They never did discover why they’d been summoned to the palace in the first place.
No one from the afternoon’s gathering could have known where Saddam had gone after he disappeared, but these impromptu artistic salons seemed partially aimed at stoking his creative energies. Brought by the country’s great artists into closer connection with his muse, he would hunker over sheets of paper and try his hand at composing his own works of literature—works such as Zabiba and the King, whose themes seem telling.
The allegorical tale features a king imprisoned in a palace that is rife with disloyal advisors, perpetually scheming in the shadows. The king craves genuine human interaction, and discovers it in the person of Zabiba, a plainspoken peasant woman who wins his heart with her candor and affection. She says to him, “Isn’t loneliness the worst enemy of one in power? And to put an end to this loneliness, one must flee it.” When the King remarks that he loves to “have a good laugh with the common folk,” Zabiba responds by asking him why he stays “locked up in the palace . . . sitting in house arrest even though nobody ordered you to do it.” She continues, “Your palace is a den for breeding demons. It looks like a place where Shaitan [Satan] himself chose to breed . . . and where Shaitan dwells, you can be sure betrayal is being plotted.”
CHAPTER 29
Baghdad, Iraq—summer of 2006
Saddam was losing weight, and the Americans were getting nervous. Recognizing that his physical well-being was a form of leverage, Saddam had launched a hunger strike—in part to protest what he claimed was insufficient security for his defense lawyers. Indeed, Khamis al-Obeidi had recently been gunned down in Baghdad, the third member of the defense team to be killed. With Saddam’s initial handpicked lawyers packing their bags and decamping to Amman, the court-appointed Iraqi legal team was forced to assume the defense duties.
The results of Saddam’s hunger strike were beginning to show. He wasn’t under the illusion that his protest would impact the results of the trial, but he knew that at a minimum it would cast another cloud over the proceedings. All of this worried the Americans, who were intent on ensuring that the trial and detention were carried out as professionally as possible. The Americans were “terrified that Saddam would die,” recalls William Wiley, the Canadian lawyer participating in Saddam’s defense.
Whether as a result of pressure from Saddam, or out of solidarity, the former president’s codefendants made at least a token effort to turn down food—though one of Saddam’s deputies, former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan, would have a particularly tough time of it. Ramadan had previously achieved notoriety in 2002 by suggesting that the growing tension between Iraq and the United States be resolved by staging a duel between Saddam and President George W. Bush, to be presided over by then U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan. A man of apparently large imagination, he also proved to have a large appetite. When the courthouse guards dutifully delivered him a tray of food, he must have thought that he could quickly wolf it down without anyone seeing. He was either unaware of, or had forgotten, the closed-circuit TV cameras blanketing the bowels of the IHT, monitored around the clock by scores of security personnel. Sure enough, they noticed the mustachioed former vice president looking around furtively before proceeding to scarf down his meal. Remarkably, Saddam also found out—even in prison, he could seem all-knowing—and, predictably, Ramadan received a “good bollocking” from his former boss, recalls the lawyer Wiley.
Increasingly concerned by Saddam’s refusal to eat, a representative from the Regime Crimes Liaison Office (RCLO), the office that had been established by the Americans to help manage the trial, asked Wiley if he could find a way to get Saddam’s defense team to convince their client to break his fast. Wiley possessed natural charm coupled with a raconteur’s wit, so he was a good choice to play the role of ambassador. No one on the defense team seemed willing to deliver this message to Saddam—except for one man, Wiley would discover. There was a retired brigadier general from the Iraqi military’s legal services branch, an older man who possessed a certain gravitas and who appeared remarkably unafraid of Saddam. The old officer’s reward for his apparent courage was to be deputized by the group to ask Saddam to please start eating.
Losing no time, the older general immediately raised the former president on the video-teleconference (VTC) terminal connecting the defendants’ subterranean cells to an aboveground room used by their lawyers. Choosing his words carefully, the general began: Mr. President, we’re very worried about your health, as you haven’t eaten in quite a few days.
