By the luck of the draw I spent the morning covering "the Saddam trial," which right now is focused on a massacre in Dujail after a failed assassination attempt against Saddam in 1982.  I've noticed driving around Baghdad this week that traffic is much, much, lighter than usual.  The last time I remember that was spring of 2004, when there was fighting in the streets between the U.S. Army and Sadr's militia.  I don't know if people are staying off the streets because they fear violence and checkpoint massacres, but it's possible.

As we were coasting through town this morning an Iraqi Police convoy came towards us in the opposite lane.  They approached a patch of heavier traffic and, disdaining their horns and loudspeakers, fired a warning shot to get cars to pull to the side of the road.  I've gotten over the idea that I'm ever going to be a hard-bitten war correspondent who shrugs off the sound of nearby gunfire and explosions; I flinched.

The first stop in the Green Zone was the press center, where I accompanied one of Time's Iraqi staff while he picked up a new press ID.  I was just there to make sure there was an English-speaker around in case there was a problem.  The entire American enterprise in Iraq is short on translators, and CPIC is no exception.  Fortunately in wasn't that hot this morning; we waited inside a concrete bunker in which a bunch of air conditioned trailers have been set up.  The sun turns the concrete into a kiln, and then the trailer air conditioners pump more hot air out into the inferno.  They helpfully provided a thermometer outside the CPIC door and it wasn't that bad; only 100 degrees at 8:45 am.

The guys at CPIC are helpful and, under the circumstances, laid back.  I've never once been there when multiple people—including me, and often including people who don't speak English and with whom the young GIs can't communicate—are trying to convince the CPIC staff to break the rules.  In some cases the rules don't make any sense, but there's not a lot the guys at the credentialing desk can do about that.  People come in without appointments; they come in without proper paperwork.  After we got things squared away I went out to the parking lot to wait for the ride over to the courthouse.

After an adventure finding the bus and talking our way past a checkpoint manned by Peruvians (I was fortunate to be with a Spanish-spaking reporter for the New York Times) we drove over to the courthouse.  Even by the standards of the Green Zone there was heavy security.  They're very concerned about security, and I haven't read in detail all of the restrictions on what you can write about and what you can't.  I'll just say it's been a while since I walked into a building in Iraq and said, "wow, there's a lot of security here."  The building itself is one of the structures you find all over the Green Zone, the airport and other big American bases—an old government building that's been converted for use by the U.S. or the new Iraqi government and has the feel of an abandoned ballroom.  Saddam was a fan of marble, high ceilings and absurd chandeliers, and the courthouse has all of that.

The media isn't actually in the courtroom; we're segregated in a press gallery directly behind the dock for defendants.  I was surprised to see how close we were to them, and disappointed Saddam wasn't in attendance.  I would've been within ten feet of him, and it would've been cool to get a good look at him.  I haven't followed the trial closely enough to have much insight into what I heard today.  The attorneys for two relatively minor Baath party officials defended their clients using every conceivable argument—they weren't there, they're too unimportant to be tried for crimes against humanity, the tribunal is illegitimate, incriminating documents were forged, prosecution witnesses had personal grudges, etc.  The case against these men is that they went around town after the assassination attempt and fingered people who were then arrested, tortured and killed by the Iraqi secret police.  In some cases women and children were arrested and killed.

Today's summations managed to drain any drama at all out of such an emotionally-charged case.  When you're behind several inches of glass and listening to a bored and patchy English translation of the proceedings it's hard to feel any connection to what's going on in the courtroom—even though it's going on right in front of you.  The defendants were a father and son, the father in his 80s and the son well into middle age.  They had an opportunity to speak after their lawyers finished up and both protested their innocence and said they were simple men, beloved in their community.  One said he could go up to any house, knock on the door, and be invited in for lunch.  He did not explain if that open invitiation is based at all on people's fear that if he goes away hungry he might have their children arrested.

The real adventure was getting out of the Green Zone so we could file our pool reports (usually you do that at the courthouse, but they were having a power outage and it seemed like the very early finish had inspired a desire to get everyone out as soon as possible).  It turned out the main checkpoint was inaccessible because a car bomb had closed a bridge across the Tigris.  So I doubled back to the July 14 bridge, on the other side of the Green Zone, with another American reporter who'd been covering the trial.  We were both having an adventure dealing with patchy cell coverage, getting in touch with our rides, and trying to figure out the best way to escape.

It was windy, mercifully temperate and very hazy.  There was a bit of gunfire in the distance, which I've been hearing more of lately.  It was part of the background noise for most of my trip in 2004, but the city had been quieter this time around.  There were some loud bangs, but I think those were the sound of construction—there's a massive new American Embassy complex being built near the river in the western part of the Green Zone.  We crossed the pedestrian walkway towards greater Baghdad with an abaya-clad Iraqi woman balancing a garbage bag full of belongings on her head.  She seemed astounded that Americans were about to walk out into the city. 

We finally made it back to the Hamra early in the afternoon.  The court was a strange experience—justice under glass.  The droning defense attorneys, the unassuming defendants and the detached judges made it hard to feel the enormity of the tragedy being discussed.  Unlike the Anfal campaign against the Kurds and the anti-Shiite campain in 1991—mass-slaughters that killed hundreds of thousands of people—you can get your head around Dujail.  Someone tried to kill Saddam, so Saddam tortured and killed a lot of people as a warning that no one should try anything like that again.  It's the kind of petty brutality on display in post-Saddam Iraq every day.