French Lawyer Says He Will Defend Saddam (HAS DEFENDED A NAZI WAR CRIMINAL IN PAST)

PARIS (Reuters) - The French lawyer known for defending Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and guerrilla Carlos the Jackal said Saturday that Saddam Hussein's nephew had chosen him to represent the deposed Iraqi president.

Jacques Verges told Reuters in a telephone interview he had received a letter from Ali Barzan al-Tikriti, whose father Barzan al-Tikriti is Saddam's half-brother, asking him to defend the former Iraqi dictator, captured by U.S. forces in December.

The U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad is setting up a war crimes tribunal to try Saddam on charges which may include genocide and crimes against humanity.

Washington has said the 66-year-old Saddam, whose interrogation is being led by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), should be tried in Iraq.

Verges, who is also defending former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, said he had accepted the job of defending Saddam and suggested his strategy would focus on the role played by the United States and other countries in supporting the Iraqi leader in the 1980s.

"We know very well that the Anglo-Americans armed Saddam Hussein, that the chemical weapons were sold by the allies," Verges said in a telephone interview.

Washington helped Saddam obtain intelligence and military equipment and, according to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control document in the U.S. Senate record, Iraq also obtained from the United States biological agents that could have been turned into weapons.

The United States was at the time supporting Iraq in its war against the old U.S. foe Iran, at a time when Saddam used chemical weapons against Iranian forces and Iraqi Kurds.

Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the former Soviet Union also supplied Iraq with equipment, expertise and funding over the years.

The West's close military and commercial relationship with Saddam ended when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. Continued ...

With Verges there, this trial will a) be a circus and b) take forever.

During the third week of the trial, the prosecution began its attack on Barbie in earnest. But before they brought forth their most powerful witnesses and most powerful accusations, the prosecution attempted to defuse Jacques Vergès by interviewing a witness who was hand-picked to give Vergès a taste of his own medicine by questioning his morals. The witness was André Frossard, a Catholic résistant who was arrested by Barbie in 1943 and who we last saw hanging over a bathtub during a "reinforced interrogation" session. When Frossard was sent to Montluc, he wound up in the "Jewish Barracks" and during his incarceration he discovered the the difference between "war crime" and "crime against humanity." Besides being an intelligent writer and a eloquent speaker, Frossard had crossed paths with Jacques Vergès before. This is where the plot thickens, for it turns out that that Vergès owed Frossard an enormous debt. Specifically, Vergès owed Frossard the life of his wife, Djamila Bouhired. When Bouhired was condemned to death in 1956 for planting two café bombs, her execution seemed imminent. Her attorney had been a young Jacques Vergès and, although Vergès proved more than able to disrupt the court, he could not prevent his client from being sentenced to death. Then, a few days after her condemnation an article entitled "No, no, no!" appeared in L'Aurore, the same paper in which Zola wrote "J'accuse."22 The author of the article was André Frossard, and he pleaded against the death penalty for the young woman and tried to fill in the gaps that her lawyer had missed while he was busy "attacking the prosecution." The article was well-received and because of the public uproar caused by it, Bouhired was spared execution and eventually released. If anyone in the courtroom had any sort of moral control over the loose cannon Vergès, it was Frossard, and perhaps, hoped the prosecution, Frossard could talk some sense into him.

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