Saddam praises insurgency

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Saddam Hussein took the witness stand at his trial for the first time Wednesday and openly incited insurgents to continue resisting the U.S. military presence in Iraq, prompting the chief judge to close the session to the media and public.

Rather than answer capital charges that he orchestrated the torture and killing of Shiite Muslims in the 1980s, the deposed president delivered a rambling 49-minute harangue, his longest and most inflammatory of the five-month-old trial.

“Oh Iraqis, in your resistance to the invasion by the Americans and Zionists and their allies, you are great in my eyes and will remain so,” he declared, standing in the dock and reading from a yellow legal pad. “It is only a short time before the sun will rise and you will be victorious.”

An agitated Judge Raouf Rasheed Abdel Rahman, seeking to dampen the effect on one of Iraq’s bloodiest spasms of violence since the 2003 U.S-led invasion, shut off Saddam’s microphone nine times before halting the delayed television broadcast and closing the session. Later he recessed the trial until April 5.

The skirmish was a setback for the judge, who in recent weeks had imposed order on an unruly process and obliged Saddam and the seven co-defendants to address incriminating documents that include signed execution orders. The prosecution says 148 men and boys were slain without trial as collective punishment for an assassination attempt against Saddam.

“You are being tried in a criminal case for killing innocent people, not because of your conflict with America,” the judge lectured Saddam on Wednesday.

The Iraqi High Tribunal and its U.S. advisers had long sought to avoid such a spectacle, mindful of the ongoing insurgency here and the embarrassment posed by Slobodan Milosevic to his accusers in The Hague. The former Yugoslav president’s war crimes trial dragged for more than three years without a conclusion before his death in prison last week.