MEET SADDAM'S LEGAL TEAM

Devil's advocates by Chrenkoff
With the recent speculation about the date of Saddam's trial, and following the first meeting between Saddam and one of his defense lawyers, I thought it worthwhile to republish the updated profile Hussein's legal eagles, which "Scotland on Sunday" describes as a "20-strong international legal team based in Jordan [with a] back-up from some 1,500 volunteer lawyers, mostly from Arab countries.".....

One of the French members of the team, Jacques Verges, famous - or notorious - as defender of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and international terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Charmingly, he "is said to have been a friend of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader behind Cambodia's genocide." Verges has long legal history:

"In World War II, he earned a reputation as a war hero with General Charles de Gaulle's Free French resistance, but later he became a Communist."During the Algerian war of independence, he defended Algerians accused of terrorism against France. One of his clients was Djamila Bouhired, who was sentenced to death in 1957 for planting bombs in cafes in Algiers. He managed to have her sentenced commuted, and married her when she was released in 1962."Later, in the 1970s, he became the champion of extremists from both left and right, defending Palestinian violence against Israel and neo-Nazi bombers."

When offered the 1987 case of Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo chief known as the Butcher of Lyons, he leapt at the chance to expose what he saw as establishment hypocrisy. But he could not prevent Barbie's life imprisonment on 341 charges, which included deporting Jewish children to concentration camps.

..... Then there is American academic (Professor of Human Rights Law at American University in Cairo) and lawyer Curtis Doebbler. Doebbler is a former legal advisor to the Palestinian Authority