The CIA could not break the former Iraqi president. After nearly seven months of interrogation and solitary confinement, a fit and imperious looking Saddam Hussein surveyed the US-financed Iraqi special tribunal, smiled and then pronounced: 'This is theatre. Bush is the real criminal.'

Dishevelled, confused and compliant when captured, Saddam must have seemed the perfect puppet for an election-friendly show trial. Salem Chalabi, the nephew of the until recently omnipresent Ahmad Chalabi, was handpicked by the US envoy, Paul Bremer, to direct the production. A quick cut-and-paste job provided a statute for the tribunal; a slate of safely anti-Saddam judges was rubber-stamped by Bremer's Iraqi Governing Council. And after the council had been hastily transformed into a supposedly sovereign interim government last month, one of its first acts was to reintroduce the death penalty. Everything was ready except the star defendant - whose resilience should have come as no surprise.

LRB 22 July 2004 | PDF Download