Tape bares Saddam's chilling admissions of war crimes

By JOHN F. BURNS
New York Times

Published on: 01/10/07

BAGHDAD, Iraq — The courtroom he dominated for 15 months seemed much smaller without him there to mock the judges and assert his menacing place in history.

But the thick, high-register voice of Saddam Hussein was unmistakable. In audio recordings made years ago and played this week in his absence, Saddam was heard justifying the use of chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s, predicting they would kill "thousands" and saying he alone among Iraq's leaders had the authority to order chemical attacks.

In the history of war crimes prosecutions against some of the last century's grimmest men, there can rarely have been a moment that so starkly caught a despot's unpitying nature.

On one recording, Saddam presses the merits of chemical weapons on Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, his vice-president, and now, U.S. officials believe, the fugitive leader of the Sunni insurgency that has tied down thousands of U.S. troops. Al-Douri, a notorious hard-liner, asks whether chemical attacks will be effective against civilian populations, and suggests that they might stir an international outcry.

"Yes, they're very effective if people don't wear masks," Saddam replies.

"You mean they will kill thousands?" al-Douri asks.

"Yes, they will kill thousands," Saddam says.

Before he was hanged for offenses in another case 10 days ago, Saddam had used the so-called Anfal trial, involving the massacre of as many as 180,000 Iraqi Kurds, as a platform for arguing that the chemical weapons attacks of the kind that devastated the town of Halabjah on March 16, 1988, were carried out by Iranian forces then fighting Iraq in an eight-year war.

But the recordings told another story. Court officials gave no hint as to how they obtained the recordings, which Iraqis familiar with Saddam's voice said seemed to be authentic. But they appeared to have been made during meetings of his Revolutionary Command Council and of the Baath Party High Command, two bodies that acted as rubber stamps for his decisions. Saddam regularly ordered meetings to be recorded, according to Iraqis who knew the inner workings of Saddam's dictatorship.

Saddam sounds matter of fact as he describes what chemical weapons will do. "They will prevent people eating and drinking the local water, and they won't be able to sleep in their beds," he says. "They will force people to leave their homes and make them uninhabitable until they have been decontaminated."

As for the concern about international reaction, he assures al-Douri that he alone will order the attacks. "I don't know if you know this, Comrade Izzat, but chemical weapons are not used unless I personally give the orders," he says.

When Iraq resumed the genocide trial of its former leaders on Monday, Saddam's high-backed, black vinyl seat at the front of the dock was left ominously empty. Something about the six remaining defendants, including Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's cousin, who was known among Iraqis as Chemical Ali for his role in overseeing the attacks on the Kurds, suggested that they felt orphaned without the commanding presence of Saddam.

Gone were the cries of "President!" as Saddam entered the court to join them in the dock, and gone, too, was the emboldened posture they took from Saddam, with frequent challenges and insults to witnesses, prosecutors and judges.

Perhaps Saddam's hanging, and the humiliating taunts he endured from witnesses and guards as he stood with the noose around his neck, had broken the last illusions among those surviving him that they could somehow evade a similar end.

When the chief judge, Muhammad Ureibi al-Khalifa, began the proceedings by abruptly cutting the microphone as Majid stood to intone a prayer in memory of Saddam, the former dictator seemed to be judicially, as well as existentially, dead. But the anticlimactic beginning swiftly gave way to the most astonishing day of testimony since Saddam and his associates went on trial. And, once more, it was Saddam, this time in an involuntary orgy of self-incrimination, who dominated.

In the sequence of scratchy recordings — some with the dialogue quite clear, some barely decipherable — Saddam repeatedly showed the ready resort to brutality that made Iraq a nation seized with fear during his 24 years in power. At one point, he is heard telling one of his generals to summarily execute field commanders who fail to adequately prepare their defenses against Kurdish guerrilla raids.

He cites as a precedent "some commanders who abandoned their positions when they found themselves in an awkward situation, who deserved to have their necks cut, and did." At another point, he tells subordinates to execute any internal security officials who fail to stop Iraqi soldiers sneaking home from the front on fake passes in Iraq's eight-year war with Iran. "If you arrest any of them, cut off their heads," he says. "Show no mercy. They only joined the security to avoid having to join the army and fight Iran."

One recording revealed, more clearly than anything before, Saddam's personal involvement in covering up Iraq's attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, the program that ultimately led to President Bush sending U.S. troops to overthrow him. Talking to the Iraqi general heading Iraq's dealings with U.N. weapons inspectors until weeks before the 2003 invasion, he counseled caution in the figures being divulged on the extent of Iraq's feed stocks for chemical weapons, so as to disguise the use of unaccounted-for chemicals in the attacks on the Kurds.

But it was Saddam's chilling discussion of the power of chemical weapons against civilian populations that brought prosecutors and judges to the verge of tears, and seemed to shock the remaining defendants. One of the recordings featured an unidentified military officer telling Saddam that a plan was under development for having transport aircraft carry containers packed with up to 50 napalm bombs each rolled out of the back of the cargo deck and dropped on Kurdish towns.

"Yes, in areas where you have concentrated populations, that would be useful," Saddam replies

Another recording involves a General Thabit, who was not further identified by the prosecutors, telling Saddam that his forces had used chemical weapons in the northern sector of Kurdistan, but that "our supplies of the weapons were low, and we didn't make good use of the ones we had." The general notes that Iraq's production of mustard gas and sarin, a nerve gas, was "very low," and says they should be used sparingly. "We're keeping what we have for the future," he said.

Before they recovered enough to begin pleading their innocence, Saddam's erstwhile companions in the dock buried their heads in their hands, gazed at the floor, and glanced furtively toward TV cameras transmitting live coverage of the trial. Majid shifted uneasily in his seat as one recording had him telling officials to warn Kurdish refugees that they would be attacked with chemical weapons if they attempted to return to their villages.

The prosecutor, Munkith al-Faroun, came to court as almost the only person who attended Saddam's execution on Dec. 30 to emerge with an unsullied reputation. It was he, as he and others confirmed, who attempted to halt the taunts hurled at Saddam as he stood with the noose around his neck, moments before the trapdoor opened. Over the hubbub, an illicit camera phone recording showed Faroun calling out for silence, "Please, no!" he said. "The man is about to be executed."

But back in the courtroom, Faroun became, again, the man holding Saddam to account — and, in one poignant moment, counseled restraint among those who have expressed outrage over the manner of the former ruler's execution. That moment came after the court watched television footage taken in the aftermath of the Halabjah attack, which more than any other event focused world attention on the atrocities committed under Saddam.

The footage showed the horrors: a father wailing in grief as he found his children lying along a street littered with bodies; dead mothers clutching gas-choked infants to their breasts in swaddling clothes; young sisters embracing each other in death; and trucks piled high with civilian corpses. "I ask the whole world to look at these images, especially those who are crying right now," Faroun said, referring to the outpouring of sympathy for Saddam.

Much of the criticism directed at Iraq's new government for rushing Saddam's execution has centered on that Saddam went to his death without being judged for the worst of his crimes. The case in which he drew the death penalty on Nov. 5 involved the execution of 148 men and boys from the mainly Shiite town of Dujail after an alleged assassination attempt against Saddam there in 1982.

But the recordings played at Monday's trial session, seemingly eliminating any doubt about Saddam's role in the attacks on the Kurds, may go a long way to answering that criticism.

U.S. Justice Department lawyers who have done much of the behind-the-scenes work in sifting tons of documents and other evidence gathered after the invasion of 2003 had never hinted that they held the trump card, judicially and historically, that the audio recordings seem likely to be.