Saddam says White House lied about chemical arms

By Mussab al-Khairalla and Gideon Long

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Saddam Hussein accused the White House
on Thursday of lying, citing its prewar assertions that Iraq
had chemical weapons and its denial of his statement that he
had been tortured in American custody.

Speaking at the seventh hearing of his trial on charges of
crimes against humanity, the former president rekindled his
battle of words with Washington.

“The White House are liars. They said Iraq had chemical
weapons,” he told the court.

“They lied again when they said that what Saddam said was
wrong,” he added, referring to a White House dismissal of his
claim during Wednesday’s hearing that he was tortured.

Iraq developed chemical weapons in the 1980s and used them
against Iran and against Iraqi Kurds. It is now thought to have
destroyed its remaining stocks after the 1991 Gulf War.

Saddam said he had marks on his body to prove he had been
tortured by the Americans. He did not, however, show any
bruises and the judge has so far made no public ruling on
whether the allegation should be investigated.

“That’s one of the most preposterous things I’ve heard from
Saddam Hussein recently,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan
said in Washington in response.

“Saddam Hussein is being treated the exact opposite of the
way his regime treated those he imprisoned and tortured simply
for expressing their opinions. And so I reject that.”

Raed Jouhi, the magistrate who led the case against Saddam
and brought it to court, said the allegation was new to him.

“We didn’t receive a single complaint of abuse from the
defendants even when we asked them about their treatment,” he
told reporters at the court. “They have a constant power
supply, hygiene and good food.”

U.S. officials have said people should concentrate on the
lengthy and often harrowing testimony of the witnesses rather
than the former president’s headline-making outbursts.

COMPLAINTS AND INSULTS

There was more drama on Thursday in proceedings which have
sometimes been chaotic since they began on October 19.

The judge dismissed a courtroom guard after the defendants
complained he had threatened them, and Saddam’s half-brother
and co-defendant Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti accused prosecutors
of being former fellow-members of the Baath party.

“This is the biggest insult in my life, to be associated
with this blood-stained party,” replied one prosecutor, who
asked to be relieved of his duties because of personal insults
from the dock — a request dismissed by the Kurdish judge.

Barzan, who has emerged as the most outspoken of the
defendants, eclipsing even Saddam, complained about the way the
trial was being televised.

It is being broadcast with a delay of 30 minutes to allow
court officials to censor images and sound, which they have
sometimes done when Saddam or Barzan have been speaking.

“If the sound is cut off once again, then I don’t know
about my comrades but I personally won’t attend again,” Barzan
said on Thursday. “This is unjust and undemocratic.”

Barzan, dressed in a Grey robe and traditional
red-and-white headscarf, complained that after his arrest in
April 2003, he had been kept in isolation and forced by the
Americans to use an outdoor toilet surrounded by a low wall.

“For eight months I was alone. I was naked as the day I was
born,” the once-feared former intelligence chief said.

Saddam and his seven co-defendants are charged with
ordering the killing of 148 people from the mainly Shi’ite
village of Dujail, north of Baghdad, in the 1980s.

Prosecutors say Saddam ordered the killings in reprisal for
a failed bid to assassinate him in the village in 1982. Scores
of families from Dujail were rounded up and shunted between
jails around Iraq for four years after the attack.

All eight defendants deny the charges and have dismissed
the trial as a sham cooked up by Washington.

The two witnesses to testify on Thursday spoke from behind
a curtain to protect their identity, but, like some earlier
witnesses, said nothing directly implicating either Saddam or
the other defendants in the Dujail killings.

One recalled the abuse he saw in Abu Ghraib prison.

“The beating was continuous,” he said. “They would take a
group into the hallway, the guards would hit them with cables
and ask the group to crawl. The women would watch this and
scream because their kids were being hit.”

A third witness was due to testify later.

(Additional reporting by Deepa Babington, Aseel Kami, Ahmed
Rasheed and Alastair Macdonald)