Surprisingly, he was not cut off, and so, slightly emboldened, the general went on to say, All of us are concerned about you, and we would encourage you to resume eating, whatever you think of this process. He then concluded, And you have to do what I say . . . because I’m older than you.
The other lawyers assembled in the VTC room held their breath and braced themselves.
After a tense silence, Saddam burst out laughing. Okay, he agreed, I will eat.
The old man had understood Saddam’s character and had intuited what kind of approach would be most likely to yield dividends. According to Wiley, the general had smartly bet that the former president was “probably looking for a face-saving way out of the hunger strike and had appealed to Saddam’s vanity by first saying how worried they were about his health, and then taking a bold chance to lighten the mood by finishing off with a joke.” Wiley believes the stratagem also worked partly because the deliverer of the message was a respected military man, and not a political hack.
Meanwhile, closing arguments in the Dujail trial had begun, and Saddam hadn’t appeared in court for a few weeks. Wisely, to maintain order the judge had decided to bring in the defendants one at a time. It was Saddam’s turn as day thirty-five of the Dujail trial began, and he immediately complained that he’d been on a hunger strike for nearly twenty days, and in the hospital for the last three, where he said he’d been force-fed from a tube.
On this day Saddam was without the international defense team that he and his daughter Raghad had retained, most choosing to hunker down in nearby Amman, Jordan, in continued protest over their security. They also felt that their attendance served to legitimize what they’d concluded was an inherently unjust trial. Saddam had long considered the trial a sham, and in strategy sessions with his defense team he’d often seemed more interested in Ramsey Clark’s stories about working in LBJ’s White House than in the particulars of his case. Saddam’s closing argument in response to the charges stemming from the Dujail crackdown was, therefore, in the hands of the substitute Iraqi lawyers put in place by the RCLO.
Saddam immediately set out to intimidate his court-appointed Iraqi defense lawyers, since he saw them as complicit in enabling what he considered a fraudulent trial to move forward. With the courtroom crowd and those watching on television as his audience, Saddam menacingly jabbed a finger at his court-appointed attorneys and shot them an icy glare of the kind that in earlier years might have constituted a death sentence. He warned, “If you present the argument, I will consider you my personal enemy and an enemy of the state.” Building a head of steam, he continued, “You’re going to read what the Canadian man [William Wiley] wrote. I challenge you, did you write it? I don’t want history to be stained by this defense.” In fact, Saddam didn’t want court-appointed lawyers to present any defense, since he feared it would make the trial appear more legitimate.
“You do not write history, people write history,” Judge Rauf interjected, trying to cut off Saddam’s threats and grandstanding.
When it finally came time to deliver the closing argument, the court-appointed defense lawyer given the task grew so nervous that he claimed to fall ill, and a colleague was designated to take over. The essence of the latter’s argument—which the Canadian Wiley had, in fact, assisted with—was that the prosecution hadn’t presented any convincing evidence that Saddam exercised control over the state organs that carried out the crackdown following the failed as
sassination attempt in Dujail. The lawyer argued that there was no established chain of command or forensic evidence linking Saddam to the subsequent imprisonments and alleged executions.
Though it was a clever defense, the suggestion that he hadn’t been in charge of what his subordinates had allegedly done was more than the narcissistic Saddam could bear. He interrupted the defense presentation, thundering, “Not a single plane can fly without my order.”
His sudden proclamation was at once fabulously revealing, and entirely self-defeating. Nothing could have made his priorities more clear; defending his imagined status as all-powerful ruler was of more importance than exploiting a nuanced legal argument to bolster his defense.
Saddam then pivoted to the subject that had really been bothering him. “When you issue the death penalty, it should be by firing squad. Remember that I am military and I should not be hanged like a normal criminal.” The judge reminded Saddam that the trial was not yet over, and that the court hadn’t yet issued a verdict. Nonetheless, discussing the possible execution had sparked Saddam’s belligerence. “I’m sure that you hear the sounds of weapons just as we hear them, though we are in jail. This is the sound of the people,” he said.
