As part of Saddam Hussein’s legal team, Ramsey Clark listens to proceedings as the former Iraqi president’s trial resumes in Baghdad, in November 2005. Photograph: Bob Strong/Reuters As part of Saddam Hussein’s legal team, Ramsey Clark listens to proceedings as the former Iraqi president’s trial resumes in Baghdad, in November 2005.
In 1959 he participated in an unsuccessful attempt by Baʿathists to assassinate the Iraqi prime minister, ʿAbd al-Karīm Qāsim; Saddam was wounded in the attempt and escaped first to Syria and then to Egypt. He attended Cairo Law School (1962–63) and continued his studies at Baghdad Law College after the Baʿathists took power in Iraq in 1963.
Saddam Hussein, also spelled Ṣaddām Ḥusayn, in full Ṣaddām Ḥusayn al-Tikrītī, (born April 28, 1937, Al-ʿAwjah, Iraq—died December 30, 2006, Baghdad), president of Iraq (1979–2003) whose brutal rule was marked by costly and unsuccessful wars against neighbouring countries.
Iraqi authorities put Saddam and seven other former Iraqi officials on trial on 19 October 2005, four days after the 15 October 2005 referendum on the new Iraqi constitution. The tribunal specifically charged the defendants with the killing of 148 Shiites from Dujail, in retaliation for the failed assassination attempt of 8 July 1982.
Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging, after being convicted of crimes against humanity by the Iraqi Special Tribunal for the Dujail massacre—the killing of 148 Iraqi Shi'ites in the town of Dujail—in 1982, in retaliation for an assassination attempt against him.
Gegeo was the personal bodyguard of the former president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and served as his valet and food taster.
Nidal al-Hamdanim. 1990–2006Samira Shahbandarm. 1986–2006Sajida Talfahm. 1963–2006Saddam Hussein/Wife
Dujail was a stronghold of the rebellious Dawa party, which was allied with Iran to overthrow Saddam Hussein--and it is no accident that both of the prime ministers under the American occupation have been members of the Dawa party. That is the real reason the trials started here, Clark says.
The first case to go forward, the one Clark is working on, centers on a day when Saddam Hussein drove through a town called Dujail.
In his nylon bag, Clark carries a copy of a letter that he just sent to each member of the United Nations and hopes to pre-sent to the President in Iraq. It's a plea rich with his signature style, sober legal argument and explosive political charges both expressed in the same mild tone.
A few years later, after a two-week trial, he signed death warrants for 148 of them. In early news accounts, this was the reason everyone gave for starting his trials with this case. With Hussein's signature on the warrants, conviction was a slam dunk. But wait, Clark says.
He remembers flying into Washington, D. C. , the night after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, the awful sight of the city in flames, and he remembers walking across China during the famine of 1948, when people were dying so fast, the authorities sent carts around every morning to gather the bodies.
invaded Grenada in 1983, Clark went in while the country was still under martial law and walked up Richmond Hill on foot and asked to see the coup leader because "he should have a right to a lawyer.".
He started at the Justice Department in 1961 as an assistant attorney general, plunging into the historic battle over James Meredith's attempt to become the first black man to attend the University of Mississippi.
The 67-year-old President, Saddam Hussein, appeared confident and defiant throughout the 46-minute hearing. Alternating between listening to and gesturing at the judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin, he questioned the legitimacy of the tribunal set up to try him. He called the court a "play" aimed at Bush 's chances of winning the US presidential elections. He emphatically rejected charges against him. "This is all theater. The real criminal is Bush", he stated. When asked by the judge to identify himself in his first appearance before an Iraqi judge (three of the five judges and the prosecutor were never identified nor photographed for security reasons), he answered, "You are an Iraqi, you know who I am."
Saddam Hussein sits before an Iraqi judge at a courthouse in Baghdad, 1 July 2004.
Main article: Execution of Saddam Hussein. Saddam was executed by hanging after being convicted of crimes against humanity following his trial and conviction for the illegal killings of 148 Kurds in the town of Dujail in 1982.
Following the assassination of his chief defense lawyer, Khamis al-Obeidi, Saddam began a hunger strike, protesting against the lack of international protection for lawyers. On 23 June 2006, it was reported that Saddam ended his hunger strike, having missed one meal. On 27 June 2006, two of Saddam Hussein's lawyers, Ramsey Clark, a former US Attorney-General, and Curtis Doebbler, held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to call for immediate security for all the Iraqi defense lawyers and to complain in a written statement that the trial was unfair, and was being conducted by the American authorities using Iraqis as a front. The two lawyers claimed that the United States had refused to provide adequate protection for the defense lawyers despite repeated requests that were made and that the United States was intentionally ensuring an unfair trial.
Also during the arraignment, Saddam defended Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait and referred to Kuwaitis as "dogs" who were trying to turn the women of Iraq into "two-penny whores", which led to an admonition from the judge for using coarse language in court. Later on 1 July, Kuwait 's information minister Abul-Hassan said crude language was "expected" of Saddam. "This is how he was raised", said the minister.
Later, on 7 December 2005, Saddam refused to enter court, complaining of the conditions in which he was being held and the conduct of the trial. Saddam's complaints included, among other things, that he had not been able to change his clothes for four days.
