Saddam Trial Lawyer Kidnapped

Ten masked gunmen kidnapped the lawyer for one of Saddam Hussein's co-defendants Thursday, police said.

Saadoun Sughaiyer al-Janabi, who was in the courtroom for Wednesday's opening session of the trial, is one of two lawyers for Awad Hamed al-Bandar, one of seven Baath Party officials being tried with Saddam.

The gunmen pulled up outside al-Janabi's office in Baghdad's eastern Shaab district in the evening, broke into the building and dragged him out, said Police Maj. Falah al-Mohammedawi of the Interior Ministry.

"The trial of Saddam Hussein is taking place under the toughest circumstances, with witnesses intimidated and lawyers for both defense and prosecution threatened," said CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk, "because the perception in Iraq is that the stakes are so high."

"The best the Iraqi police can do is attempt to protect all participants in an atmosphere that is far from secure," said Falk, "which today's kidnapping underscores."

Al-Janabi was one of 13 defense lawyers in Wednesday's session, seated at desks along the side of the courtroom. Some of the lawyers were shown in the television broadcast of the trial, but it was not immediately known if al-Janabi appeared.

Identities of the five judges and the prosecutors in Saddam's trial have been kept secret to prevent insurgent reprisals. The names of the chief judge and the top prosecutor were the only ones revealed, and only on the day of the trial, when they both appeared extensively in the broadcast.

Meanwhile, a key prosecution witness in Saddam Hussein's trial will testify at an unexpected session Sunday because the former intelligence official is seriously ill with cancer, officials said Thursday.

The witness, Wadah Ismael Al-Sheik, was a senior Iraqi intelligence officer at the time of the Dujail massacre in 1982 that Saddam and seven other co-defendants are charged with, two lawyers said. They spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid compromising the case or the heavy security surrounding it.

Saddam made a defiant initial court appearance Wednesday on the murder and torture charges, along with the seven former government and Baath Party officials, and chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Mousawi, outlined the case against the men. The three-hour session then adjourned until Nov. 28.

But in a surprise, lawyers said Al-Sheik will testify Sunday at a U.S. detention center where he is being held near Baghdad's international airport because of his cancer. If he recovers, he could be a defendant in a later case regarding another alleged massacre carried out during Saddam's rule, the lawyers said.

The session would not involve reconvening the full trial, but rather would be a hearing to take a deposition from al-Sheik, the lawyers said.

President Jalal Talabani said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. the trial was a positive step for Iraq, but he insisted he would refuse to sign any death warrants that might arise from the judgment of Saddam and his associates.

The trial "means the beginning of the rule of the Iraqi people, and it means that all dictators who are committing crimes against their people will have the same fate," Talabani told the BBC.

He added that he did not think the trial would provoke the nation's Sunni Arabs, who form the backbone of Iraq's insurgency and some of whom still support Saddam. He said when people saw the crimes Saddam had committed, they would change their minds about him.

On Wednesday, a rapt Iraq watched on TV as a defiant Saddam Hussein pleaded innocent to charges of murder and torture as his long-awaited trial began Wednesday with the one-time dictator arguing about the legitimacy of the court and scuffling with guards.

CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey reports that cafes in Baghdad were packed for an event few here dared to dream of when Saddam was in power. In the town of Dujail, the site of the massacre for which Saddam is on trial, people took to the streets carrying pictures of relatives who died, a release of years of fear and hatred.

At Wednesday's session, Saddam was combative from the very start.

When the chief judge asked him to identify himself for the record, Saddam quickly turned the question back on the little-known jurist: Who are you? More importantly, who are you to pass judgment on the man who still considers himself the ruler of Iraq?

Sitting inside a white pen with metal bars, Saddam appeared gaunt and frail and his salt-and-pepper beard was unkempt as he pleaded innocent to charges of murder, torture, forced expulsions and illegal detentions.

A too-busy President Bush did not watch, even as the White House hailed the trial as a key step in Iraq's transition to a functioning democracy.

"Saddam Hussein is facing Iraqi justice," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "The trial is a symbol that the rule of law is returning to Iraq. We hope this trial will help bring some closure for the Iraqi people to their country's dark past."

Americans today do not believe that the overall result of the Iraq war has been worth the costs – just 32 percent said it was in the latest CBS News poll conducted in October, 2005. But until now, Americans had consistently rated the specific act of removing Saddam from power as more worthwhile than the war's results, generally. But that is not the case any longer: in that recent poll only 34 percent saw removing Saddam as being worth the costs.

In May of 2003, 65 percent of Americans surveyed supported the ousting of Saddam.

The Dujail trial is the first of about a dozen cases prosecutors intend to bring against Saddam and members of his inner circle in an attempt to hold them accountable for a 23-year regime that saw tens of thousands of Iraqis killed and imprisoned.

Falk said the outcome of Saddam's tribunal, the rest of which is being strategically delayed until November so evidence can be reviewed, may be obvious. Saddam will likely be found guilty because "there is 'smoking gun' evidence of his responsibility for the 1982 massacre of civilians, including children, in Dujail."

Other cases likely will tackle his regime's Anfal Offensive that killed 180,000 Kurds, a poison gas attack on Halabja that killed 5,000 and a crackdown on rebellious Shiites and Kurds in 1991.

Reaction to Saddam's trial varied in Iraq, where his loyalists, together with hardcore members of his Baath party and feared security services are an important faction of a Sunni-led insurgency wracking Iraq for the past 2½ years.

In Baghdad, Shiite construction worker Salman Zaboun Shanan sat with his family at home in the Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah, having taken the day off from work to watch the trial.

When Saddam appeared on television, his wife spat in disgust.

"I hope he is executed, and that anyone who suffered can take a piece of his flesh," said Shanan, who was jailed during Saddam's rule, as was his wife, Sabiha Hassan, and several of their sons.

But across the Tigris River in the mainly Sunni Arab district of Azamiyah, some were embittered by the trial of Saddam, whose regime was dominated by Sunni Arabs who have now lost their power. "Saddam is the lesser of evils," said engineer Sahab Awad Maaruf, comparing Saddam to the current Shiite-Kurdish led government. "He's the only legitimate leader for Iraqis."

Saddam was ousted after U.S.-led forces swept into Iraq in March 2003 and marched in to Baghdad. He fled the capital and was on the run for nearly eight months until American forces found in him hiding in a cellar in a rural area outside his hometown of Tikrit north of Baghdad on Dec. 13, 2003.

He has been held since in a U.S. detention facility at Baghdad International Airport.