“You are provoking the killing of people by car bombs,” Rauf responded.
“I provoke against America and against the invaders—I urge the people to kill the aggressive invaders,” Saddam fired back.
Judge Rauf then made what would perhaps be his most controversial comments of the trial. “Around sixty Iraqis die daily, while just two American soldiers are killed. Who are the victims here?” the judge asked.
“I do not incite killing,” responded Saddam.
“Well, if you command your groups of mujahideen, or whatever their names, ask them to attack the Americans in their camps, not the civilians in the streets, they are innocent,” said the judge.
Rauf’s comments, while remarkably tone deaf in light of the American blood that had been shed to bring Saddam to justice, nonetheless made sense when viewed from the perspective of an Iraqi nationalist trying to show Saddam that Iraqi civilians bore the brunt of the suffering caused by the insurgency.
Saddam’s fiery call to kill Americans, meanwhile, was dramatically at odds with the avuncular demeanor of the prisoner who was affectionately nicknamed “Abu,” or “Father,” by his Lebanese-American interpreter, and who once referred to his American guards as his “sons.”
Who was the real Saddam? All that could be said definitively was that his demeanor would change the instant he joined his guards in the elevator following a court appearance. Whether he’d had a good day in court or a bad one, “he left it in the courtroom,” says Private Dawson, recalling how “even if Saddam had just gotten mad at the judge, he would step out of the courtroom and joke with me.”
One moment Saddam would be in the courtroom “yelling and swinging his arms and calling the judge a sissy boy,” says Hutch, and the next he’d be relaxing contentedly in his subterranean cell, “like he was proud of himself for giving them hell.” The former president effortlessly downshifted from “game time” to “play time.”
Often, Hutch would fetch for Saddam some of the Raisin Bran Crunch that he liked and watch as the old man enjoyed it with some tea. Then the courtroom firebrand of a half hour earlier would peel off his suit and fire up a cigar, puffing on it for a few minutes before collapsing onto his cot for a nap, “exhausted from the show.”
CHAPTER 30
Baghdad, Iraq—fall of 2006
If there was only a day or two between trial appearances, the American soldiers would keep Saddam at the IHT to avoid exposing him to the unnecessary risk of shuttling him back and forth from the Rock by helicopter. At the Crypt, the Super Twelve were generally more focused on the prosaic concerns of everyday life than on the history-making drama unfolding in the courtroom above. They accepted that their contribution to the trial was ensuring that Saddam was properly cared for.
Among their daily responsibilities was making sure Saddam was well fed, and for this, like everything, they developed a routine. Hutch would pick up Saddam’s food from the chow hall and deliver it to his cell in a cardboard box. He made sure that each item on the ridged paper plate was segregated from the neighboring types of food, using a napkin to carefully wipe off the rims between the sections. Saddam loved seafood or red meat as an entree. If the food wasn’t presented to his liking, he sometimes wouldn’t touch it. He wouldn’t complain, but he could be stubborn. He’d simply open the box, examine it, close it, and quietly push it to the side.
When Hutch was at the Crypt and neither guarding Saddam nor sleeping, he liked to log on to the Internet in the media room, which the soldiers could use when the computers were available. He’d spend most of his online time emailing his wife and kids, and occasionally check to see how his Longhorns were faring as college football season heated up.
There was also a small room near the Crypt where the soldiers had been able to hook up a DVD player and a PlayStation as another way to pass the limited amount of time they weren’t on shift. One afternoon Private Dawson was in the fourth quarter of a heated NFL 2K5 game when another Super Twelve member, Lieutenant Jackson, not long removed from his commissioning as an Army officer, walked in. The young lieutenant announced, “You’re done,” and, as Hutch later recalled, demanded that Dawson turn off his game and allow Jackson and an officer friend to watch “some female show like Sex and the City.” Hutch was as annoyed by the officers’ imperiousness as he was puzzled by their choice of programming.
