Saddam and the seven former members of his regime face possible execution by
hanging if they are convicted in connection to the crackdown launched in Dujail
following a July 8, 1982, shooting attack on Saddam's motorcade in the town.
Last month, Saddam stood up in court and boldly acknowledged that he ordered
the 148 Shiites put on trial before his Revolutionary Court, which eventually
sentenced them all to death. But Saddam insisted it was his right to do so since
they were suspected in the attempt to kill him.
Before Saddam's testimony, his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim, who headed the
feared Mukhabarat intelligence agency at the time of the Dujail attack, was
questioned for more than three hours by the chief judge and prosecutor, who
presented him with half a dozen Mukhabarat documents and memos about the
crackdown.
Barzan, a secular Sunni, interspersed his commentary with passages from the
Koran, Logan reports. At times, this drew laughter from the Iraqi journalists
listening in the gallery, Logan says.
One after another, Ibrahim insisted that the documents were fake and that his
signatures on them were forged. "It's not true. It's forged. We all know that
forgery happens," he said.
In previous sessions, Dujail residents have testified that Ibrahim personally
participating in torturing them during their imprisonment at the Baghdad
headquarters of the Mukhabarat intelligence agency, which Ibrahim headed. One
woman claimed Ibrahim kicked her in the chest while she was hung upside down and
naked by her interrogators.
But Ibrahim insisted the Mukhabarat agency was not involved in the
investigation into the attack on Saddam and denied any personal role in the
crackdown.
"I didn't order any detentions. I didn't interrogate anyone," he said, adding
that he resigned from the Mukhabarat in August 1983. "There is not a single
document showing that I was involved in the investigation."
Chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi showed the court a series of Mukhabarat
documents on the Dujail case from 1982 and 1983, some of which bore signatures
he said were Ibrahim's. One of them was a memo from Ibrahim's office asking
Saddam for rewards for six Mukhabarat officers involved in the Dujail crackdown.
"This is not my signature. My signature is easy to forge, and this is
forged," Ibrahim said.
He said the same of another document that listed Dujail families whose
farmlands were razed in retaliation for the shooting. Another document, signed
by an assistant to Ibrahim, talked of hundreds of Dujail detainees being held by
the Mukhabarat at its headquarters and at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
Ibrahim said that memo as well was false.
At the end of Wednesday's session, Abdel-Rahman ordered forensic tests on the
signatures to determine their veracity.
Ibrahim insisted that the General Security agency, not the Mukhabarat,
carried out the Dujail crackdown. He said his sole role came on the day of the
shooting, when he went to the village and ordered security officials to release
Dujail residents who had been arrested.
The defense has argued that Saddam's government acted within its rights to
respond after the assassination attempt on the former Iraqi leader. The
prosecutor has sought to show that the crackdown went well beyond the authors of
the attack to punish Dujail's civilian population, saying entire families were
arrested and tortured and that the 148 who were killed were sentenced to death
without a proper trial.