Hussein

A TRIAL of Saddam Hussein for the decades of his murderous rule will be the most symbolically important episode in Iraq's postwar reconstruction. Any trial must give Iraqis a sense of ownership over their own postwar justice process. And it must also allow the international community to contribute its invaluable legal, investigatory and administrative expertise to make such a proceeding unimpeachably legitimate. As the trials of Nazi henchmen, executors of Rwandan genocide and Balkan warlords have demonstrated, international criminal trials can bring closure and relief to victims, place unimpeachable judicial condemnation on the immorality of a murderous regime and validate efforts by the regime's opponents to bring about its destruction.

Swimming UMBC's Hussein qualifies for Olympics UMBC junior Mohamed Hussein took first place, broke the Egyptian national record and qualified for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London in the 200-meter individual medley Sunday afternoon at the Auburn Classic at the Martin Aquatics Center. Hussein, who has already qualified for the Summer Games in the 100 freestyle, becomes the first Egyptian swimmer to ever make the cut for two events at a single Olympic Games. He is the second UMBC swimmer to make the Olympics, joining Mehdi Addadi , who qualified for the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney for his native Algeria.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Saddam Hussein's lawyer ended a one-month courtroom absence yesterday, defending his client briefly before getting into another spat with the judge and leaving again. Hussein and six co-defendants face charges of genocide in the killings of tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds in 1988 by firing squads and chemical warfare attacks. Most of the victims were civilians, including women and children. Citing disagreements with Chief Judge Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa, the defendants' privately retained attorneys stormed out of the courtroom Sept.

Patrick Husson has come a long way since walking on to the UMBC swimming team as a freshman in the fall of 2010. Now, he's one of three Retrievers hoping to compete in his country's Olympic swimming trials for a spot in the Summer Games in London. Husson will participate in the U.S. trials in June in Omaha, Neb., for a chance to be one of two swimmers to represent his country in the 200-meter breaststroke. "I have nothing to lose and I'm just having a blast with training and preparing for this meet.

AMERICA nearly went to war last weekend in defense of weapons inspections in Iraq that U.S. diplomacy surreptitiously subverted last summer. That subversion provoked an American rarity, a resignation on principle, by an American rarity, inspector Scott Ritter, who never learned in the Marine Corps the delicacies of surrender.The surrealism of U.S. policy -- suddenly threatening war to support an inspection regime that an anonymous administration official admits has been "moribund" for three months -- was compounded by proof that the pen can indeed be mightier than the sword.

THE DEATH of King Hussein of Jordan generated a wealth of tributes from politicians and journalists, singing his praises as a ruler, and hailing him as a man of peace and democracy.The people of Jordan, and the Palestinian people, have a different memory.Hussein's family came to Jordan early in this century from what is today Saudi Arabia. They were installed by the British as a reward for their blind loyalty to the British throne.The king himself was unswerving in his subservience to Western interests over the years, except for a brief period in 1990 when he threw in his lot with Saddam Hussein.

London. -- Sanctions do work, perhaps too well. Saddam Hussein's rush to point his troops at Kuwait was the stratagem of a very desperate man.Sanctions have achieved far more than war did. They have led to the dismemberment of Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and long-range missile capability. They have destroyed the modern sector of Iraq's economy. They have led to the first serious internal challenges to Mr. Hussein's absolute power.Sanctions have led, too, to a sharp rise in the infant-mortality rate and a chronic shortage of basic surgical materials in the hospitals.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The gruesome video footage showed a man cradling a dead infant, bodies piled in the back of a truck, women and children weeping and telltale smoke rising from the hills. Prosecutors presented the videos and other documents yesterday at Saddam Hussein's second genocide trial. Hussein and six co-defendants are charged in connection with the Anfal campaign of chemical weapon attacks on villages in the Kurdish north of Iraq during the 1980s. The videotapes showed scenes of carnage captured in Kurdish villages in April 1987 and May 1988, both preceding and during the Anfal campaign designed to root out Kurdish resistance fighters known as peshmerga.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A second lawyer in Saddam Hussein's defense team was gunned down yesterday in Baghdad, calling into question the prospects that a fair trial can proceed in the current climate of violence. Adil al-Zubaidi, who was defending former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, died when three men in a car pulled up alongside his vehicle and opened fire, according to witnesses and police. Thamer al-Khuzaie, a lawyer defending Hussein's half-brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, was slightly injured in the midday attack.

WASHINGTON - War is upon us, world opinion is largely against us and one may seriously question President Bush's inept diplomacy and some of his motives (for instance, oil). But it is hard to disagree with the administration's conclusions on Saddam Hussein's regime. Mr. Hussein indeed represents a threat to the United States and the Middle East. Based upon intelligence briefings and information presented by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, I am convinced that Iraq has not accounted for up to 26,000 liters of anthrax, 1.5 tons of VX nerve agents, mustard gas and sarin nerve gas. While there is some dispute about the extent of Iraq's nuclear program, widely accepted evidence from Iraqi defectors indicates that Mr. Hussein was moving along the path of developing a nuclear arsenal.

