Sham Sham[e] Sham[bles]

It's hard to assess whether Saddam is more evil than arrogant, or vise versa. The Herald's star reporter in the region, Paul McGeough, reports on the latest in Saddam's trial:

"THE witnesses come to recount harrowing days of torture and rape, of beatings and detention in grim desert camps. But Saddam Hussein is demanding a change of underwear.

The emotional cost of retelling stories that could only be whispered in days of dictatorship is all too painful, despite the electronic distortion of witnesses' voices to protect their identities; an overriding translation - laboured and monotone; and a 30-minute delay as their testimony is relayed to the world. But at times it seems to ebb away through procedural cracks, legal game-playing and political point-scoring before it might be captured and held for long enough to help us all grasp the brutal enormity of life in Iraq under Saddam.

Observers were stunned when Saddam leapt in. Seeming utterly deaf to the suffering of the witness's past, he demanded that the court investigate his present. "Does anyone ask Saddam Hussein whether he was tortured? Whether he was hit? I live in an iron cage covered by a tent under American democratic rule. You are supposed to come see my cage," he admonished Judge Rizgar Amin.

Threatening to boycott the court, he railed: "Are you deliberately hauling defendants before the trial when they are exhausted? We've spent three days in these shirts - no underwear, no chance to take a shower and no chance to smoke a cigarette if some do smoke, no chance to walk a couple of steps outside the small room. This is terrorism."

It's early days, but after the first five witnesses, the case for the prosecution over the death of 148 people from Dujail seems to lack direction. At the same time, the bones of a defence case are being revealed in cross-examination and interjections.

The prosecution does not seem to have come with what the the former CIA chief George Tenet might call a "slam dunk" case. The combined weight of the testimony is tragic beyond belief, but so far witnesses have directly linked only one of the defendants to the scenes of the crime - Saddam's half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti.

After a traumatic account of torture and what sounded like rape, the judge asked the first woman witness - Witness A - if she could specifically blame any of the defendants. "No," she said, only that she held Saddam responsible because he was running the country. Each witness has been asked the same question and the half-brother was the only one named - twice.

The defence is also combining politics with legal arguments. After Witness A detailed the horror of Abu Ghraib, the defence suggested that the Americans were no different to the Saddam regime, with one lawyer saying: "I agree things in Abu Ghraib were, until recently, bad. But did they use dogs on you? Did they photograph you?"

She remained silent. He pushed: "Did they?" "No," she replied.

More broadly, the defence appears to be shaping an argument that, in 1982, Saddam was a leader at war with neighbouring Iran and that the Shiite people of Dujail were linked to Iran through the outlawed Dawa party."