A veteran of a number of combat deployments, as compared to Lieutenant Jackson’s zero, Hutch jumped to young Dawson’s defense, declaring, “No, sir, that’s not how things go.” He was sick of what he saw as the lieutenant throwing his weight around unnecessarily, especially as he was “straight out of college and shouldn’t have been ordering soldiers around in their off time.” Eventually, a captain and a first sergeant rushed in to defuse the situation. Hutch didn’t have a dog in the fight but was responding to what he felt was a violation of the unspoken code governing the relationship between young officers and enlisted soldiers. Maybe, too, the grind of this deployment had him chafing at Army life, a mode of existence in which rank so often determined what a guy could or couldn’t do.
When they got back to the Rock, Hutch noticed that Saddam’s cell was growing increasingly cluttered with papers and books. While the outdoor rec area provided the former president a place to escape his claustrophobic cell and enjoy a change of scenery and some more space, it sometimes got uncomfortably cold out there in the evening as the days grew shorter and winter approached. There was a small room between Saddam’s cell and the outdoor rec area that was nearly empty. It occurred to Hutch that they could clean up this room and convert it into a small office and indoor smoking area for Saddam. That way he’d have some more space to read, write, enjoy his cigars, and manage his correspondence. Without being asked, Hutch, Tasker, and a few others set to work transforming the old storage room into an “office” for the former president.
They spent an afternoon clearing out the ten-by-sixteen-foot room and preparing it for Saddam. Hutch spent a few hours scrubbing scuff marks off the walls. The soldiers managed to dig up a small wooden desk and leather office chair that had been abandoned elsewhere in the old palace, and they installed the furniture in the center of the room. They hung a small Iraqi flag behind the desk to make it seem more official and befitting a head of state.
Hutch looked forward to being the one who escorted Saddam to the new office they’d constructed for him. After the soldiers had completed the finishing touches, Hutch led Saddam out of his cell and toward the rec area, but at the right moment he took a detour and surprised the old man, revealing to him the newly outfitted office space. Hutch smiled with pride as the former president absorbed what he’d been gifted with.
Saddam had thought he was headed to the rec area so, when they entered, he was carrying his wet wipe box full
of cigars and a water bottle. Hutch explained what he and the soldiers had done. Saddam slowly examined the room, almost as if inspecting it, making small adjustments to the location of the desk and checking the stability of the chair. While he did so, Hutch quickly scrubbed some residual dust off the desk and chair with a baby wipe.
Saddam stepped back, surveyed the new space one final time, and beamed.
He went back to retrieve stacks of his yellow legal pads from his cell, purposefully delivering them to his new office. While wearing a dark jacket over his dishdasha, he sat behind the desk and rifled through his paperwork. Meanwhile, Hutch and another guard sat across from him—the same place those who were summoned for an official audience with him in years past would have sat. The scene felt a little unreal—almost as if Saddam were pretending, a child playing make-believe.
The former president would go on to spend a portion of each day there, busying himself with his reading and writing. He even carried his beat-up old transistor radio into his new work area, listening to that curious mix of Iraqi and American music as he went about his business. He worked with a sense of urgency, scribbling entries in a journal he kept so that “the people . . . may know the facts as they are and not as those who want to counterfeit them,” as well as composing his poems.
The soldiers enjoyed pleasing Saddam, in part because he was pleasant in turn and surprisingly low-maintenance. Hutch would later recall that “everyone brought things to him, but he didn’t require it. You always hear stories of the rich and famous people having a fit because somebody didn’t take all the green M&Ms out of their bowl of candy or something like that. He was never like that. He appreciated everything he had; he took very good care of his clothes and things, because that was the way he was raised.”
The Prisoner in His Palace Page 15