Saddam's Legal Team Is in Disarray

 BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Three weeks before he is due to stand trial for murder, Saddam Hussein's defense is in turmoil. 



 His attorney says he is only beginning to study the prosecution's evidence of a 1982 massacre and has asked for a delay in the proceedings. The deposed Iraqi president's defense team has been impaired by differences over strategy, limited access to their client, and an internal shake-up that recently stripped four of its five members of their authority to represent him before the Iraqi High Criminal Court. 



 This week Saddam's sole designated attorney petitioned the tribunal to postpone the first of his many expected trials for crimes against humanity that American and Iraqi investigators are planning. The trial of Saddam and seven former aides is scheduled to open Oct. 19 in a courtroom inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone. 



 Saddam was arrested in December 2003, eight months after being ousted in a U.S.-led military invasion. He and the former aides, imprisoned at a U.S. military base, are accused of responsibility for the 1982 slayings of 148 people in the predominately Shiite Muslim town of Dujail following an attempt to assassinate him there. 



 On Sunday, his designated attorney, Khalil Dulaimi, passed through a maze of armed checkpoints protecting the court headquarters to receive the prosecution case file. Before leaving the building, Dulaimi filed his motion seeking a delay. It noted that the court's rules required the prosecutor to give him access to the evidence against his client at least 45 days before trial. 



 ``They had 2 1/2 years to prepare this case. They are giving us just three weeks,'' Dulaimi said. ``What's the hurry? Saddam is not going anywhere.'' 



 In addition, Dulaimi asked the court's five-judge trial panel to send an 800-page dossier of testimony against Saddam back to the investigative judge because none of the more than 100 witnesses had been identified by name. 



 Both arguments foreshadow a broader campaign by the defense to portray the upcoming trials of Saddam as unfair and illegitimate. The defense has complained that the trials are to be conducted by an American-tutored Iraqi court established under U.S. military occupation and because non-Iraqi lawyers Saddam wants to consult have not been allowed to see him. 



 Iraqi officials say the worst crimes committed during Saddam's Sunni-dominated 24-year rule, including state-orchestrated massacres of tens of thousands of Shiites and Kurds, would come to trial in as many as a dozen separate cases after the Dujail verdict. 



 The timing of the first trial is politically sensitive, scheduled to begin four days after Iraq's constitutional referendum and less than two months before Dec. 15 parliamentary elections. Officials of the current government, a coalition led by Shiites and Kurds, have been promising for months to put Saddam on the stand, hoping to rally support by satisfying a popular demand for justice -- even at the risk of inflaming Sunni Muslim insurgents still loyal to Saddam. 



 The trial panel will consider Dulaimi's request for a delay, a court official said, ``but I don't think they will accept it.'' The reason, stems from disarray among Saddam's attorneys, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns. Khamis Ubaidi, a veteran criminal lawyer, also was registered with the court as a member of the team when he asked for and got a copy of the prosecution's case file on Aug. 10. That made Saddam's entire defense team technically in possession of the file more than the required 45 days ahead of the trial date, according to the official.Ubaidi's decision to plunge into the case undercut an alternative strategy among Saddam's legal advisers to shun the court and postpone his day of reckoning as long as possible. 



 Dulaimi said in an interview this week that Ubaidi never showed him the file. Ubaidi said that is because Dulaimi avoided coming to look at it. The strategy was that ``if he didn't receive the case file, he could delay the trial for years,'' Ubaidi said. 



 Thedifferences came to a head when Rahgad Saddam Hussein, the former president's daughter and paymaster of the lawyers, dismissed all of them except Dulaimi and hired a London-based Iraqi spokesman, Abdel Haq Alani. The spokesman began making statements that the prosecution was withholding evidence and that Ubaidi was never part of Saddam's team. 



 Eventually, Ubaidi said he persuaded Dulaimi that the trial might start whether or not the defense was ready and that he should obtain the prosecution's file to prepare. The deposed president's legal cause has been plagued by disorganization since his daughter, who lives in Jordan, last year set up a Defense and Support Committee that eventually counted 2,000 volunteer lawyers from around the world, few of whom did any work on the case. Its two Jordanian chairmen were dismissed in succession for grandstanding in the media, and the group was disbanded last month for being too unwieldy. 



 Saddam's family is now being counseled by a smaller international team that includes former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, and former Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella. Their mission, they say, is to lobby for a fair trial. 



 In a telephone interview this week, Clark said the biggest problem for the defense has been the decision by American jailers and Iraqi prosecutors to keep Saddam isolated. 



 No lawyer was present in July of last year when Saddam was first arraigned. He was first given access to counsel in December, a year after Saddam's arrest. 



 Dulaimi, 43, a relatively inexperienced lawyer who had not previously known Saddam, has seen him six times since -- always, he said, in the presence of U.S. soldiers. He and other Iraqi lawyers volunteered for the defense team shortly after the former president's arrest and were referred to his family by the Iraqi Bar Association. 



 He said Saddam had asked several times to see a variety of more seasoned lawyers, including Clark, to help him prepare a defense but neither he nor they had received a definitive answer from U.S. and Iraqi officials. 



 ``No lawyer Saddam Hussein has known before the U.S. invasion has seen him,'' Clark said. ``He never has had anything approaching counsel of his own choosing. . . . There has been no ability to begin to prepare a defense.''







 Boudreaux reported from Baghdad and Weinstein from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Zainab Hussein in Baghdad contributed to this report.