[summer]

"Under strain," I wrote [about Saddam] a minute or two later, "rubbing eyes, finger to eyebrow, hand splayed to cheek, timbre of voice changed.".

I found most of this article quite interesting.

[Snerfling]

These rights are excellent.

This guy has watched too much Western TV. I almost expected to hear him say "these rights are most excellent, dude".

[summer]

This is the first article I've read where a reporter describes the reaction in court of Saddam's henchmen.

[bayourod]

"Muhammad Hamza al-Zubaydi, who is 66, asked for the judge's helping fixing the years in which he held various posts, saying he was "exhausted from the flight" to the hearing. "

Must have been a long flight to exhaust someone accustomed to sitting in a cell all day.

[Rennes Templar]

The Slimes, like Saddams henchmen, might realize they need to get on the winners side now. After all, it is a business.

[livius]

Very interesting article! Good reporting from the NYT, of all places! Does anybody know anything about the reporter? He's observant and writes well (which is a real shocker nowadays).

[Rose in RoseBear]

Pingpingping!

[dbwz]

Bookmark bump

[Kaslin]

But the others, who were brought to the court together by American troops - while Mr. Hussein arrived and departed alone with a separate American guard - seemed mostly intent on winning the judge's favor.

These don't look like American guards to me

In this image cleared by the US military and released Friday July 2, 2004, Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) is lead to an armored vehicle after leaving a courtroom in chains Thursday, July 1, 2004 at Camp Victory, a former Saddam palace on the outskirts of Baghdad. (AP Photo/Karen Ballard/Pool

[Vince Ferrer]

The phrase "banality of evil" comes to mind:

Evil is never "radical," ...it is only extreme, and... it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension... It is "thought- defying"...because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its "banality."2 Hannah Arendt, 1964

[Yardstick]

Excellent article from the exceptional John Burns. Finally I have what feels like a reasonably complete picture of the courtroom that day. All the other reporting has been like looking through a keyhole. We hear from one report that Saddam was nervous and in another, defiant. Now we see that it was both.

I think Saddam's underlings are going to go turncoat on him. I think we (or I should say, the Iraqis) have this one in the bag, regardless of how many slicked back Euroweasel attorneys are there to throw a monkeywrench into this thing.

[summer]

Re: The many positive comments on this thread about the fine writing of this NYT journalist in Bagdad, John F Burns

From link below, Sept 2003:

The following are the words of New York Times correspondent John F. Burns, on his experiences reporting from Baghdad during the war. Excerpted from the book Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, an Oral History [....]

John Burns: 'There is Corruption in Our Business'

Excerpt:

[....]Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that this [terror in Iraq] was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay.

There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.

In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people's stories -- mine included -- specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper.

Yeah, it was an absolutely disgraceful performance. CNN's Eason Jordan's op-ed piece in The New York Times missed that point completely. [....]

-----------------------

from summer: He also mentioned in the above that he is 58 years old. Maybe he is wiser than some of his counterparts in Iraq, with a longer view as to the horrors of terrorism. And, he sees the US as a country that cares.

Another excerpt, from the same link:

[....] That night at 8:00 p.m, I went to every floor of the ministry. I told everybody. "Get off! Get off this building. It's going to be attacked this night."

When I got back to my hotel room I got another call from New York saying it's been put off twenty-four hours because of weather. It was after my second meeting with Al-Tayyib that they raided my room. He shouted at me. He said, "We know you're a CIA agent because they attacked the ministry." I said, "You lying son of a bitch. I told you that because I come from a newspaper and a country who cares about people. We were told this on the basis of human decency. Not just for ourselves but also for Iraqis. They didn't want to kill innocent Iraqis. You failed to do anything at all about it." [....]

[VOA]

It was only in the courtroom, at the American military base, that their physical
insignificance, their sheer unremitting ordinariness, became so plain.

"The Banality of Evil"

That was a title of a book on The Holocaust, IIRC.