Hussein Half Brother Named in Torture

As Saddam Hussein and other key defendants boycotted their trial, two women testified Wednesday that the former dictator’s intelligence chief had supervised and taken part in torture sessions where they were stripped naked, given electric shocks, hung from the ceiling and beaten.

The accounts were the most chilling so far in court proceedings in which the defendants’ tirades have often overshadowed the victims of their alleged crimes. It was the most damaging testimony yet against Barzan Ibrahim Hasan, who is Hussein’s half brother, in the courtroom drama that began in October.

One woman said Hasan had subjected her to a mock execution, firing a pistol near her head before beating her unconscious with it. The other woman said the intelligence chief had kicked her in the chest, breaking a rib. Both described their humiliation in rapid speech and high-pitched voices, seated behind a curtain to hide their identities.

“The torture was one-fourth of the suffering,” the first woman recalled, her voice choking over events nearly 25 years ago. “The undressing was the other three-fourths.”

Hussein, Hasan, three of the other six defendants and the entire team of defense lawyers refused to show up for the session in protest against what they consider bias by the new chief judge.

In his first session as the head jurist Sunday, Raouf Rasheed Abdel Rahman ousted Hasan and a defense lawyer for shouting, triggering a walkout by the other lawyers, Hussein, former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan and Awad Hamed Bandar, former head of the Revolutionary Court.

Of the remaining four defendants, lesser-known former Baath Party officials, one joined the boycott and remained in his cell as the trial resumed Wednesday after a two-day recess. Six court-appointed attorneys stood in for the defense team.

Hussein’s lead attorney, Khalil Dulaimi, said the boycott would continue unless the judge was removed from the bench. Dulaimi called him “an enemy to my client,” noting that Abdel Rahman had been imprisoned during Hussein’s rule for membership in an outlawed Kurdish nationalist movement.

The defendants are charged in the killings of more than 140 men and boys from Dujayl, a predominantly Shiite Muslim village, in collective punishment for a 1982 assassination attempt there against Hussein. The trial is the first of many planned for Hussein by the tribunal set up after his U.S.-led ouster in 2003.

Among other things, prosecutors are trying to prove that Hasan, then in charge of Iraq’s feared Mukhabarat intelligence agency, supervised the arrests of the victims along with several hundred others from Dujayl who survived four years of torture and imprisonment.

In testimony last year, Hasan acknowledged that he had investigated the attempt on Hussein’s life but insisted that he had no authority over the security police who made the arrests. He denied taking part in interrogations.

Two previous witnesses, however, placed him at the scenes of torture sessions, and Wednesday’s harrowing testimony appeared to bolster the prosecution’s case.

Hasan has long been said to have used the Mukhabarat as an instrument of savagery against suspected foes of the government. But the women who testified Wednesday were the first to accuse Hasan in court of having brutalized them personally.

Both said they were arrested within days of the assassination attempt and taken to the intelligence agency’s Baghdad headquarters, one of several detention centers where they and other Dujayl residents were to spend the next four years.

The first woman said Hasan took a special interest in her.

“They brought you in at last,” she said he told her, before she was taken for questioning in the building’s Operations Room, a torture chamber with electric paddles, rubber hoses, chains and blood on the floor.

Hasan, she said, wanted one thing -- a confession that she belonged to the Islamic Dawa Party, then an outlawed Shiite Muslim opposition group with ties to Iran.

“I told him I am innocent,” she said.

The next day Hasan entered the Operations Room brandishing a side arm, she recalled. The woman said she had been forced to undress.

“I have a very good pistol for you,” she said Hasan told her. “Then he fired it and struck me on the head. I passed out.”

Her tormentors weren’t finished, she testified. A day later they hung her by the wrists from a ceiling fan, gave her a chemical enema that made her entire body hurt, and left her there for hours, she said. By the end of the interrogations five days later, she added, she had a broken arm.

From behind the curtain, the woman’s words tumbled out too quickly for court stenographers to keep up. She sounded agitated. “Slow down,” the judge told her.

In a brief cross-examination, Hasan’s court-appointed attorney asked whether she was sure the official she saw was Hasan. “After all that happened to her, she couldn’t have a very good memory,” the attorney told the judge.

“Does he think I’m a foreigner?” the woman asked. “I am an Iraqi. I had seen him on TV.”

And the guards, addressing their boss by his first name, said, ‘Mr. Barzan, this is the prisoner,’ ” she testified.

The second woman described a similar litany of horrors, which she said were aimed at forcing a statement that her brother was a Dawa activist.

Her interrogators told the guards to “give her earrings,” she said, referring to wires with alligator clips that sent jolts of electricity into her body. At one point, while she was suspended by her wrists, Hasan came in and instructed her tormentors to hang her upside down, she said.

“Then he kicked me three times in the chest,” she said.

Asked by Hasan’s lawyer whether she had proof of injuries, she replied angrily that she was ready to be examined by a doctor. “I still have broken things in my chest,” she said.

Three other witnesses testified Wednesday, including a man who was in the Baath Party militia in Dujayl. He said Vice President Ramadan had given the orders to destroy Dujayl’s fruit orchards and palm groves with bulldozers, part of the systematic punishment inflicted on the village.

The court has yet to hear evidence of Hussein’s direct role in the crackdown. But prosecutors say they plan to present documentary evidence that he signed death sentences carried out summarily by Bandar’s Revolutionary Court. Two witnesses whose relatives were killed said Wednesday that they had seen such documents.

Judge Abdel Rahman ordered the proceedings closed for the first half hour to discuss the defendants’ boycott. Court officials did not say who attended or what took place.

“The judge really didn’t have much of a choice [but] to proceed,” said Jonathan Drimmer, a former U.S. Justice Department war crimes investigator. “If he had ruled that the trial should be postponed because Saddam and the others refused to appear, we might never see them in court again.”

But if the trial continues without defendants present, he added, “it’s hard not to be concerned about the fairness of the proceeding. The continual chaos is far from what you want to see in a landmark case like this.”