Mortar attacks on Sunni neighbourhoods continued unabated, however, with one person killed and four wounded when two rounds slammed into Qahira in north Baghdad early Wednesday, Lt. Mohammed Khayoun said.

US forces said they killed four suspected insurgents in gun battles and detained 48 others during a raid yesterday afternoon on a site used by the al Qaida in Iraq terrorist group in Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad.

The military said the area had been used as a staging point for foreign fighters launching suicide car bomb attacks on US and Iraqi army checkpoints. Rocket-propelled grenades, machine-guns, grenades and explosives-rigged vests used by suicide bombers were found in a vehicle used by the group, the military said.

Fighting involving US forces also left nine Iraqi gunmen dead in Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, police Brig. Sarhat Abdul-Qadir said, without giving other details. There was no word of US casualties in the clash and the American military had no immediate comment on the report.

Police said they found the bodies of three apparent victim of death squads dumped on city streets, a day after the bullet-riddled bodies of 15 victims were found floating in the Tigris River south of Baghdad. Hundreds of such killings - in which victims are bound hand and feet, blindfolded, and often tortured - have been recorded in the capital since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in February that ignited successive waves of sectarian killings.

Bakeries are the frequent target of sectarian attacks because most are owned and run by Shiites. Police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razaq said there was no immediate word on the identities of the gunmen in Wednesday's attack in a predominantly Sunni section of western Baghdad. He said they sped away in two cars after raking the bakery with machine gun fire.

One person was killed and six wounded when car bomb detonated early Wednesday near the al-Nidaa Sunni mosque in Waziriyah, north-east Baghdad, police Lt. Thaer Mahmoud said.

Shiite militia also raided a Sunni mosque in western Baghdad, police 1st Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq said. He had no word on any resulting casualties.

The conservative News Corp chief spoke on the eve of US elections where President George W Bush's Republican Party was expected to lose seats in part due to a backlash over the war.

"The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute," Murdoch told reporters at a conference in Tokyo.

"Of course no one likes any death toll, but the war now, at the moment, it's certainly trying to prevent a civil war and to prevent Iraqis killing each other."

A total of 2,832 US troops have been killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. Thousands more Iraqis have died.

Murdoch -- whose News Corp empire includes the New York Post and Britain's most widely read newspaper, The Sun tabloid -- said while the United States made mistakes in the war its intentions were good.

"I believe it was right to go in there. I believe that certainly the execution that has followed that has included many mistakes," Murdoch said.

"But that's easy to say after the event. It's much easier to criticize the conduct of the war today in the media than it was in previous wars. I'm sure there were great mistakes made in the past, too."

"I think that one forgets that American foreign policy for the whole of the (20th) century saved the world from terrible things three times," he said, "for which they certainly got no thanks and for which they never had imperial ambitions at all."

"A multi-resistant strain of A. baumannii known as the 'T strain' has been isolated from casualties returning to the UK from Iraq," the Health minister Andy Burnham said in a Commons written answer.

He said the exact source of the infection had not been identified but US casualties returning to America had also been found to be carrying the superbug.

Experts in microbiology who were studying the links between the infection and those wounded in Iraq, said an injured soldier thought to have caught the infection in Iraq may have caused a large outbreak of the superbug in an intensive care unit in an NHS hospital in south-east England.

They reported that the superbug was also found in two hospitals in the Midlands in soldiers who had been injured while serving in Iraq. The HPA said last night it was thought the T-strain survived in soil and sand in warm climates such as Iraq.

There was criticism last month of the treatment of injured soldiers on NHS wards after reports that a paratrooper wounded in Afghanistan was threatened by a Muslim visitor at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham, where many soldiers are treated. A campaign for a dedicated hospital for the armed forces was mounted with the support of forces' families. Tony Blair partially bowed to the pressure by announcing that troops would be given a dedicated ward at Selly Oak.

Reg Keys, whose son Tom was killed by a mob in Majar al-Kabir, Iraq, in June 2003, said the existence of the new strain of the infection underlined the need for dedicated facilities for the armed forces. "These lads are giving their lives for their country," he said. "The least they deserve is to be treated in military hospitals, not civilian hospitals, for reasons of security, but the existence of this superbug is very worrying. It proves the case even more for their own medical facilities."

Harry Cohen, the Labour MP for Leyton and Wanstead, who tabled questions about the superbug, said: "It is a worry that this bug which is infecting some of the wounded in Iraq is coming back to this country and could infect other patients in NHS hospitals. It does show that we need more separate wards for the armed forces."

