Saddam Is A Monster, Yes. Was That Enough?

Amid chaotic scenes including the defendants abusing the judge and the entire defense team staging a short walkout, the trial of Saddam Hussain has being hearing evidence from a witness who says he saw torture with his own eyes.

"I swear by God I walked by a room and on my left I saw a grinder with blood coming out of it and human hair underneath," said 38-year-old Ahmed Hassan, who said he had been kept in room 63 at the Hakmiya intelligence headquarters in Baghdad.

Hassan, the first witness to face Saddam in court, said he was 15 when Saddam visited the village in July 1982 and Shi'ite militants tried to assassinate him.

Speaking technically as an individual plaintiff alongside the state, which is pressing charges of crimes against humanity, Hassan said he and his family were among hundreds of people rounded up in a security operation run by Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti after an attempt on Saddam's life in the village.

Barzan, one of Saddam's three younger half-brothers and the former head of the feared Mukhabarat intelligence service, is one of Saddam's seven co-accused in the case relating to the killings of 148 mostly Shi'ite Muslim men from Dujail.

"Barzan was present. He had red cowboy boots and blue jeans and a sniper rifle," Hassan, a stockily built worker with a round face and a graying beard, told the heavily fortified court in central Baghdad.

He said Saddam, from the Sunni Arab minority, asked a 15-year-old boy if he knew who he was. "He said 'Saddam'. Then Saddam hit him in the head with an ash tray," Hassan said.

There's far more in this vein. If true, and I fully expect it is, then it confirms waht everyone believed - that Saddam was a tyrranical despot.

He said it was while he was climbing the stairs there that he saw the meat grinder. "No one escaped torture," he said.

"They would put a mask on my eyes and because I was young it would fall down. I saw women being tortured," he said.

"My brother was given electric shocks while my 77-year-old father watched," Hassan said. "They told us, 'why don't you confess, you will be executed anyway'," he said.

"One man was shot in the leg with two bullets... Some people were crippled because they had their arms and legs broken."

He said they were held in Hakmiya for 70 days. While they were there a woman told a guard that her infant baby needed milk or he would die.

"He died and the guard threw him from the window," Hassan told the court. "Pregnant women gave birth in the prison. Their babies died."

Now the Right loves this stuff, because they feel it justifies the invasion of Iraq by their hero, Bush. But does it really? Does it really make the difficulty for progressive lefties like me that the rightwing pundits thinks it does?

Well no, I'm afraid it doesn't. And it certainly doesn't make me all warm and fuzzy feeling about tortures perpetrated by the new Iraqi government, by the USA or by Britain. At the time of the invasion there were plenty of details of Saddam's cruelties but I still didn't feel those alone were enough to justify a pre-emptive invasion. In the same way, I didn't feel the documented tortures of Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan, of Khyrgizstan, Nigeria or Thailand, or a dozen and more other nations justified invading them either.

Funnily enough, neither did the Bush administration. Its not me who has the problem explaining myself here.