At that time, he says now, he wondered if anybody of real authority in Saddam's terror machinery knew about his case. Families of many who disappeared into the jails, and from there to mass graves, now speak of a terrifying casualness about the arrests, for the most trivial of perceived slights against Saddam.
Being recognized by the former dictator in the court, without ever having met him, al-Rubaie said, was an indication that he was not one of the army of unknown. He acknowledged, too, that, at moments, he experienced a personal edge to his feelings.
One, he said, came when he listened to Barzan Ibrahim Hasan, Saddam's 53-year-old half-brother, who was deputy head of the feared secret police at the time of al-Rubaie's arrests in the late 1970s.
"I thought, `Mouwafak al-Rubaie, when you were in your cell, and being tortured, this man was upstairs,' and I thought how unfair it was, in a way, that he should be treated with such respect by the court," he said. "You know, at the time these men seemed like giants, like monsters, but it turns out that they were basically just thugs. I sat there in court thinking, how could it be that men like this reduced a nation with a 5,000-year history of civilization to this? How did we allow it to happen?"
RSS