterday, also anonymously.

“Witness B” was an older woman, but her public testimony was halted after problems developed with the voice modulator.

“Witness C,” a man, said he and his family — including two baby sisters — were arrested and spent almost three weeks at the Baghdad intelligence center before being transferred to Abu Ghraib.

He described being tortured with electric shocks through clips placed in his ears. The witness said his father died at the prison after being beaten on the head.