Woman gives tearful testimony in Saddam trial
Identity of witness kept secret as fourth session begins in Baghdad
The Associated Press
Updated: 7:05 a.m. ET Dec. 6, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A woman witness testified Tuesday from behind a screen and her voice disguised to protect her identity, weeping as she told of beatings and electric shocks at the hands of Saddam Hussein's agents in the trial of the former president and seven lieutenants.
Saddam sat stone-faced, taking notes on a pad of paper, as the woman, known only as "Witness A," testified how she was taken into custody after the 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in the town of Dujail.
Wadah al-Sheik, an Iraqi intelligence officer who died of cancer last month, ordered her to take off her clothes, she said, testifying from behind a light blue cloth curtain.
"I was forced to take off my clothes, and he raised my legs up and tied up my hands. He continued administering electric shocks and beating me," she said.
Several times, the woman broke down in tears, at one point moaning, "God is great. Oh, my Lord." She strongly suggested she had been raped, but did not say so outright.
When the judge asked her about the "assault," she said "I was beaten up and tortured by electrical shocks." She repeated that she had been ordered to undress.
"I begged them, but they hit with their pistols," she said. "They made me put my legs up. There were five or more and they treated me like a banquet. Is that what happens to the virtuous woman that Saddam speaks about?"
'I could not even eat'
The judge advised her to stick to the facts. She said she was thrown into a room with red walls and ceiling in an intelligence department building and that prisoners were given only bread and water to eat.
"I could not even eat because of the torture," she said. She said prisoners were later moved to Abu Ghraib -- the notorious prison on Baghdad's western outskirts -- where the torture continued.
Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin told the court that defense attorneys would be told the identity of the witness but they must not pass them to anyone outside the tribunal.
Witnesses have the option of not having their identities revealed as a security measure to protect them against reprisals by Saddam loyalists. The first two witnesses — both males who took the stand Monday — allowed their names to be announced and their pictures to be transmitted around the world.
The witness's testimony at first was hampered by technical difficulties. When she first spoke, defense attorneys complained they could not hear her because her voice was being distorted to protect her identity.
The judge then ordered the voice modulator to be shut off, but then people in the visitors' gallery and the press viewing area could not her any of her testimony.
Stormy session
The Tuesday hearing began after a dramatic, often chaotic day Monday when for the first time, Shiite victims of a 1982 crackdown confronted the former leader and his lieutenants. They are on trial for the killing of more than 140 Shiites in the town of Dujail north of Baghdad and could be executed by hanging if convicted.
A defiant Saddam sought to take control of the proceedings through boisterous outbursts, declaring at one point that “I am not afraid of execution” and denouncing the trial run according to “American rules.”
His half brother and co-defendant Barazan Ibrahim spat into the gallery and got into shouting matches as the judge struggled to maintain order.
Despite the sometimes free-for-all atmosphere Monday, the trial’s first witnesses offered chilling accounts of killings and torture using electric shocks and a grinder during a 1982 crackdown against Shiites.
One witness said he saw a machine that “looked like a grinder” with hair and blood on it in a secret police center in Baghdad where he and others were tortured for 70 days. He said detainees were kept in “Hall 63.”
The trial’s first witness, Ahmed Hassan Mohammed, delivered a rambling, nearly two-hour account of the events in Dujail in retaliation for an armed attack on Saddam’s convoy.
Chilling details
Mohammed recalled how security agents rounded up townspeople of all ages, from 14 to more than 70.
“There were mass arrests. Women and men. Even if a child was 1-day-old, they used to tell his parents, ‘Bring him with you,”’ Mohammed said.
He said the agents took him and the others to the intelligence headquarters in Baghdad, where they were tortured before being transferred to Abu Ghraib prison.
Mohammed said his brother, who was at 17 at the time, was tortured while his 77-year-old father watched. Interrogators threatened to rape the prisoners’ daughters and sisters if the men did not sign confessions, he said.
“Some men just said ‘I will sign anything but leave my sisters alone,”’ he said.
Mohammed, who was 15 at the time, said he himself was tortured. “They blindfolded me, but I was so young, it kept falling.” At the Baghdad detention center, he saw “a machine that looked like a grinder and had some blood and hair” on it, and “I saw bodies of people from Dujail.”
The witness exchanged insults with Ibrahim, Saddam’s half brother, telling him “you killed a 14-year-old boy.”
“Go to hell,” replied Ibrahim, who was intelligence chief at the time.
“You and your children go to hell,” the witness replied.
The judge then asked them to avoid such exchanges.
As the testimony continued, Saddam’s lawyers objected that someone in the visitors’ gallery was making threatening gestures and should be removed. Ibrahim leaped to his feet, spat in the direction of the gallery, and shouted, “These are criminals.”
The judge ordered the person removed from the gallery.
Heated exchange
Mohammed, fighting back tears, described how there had been “random arrests in the streets, all the forces of the (Baath) party, and Thursday became ‘Judgment Day’ and Dujail has become a battle front.”
“Shootings started and nobody could leave or enter Dujail. At night, intelligence agents arrived headed by Barazan” Ibrahim, he said.
Ibrahim interrupted him: “I am a patriot and I was the head of the intelligence service of Iraq.”
But Ibrahim also contested Mohammed’s testimony, insisting there was no “Hall 63” and no place in the intelligence building large enough to accommodate as many prisoners as the witness said were there.
The testimony drew an angry response from Saddam, who suggested that Mohammed needed psychiatric treatment and accused the court of bowing to American pressure.
"When the revolution of the heroic Iraq arrives, you will be held accountable," Saddam warned the chief judge.
"This is an insult to the court," Amin responded. "We are searching for the truth."
"How can a judge like yourself accept a situation like this?" Saddam asked. "This game must not continue. If you want Saddam Hussein's neck, you can have it. I have exercised my constitutional prerogatives after I had been the target of an armed attack."
When Mohammed objected to some of Saddam's remarks, the former president snapped: "Do not interrupt me, son."
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