The first session of Saddam's trial lasted three hours. The court adjourned the case until 28 November 2005, as some of the witnesses were too frightened to attend, and to allow the defense more time to study evidence. During an interview with the Arab news agency al-Arabiya following the opening of the trial, Saddam's eldest daughter Raghad branded the court a "farce" and claimed that her father behaved like a "lion" during the proceedings. "He would be a lion even when caged. Every honest person who knows Saddam knows that he is firm and powerful."
Iraq’s crushing defeat triggered internal rebellions by both Shiʿis and Kurds, but Saddam suppressed their uprisings, causing thousands to flee to refugee camps along the country’s northern border. Untold thousands more were murdered, many simply disappearing into the regime’s prisons.
The opening salvo of the Iraq War was an assault by U. S. aircraft on a bunker complex in which Saddam was thought to be meeting with subordinates. Although the attack failed to kill the Iraqi leader, subsequent attacks directed against Saddam made it clear that eliminating him was a major goal of the invasion. Always obstinate in his tone, Saddam exhorted Iraqis to lay down their lives to stop U.S. and British forces, but resistance to the invasion soon crumbled, and on April 9, the day Baghdad fell to U.S. soldiers, Saddam fled into hiding. He took with him the bulk of the national treasury and was initially able to evade capture by U.S. troops. His sons, Uday and Qusay, were cornered and killed in Mosul on July 22, but it was not until December 13 that Saddam was finally captured. The once dapper leader was pulled, disheveled and dirty, from a small underground hiding place near a farmhouse in the vicinity of Tikrīt. Although he was armed, Saddam surrendered to U.S. soldiers without firing a shot.
To assert Iraq’s hegemony over its neighbours, Saddam led Iraq into war with Iran in the Iran-Iraq War and with Kuwait in the lead-up to the Persian Gulf War. His refusal to cooperate fully with international inspections for proscribed weapons led to the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and allies in the Iraq War.
To assert Iraq’s hegemony over its neighbours, Saddam led Iraq into war with Iran in the Iran-Iraq War and with Kuwait in the lead-up to the Persian Gulf War. His refusal to cooperate fully with international inspections for proscribed weapons led to the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and allies in the Iraq War.
Throughout the nine-month trial, Saddam interrupted the proceedings with angry outbursts, claiming that the tribunal was a sham and that U.S. interests were behind it. The tribunal finally adjourned in July 2006 and handed down its verdicts in November. Saddam was convicted of crimes against humanity —including willful killing, illegal imprisonment, deportation, and torture—and was sentenced to death by hanging. Saddam’s half brother (an intelligence officer) and Iraq’s former chief judge were also sentenced to death. Days after an Iraqi court upheld his sentence in December 2006, Saddam was executed.
The cost of the war and the interruption of Iraq’s oil exports caused Saddam to scale down his ambitious programs for economic development. The Iran-Iraq War dragged on in a stalemate until 1988, when both countries accepted a cease-fire that ended the fighting.
He used an extensive secret-police establishment to suppress any internal opposition to his rule, and he made himself the object of an extensive personality cult among the Iraqi public. His goals as president were to supplant Egypt as leader of the Arab world and to achieve hegemony over the Persian Gulf.
Di Stefano used the Italian title " avvocato " ("advocate", analogous to an English lawyer) on his business card, and misled clients and the courts into believing that he was a qualified lawyer. On 27 March 2013 he was convicted on 25 charges including deception, fraud and money laundering between 2001 and 2011 by a jury at Southwark Crown Court in London. During the trial he had told the court of his links to Robert Mugabe, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein (whom he described as a "nice guy") and his "friendship" with the daughter of Slobodan Milošević.
Di Stefano claimed in a BBC article that the conviction was quashed on a second appeal in 1988 and that "a sense of injustice remains, making each victory against the system a sweet revenge."
Around 1992, while trying to buy the MGM film studio, the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service deported him from the United States because of a fraud conviction in the UK in 1986. Months later he applied for a non-immigrant visa for re-entry, and was told that he needed a waiver of grounds of inadmissibility to be eligible. The waiver application was denied by the federal agency, causing the visa to also be denied. In 1993, he appealed to a United States District Court, which ruled that it lacked jurisdiction to review the denial of a waiver application. In 1995, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the judgment of the district court, ruling that Di Stefano did not have standing to challenge the waiver denial under the Immigration and Nationality Act.
In the eighties, Di Stefano says that he imported videotapes from Hong Kong into the UK, making a £200 million fortune when he was still in his 20s.
According to The Scotsman and Irish Independent, Di Stefano was moving to a country with no extradition treaty with the UK, to escape a warrant for fraud charges.
In 1986, Di Stefano was tried for conspiracy to obtain property by deception and fraudulent trading, and was convicted after a 78-day trial, jailed for five years, and prohibited from being a company director for 10 years; of a total of 11 fraud counts, he was convicted of 3 counts and acquitted of 8.
In 1990 a Solicitors' Disciplinary Tribunal ruled that Di Stefano could not be employed by any solicitor in England or Wales without permission from the Law Society, because of his criminal record, although he could still contract a solicitor to act on his name.
Giovanni di Stefano, 66, earned nickname for taking on difficult cases
After leaving school, he worked as a waiter at London’s Savoy Hotel before moving Cambridge where he found a job as a lab technician.
1986 - He is jailed for five years for fraud after trying to steal tens of thousands of pounds through cheques drawn on imaginary banks.