First witness in Saddam trial testifies before court

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The first witnesses in the Saddam Hussein trial offered chilling accounts Monday of killings and torture using electric shocks and a grinder during a 1982 crackdown against Shiites, as the defiant ex-president threatened the judge and tried to intimidate a survivor\nOne 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."\nBut defense lawyers questioned the reliability of witnesses who were only 15 and 10 at the time and walked out of the tumultuous session when the judge refused to allow former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark to address the court on Saddam's behalf. They returned after the judge relented.\nThroughout the daylong session, Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin struggled to maintain order among boisterous defense outbursts. Saddam and his co-defendant and half brother, Barazan Ibrahim, gestured and shouted together, "Long Live Iraq!"\n"Everyone must remain calm and be civil," Amin said repeatedly.\nSaddam and his seven co-defendants could be hanged if convicted on charges stemming from the deaths of more than 140 Shiites in the town of Dujail after an assassination attempt in 1982.\n"I am not afraid of execution," Saddam proclaimed at one point.\n"Why don't you just execute us and get rid of all of this," Ibrahim shouted at the judge.\nThe 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.\nMohammed recalled how security agents rounded up townspeople of all ages, from 14 to more than 70.\n"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.\nHe 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.\nMohammed 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.\n"Some men just said 'I will sign anything but leave my sisters alone,'" he said.\nMohammed, 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."\nThe witness exchanged insults with Ibrahim, Saddam's half brother, telling him "you killed a 14-year-old boy."\n"To hell," replied Ibrahim, who was intelligence chief at the time.\n"You and your children go to hell," the witness replied.\nThe judge then asked them to avoid such exchanges.\nAs the testimony continued, Saddam's lawyers objected that someone in the visitors' gallery was making threatening gestures and should be removed. Ibrahim leapt to his feet, spat in the direction of the gallery, and shouted, "These are criminals."\nThe judge ordered the person removed from the gallery.\nMohammed, 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."\n"Shootings started and nobody could leave or enter Dujail. At night, intelligence agents arrived headed by Barazan" Ibrahim, he said.\nEarlier, Mohammed said he was told that Saddam asked a 15-year-old boy if he knew who he was. "He said 'Saddam'. Then Saddam hit him in the head with an ashtray"