NYT: For Hussein, a Spartan Life at His Former Palace

[kskiska]

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 18 - Nine months after American troops pulled him disheveled and disoriented from an underground bunker near his hometown, Tikrit, Saddam Hussein is living in an air-conditioned 10-by-13 foot cell on the grounds of one of his former palaces outside Baghdad, tending plants, proclaiming himself Iraq's lawful ruler, and reading the Koran and books about past Arab glory.

American and Iraqi officials who have visited the former Iraqi leader say he wears plastic sandals and an Arab dishdasha robe, eats American soldiers' ready-to-eat meals for breakfast, and is permitted three hours' daily exercise in a courtyard outside his cell. He has been flown by Black Hawk helicopter to an American military hospital in Baghdad, where doctors ran tests for an enlarged prostate, which they believe could be an early pointer to cancer.

He has undergone hours of interrogation by investigators preparing evidence for his trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. But he has refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing, or to show remorse for the hundreds of thousands of people killed during his 24-year dictatorship, officials say. He has insisted that his position as Iraq's president gave him legal authority for all he did and that his victims were "traitors." At every encounter, the officials say, he insists he is still the constitutionally elected president.

More than 80 other "high-value detainees" at the same prison - including more than 40 who were on the Pentagon's "pack of cards" of Iraq's most-wanted fugitives - are kept away from Mr. Hussein, said Bakhtiar Amin, the Iraqi human rights minister. Mr. Hussein has been in solitary confinement since his capture on Dec. 13, officials said, because of a fear that he would try to rig evidence or intimidate old associates in the prison. But the core of the group, 11 men who appeared with him in court on July 1, are allowed to exercise together, and to play chess, poker, backgammon and dominos. Offsetting those privileges, they have faced indignities that Mr. Hussein has been spared, including, at the outset, digging their own latrines. But the strict protocol favored by authoritarian governments still rules. "They call each other by their old titles, Mr. Minister of this, Mr. Minister of that," Mr. Amin said. "It is as if nothing has changed."

more…
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/international/middleeast/19saddam.html?hp

[Maple]

1. That's okay

That isn't Saddam anyway. Just another illusion.