Clark: Hanging Saddam would cause chaos

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, a member of Saddam Hussein's defense team, predicted on Thursday that a bloodbath would follow should an Iraqi court trying the former president have him executed.

At a news conference, Clark said he feared that should Saddam and the others be hanged, "catastrophic violence" would follow that would lead to "the end of civilization as we know it in the birthplace of civilization, Mesopotamia. Total, unmitigated chaos."

Saddam's Sunni Muslim tribe of 1.5 million would be enraged over what they would consider the revenge killing of the former president by the Shiite-controlled and U.S.-sponsored government, Clark said.

Clark, 78, was attorney general under President Johnson despite opposing the Vietnam War and has been best known since for defending people with unpopular causes. Besides Saddam, he has worked with blind Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, a planner of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and American Indian activist Leonard Peltier, convicted in a 1975 gunfight at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in which two FBI agents died.

Saddam and the other defendants, who include his vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, are being tried for genocide in the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds during the late 1980s. They already have been tried for murder and torture in the deaths of 148 Iraqi Shiites from the Iraqi town of Dujail who allegedly conspired to kill Saddam in 1981.

The court that tried them was to have returned its verdict on Oct. 16, but it announced this week it will not do so. A new date was not set.

Clark said the defendants are at Camp Cropper near Baghdad's airport in a new million detention center. The Army says it oversees about 13,000 prisoners in Iraq at Cropper, Camp Bucca in the southern desert and Fort Suse in the Kurdish north.

The United States has said it transferred Saddam to Iraqi custody some time ago, but his whereabouts have not been divulged.

In March, an AP-Ipsos poll in the United States and several other countries found that two out of three Americans felt Saddam was getting a fair trial and if convicted should be executed. Lesser majorities in eight other countries polled said he was being tried fairly and should be jailed for life if convicted.