BAGHDAD — Iraq’s top security official is calling for the dismissal of the chief judge trying Saddam Hussein, saying the judge is letting Saddam and his co-defendants dominate the courtroom and intimidate witnesses.
“The judge is doing a very bad job,” National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie told The Washington Times.
“I think he should be replaced, yes, absolutely,” said Mr. al-Rubaie, who is expected to emerge as a contender for prime minister after Thursday’s elections for parliament.
“People are very angry at his weakness in handling Saddam,” Mr. al-Rubaie said, referring to Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin’s performance at hearings this week.
The judge faced harangues from a truculent Saddam alongside his irascible and at times leering half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti, the former intelligence chief.
At one point al-Tikriti told a witness, a 38-year-old man, to “go to hell.”
“The witnesses are under attack now, and being spat on by Barzan Tikriti and being called names and cursed by Saddam,” Mr. al-Rubaie said.
In contrast, the judge had been far too deferential to a man seen by the majority of Iraqis as a criminal, he said.
“You don’t tell Saddam: ’Mr. Saddam you are a man of law.’ I heard the chief judge say it with my own ears,” said the national security adviser, who has attended two days of hearings inside the heavily guarded courtroom in a building that once housed the Ba’ath party headquarters.
Mr. al-Rubaie said he worried about public disquiet resulting from the slow progress of the trial and especially from the opportunities being given to Saddam and his co-defendants to complain about their treatment even as witnesses describe torture.
“People want to eat the judge now and not Saddam,” Mr. al-Rubaie said.
“God awful, [Saddam] didn’t have a clean shirt for two days. Just imagine how the woman who lost seven of her children listened to that complaint — and to the judge allowing all that,” he said.
The issue was particularly painful to Mr. al-Rubaie, who spent years in exile after being jailed three times in Iraqi prisons during the 1970s.
He said he, himself, was tortured at Baghdad’s notorious intelligence headquarters, including being hung up by his hands from a ceiling hook while being lashed, and having electrodes attached to parts of his body.
“I go to the trial — or watch it on television — and it should give me psychological healing,” he said. “But quite honestly all it’s giving me are sleepless nights.”
Similar worries about the conduct of the trial were expressed by a Shi’ite politician close to the most powerful Shi’ite religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani.
“[Ayatollah al-Sistani] is angry with the way Saddam is performing in court and being allowed to get away with his behavior,” said Ali Aldabbagh, a lawmaker who is running for re-election to parliament in Thursday’s national election.
Saddam and seven co-defendants are on trial for the 1982 murder of more than 140 Shi’ites from the town of Dujail, near Baghdad, after a failed assassination attempt on Saddam.
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