AMMAN, Jordan - Najim Abid Hajwal has been having a difficult time renewing his passport. He submitted his paperwork at the Iraqi Embassy here but was told days later that he was a wanted man back home in Iraq. It turned out that the Interior Ministry was after someone with a similar name. He submitted a new set of papers to prove his identity but was issued a passport with a wrong name. It's enough to make an Iraqi nostalgic for the good old days. "Under Saddam, a ministry was a ministry," Hajwal says.

A 67-year-old Maryland restaurateur, known by the code name "Adam," pleaded guilty yesterday in federal court to spying for the Iraqi government - including Saddam Hussein's regime - since 1989. According to court documents, Saubhe Jassim Al-Dellemy used his Laurel restaurant to gather information about nearby U.S. agencies and their employees, including where military officers lived. He gave the data to Iraqi Intelligence Service members and officials, who sometimes met at the restaurant.

Emily Nordling has never met a Muslim, at least not to her knowledge. But this spring, Nordling, a 19-year-old student from Fort Thomas, Ky., gave herself a new middle name on Facebook.com. "Emily Hussein Nordling," her entry now reads. With her decision, she joined a growing band of supporters of Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who are expressing solidarity with him by informally adopting his middle name. Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim. Hussein is a family name inherited from his father.

BAGHDAD -- U.S. officials yesterday sidestepped the demand of Iraq's prime minister for the immediate handover for execution of three former officials from Saddam Hussein's regime. The U.S. military issued a written statement reaffirming the position of the military and U.S. Embassy that the three condemned men would remain in U.S. custody until the Iraqi government has sorted out disputed procedures for death sentences handed down by Iraq's high tribunal for war crimes. The three men received death sentences in June for their roles in Hussein's internal campaigns during the 1980s that killed up to 180,000 Kurds.

Throughout a career that took him from hardscrabble wildcatter to wealthy oil tycoon, Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. hasn't been the type to back down from a fight. So Monday's guilty plea to a federal conspiracy charge by the 83-year-old founder and former chairman of Coastal Corp. surprised those familiar with his tenacity. "I am shocked by his decision to plead guilty," said David H. Berg, who represented Wyatt's brother-in-law, Houston clothier Robert T. Sakowitz, when the oilman sued him in the 1980s over some business deals.

WASHINGTON -- Has journalism become a crime in the Bush administration's "war on terror"? We Americans are left to wonder. Our military is holding two journalists without charges or any public evidence that they broke any laws. One of them, Iraqi photographer Bilal Hussein, was part of the Associated Press' 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage in Iraq. He has been held by U.S. forces in Iraq since April 12, 2006, with no indication as to whether he ever will be charged or released. The other journalist, Sami al-Hajj, is worse off. He's a Sudanese national, a cameraman for Al Jazeera and has been held more than five years.

BOSTON -- He made light of it, but there was hurt behind the words Ibrahim Hussein used to describe his victory in the 95th Boston Marathon yesterday.Actually, the truth be known, the Kenyan probably got away with a latter day "Brinks Job" when all he was looking to prove was that he shouldn't have been written off so hastily.Hussein won here in 1988 and captured the New York Marathon the year before that. All he seemed to be reading for the past week was that other guys were going to win.What, over the hill at 32, supposedly a marathoner's prime?

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Missing evidence, personal attacks and the appearance in court of the prosecutor's doppelganger were some of the dramatic moments yesterday in the Baghdad courtroom where former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his seven co-defendants are being tried. The eight defendants have been charged with crimes against humanity for the alleged detention, torture and execution of 148 people from the mainly Shiite Muslim village of Dujail after an assassination attempt against Hussein there in 1982.

Baghdad -- A U.S. military commander who helped oversee the prison camp that once held Saddam Hussein has been charged with aiding the enemy, mishandling classified information and engaging in "inappropriate" relationships, officials said yesterday. Lt. Col William H. Steele was arrested last month and accused of nine violations of U.S. military code, which also included keeping classified information in his living space, failing to monitor funds, disobeying an order and possessing pornographic videos, the military said.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush said yesterday that Iraq had "fumbled" the executions of Saddam Hussein and two of his deputies, and that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki "has still got some maturation to do." The president's remarks were the most extensive yet on the executions, and they pointed up the continued tensions between Bush and al-Maliki as they try to forge a joint plan to calm the violence gripping Iraq. Bush expressed particular displeasure with the handling of Hussein's hanging in late December, at which guards chanted their allegiance to the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who backs al-Maliki and whose militia has been a major source of anti-Sunni violence.