At one hospital in Birmingham the bacteria is reported to have infected 93 people, 91 of them civilians. Thirty-five died, although the hospital was not able to establish whether the superbug was a contributory factor.

A. baumannii is resistant to most common antibiotics and, if left untreated, can lead to pneumonia, fever and septicaemia. It has been identified in more than 240 military personnel in the US since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and has been associated with five deaths.

Lt. Col. Curtis Hill, a Marine spokesman, gave no details on the nature of the allegations other than to say they were leveled against 17 members of Bravo Company of the 4th Assault Amphibian Battalion, Dam Security Unit-2, of Jacksonville, Fla.

He said the Marines were assigned to Camp Lejeune to assist in the investigation but were not under any restrictions.

Between 100 and 120 members of the unit returned from Iraq in late October. The company was sent to Iraq's Anbar province in March to handle counterinsurgency operations and protect infrastructure.

The secretary made the announcement on Nov. 2 at the 6th AnnualC4ISR (command, control, communications, computer, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) Journal Integration conference in Arlington, Virginia, according to the report.

The announcement capped a yearlong drive by Wynne to put cyber warfare on an equal footing with air and space operations, it said.

The job of creating and organizing a cyberspace command from existing Air Force units went to the 8th's commander, Lt. Gen. Robert Elder, a career B-52 pilot and former commandant of the Air War College.

The 8th, part of Air Combat Command, is home to the Air Intelligence Agency, and the Air Force Network Operations Center, which protects Air Force networks from being hacked.

Of the 40,000 airmen assigned to the 8th, about 25,000 already work in jobs that directly deal with cyberspace, Elder was quoted as saying. The 8th's other 15,000 airmen are assigned to strategic bomber wings, which will still stay under the 8th's command, the report said.

"I demand the opening of an investigation on the American side because the area of the offices is guarded by the Americans, who would shoot anybody who comes near," Aref said.

It was the first time that Aref appeared in the court since September 21 when the defence team announced a boycott of the trial to protest the court's rejection of many of their motions.

On Sunday, a separate court sentenced Saddam to hang for the deaths of about 150 Shiite Muslims following an assassination attempt against him in 1982 in the town of Dujail.

Saddam has appealed, but his trial for Operation Anfal is to continue while a panel of nine judges considers the appeal. Saddam and his co-defendants could also be condemned to death sentence if they are convicted in this trial.

In yesterday's session, Saddam called on all Iraqis - Arabs and Kurds - "to forgive, reconcile and shake hands".

Today, the court heard more testimony from Kurdish survivors about attacks against them during the Anfal operation.

Witness Ayoub Abdellah Mohammed said his village was attacked with chemical weapons on August 24, 1988.

"After this we had difficulty in breathing and I told the villagers that the village was hit by chemical weapons," he said. "I could see birds falling and liquids coming out of people's noses."

Another witness, Tawfeeq Abdul-Aziz Mustafa, said he and other villagers fled to Turkey after a chemical attack on their community on August 25, 1988.

"We looked at the villages and there was yellow smoke coming out," he said. "Our eyes became red, itchy and teary. We knew it was a chemical attack."

Mustafa said he lost about 40% of his vision because of exposure to the chemical weapons.

One of the defendants, former intelligence chief Sabir al-Douri, maintained that the Iranian army was operating near where some of the attacks took place.

He said that Kurdish rebels, whom the defence maintains were the target of the Anfal operation, were working closely with Iranian troops during the eight-year war which began in 1980.

As the dominant corporate media in the US made sure everyone in the country would know just ahead of the mid-term congressional elections here, Saddam Hussein was convicted of crimes against humanity on November 5 for his involvement in the killing of 148 Shia men in al-Dujail village after a failed assassination attempt against him there in 1982. The Supreme Iraqi Criminal (Hanging Court) Tribunal (SICT) sentenced him to death by hanging, subject to appeal that's automatic and pro forma. It won't save him from a very sore neck as long as the Bush administration has the final say, which it does despite international law or whatever passes for it in Iraq where the law is what the US occupier says it is. The sentence must be carried out within 30 days after all appeals are exhausted and the death sentence is ratified by Iraq's nominal president and two vice-presidents who have no authority and take their orders from US Ambassador and proconsul Zalmay Khalilzad who takes his orders from Washington.

While few villains are more worthy than the man called the Butcher of Baghdad for whatever fate might befall him, not even a former dictator of his "stature" should have to answer for his crimes before an illegal tribunal established by an occupying power that has no authority under international law. The fact that the trial proceeded this way delegitimized the entire judicial process and in the eyes of independent jurists renders the verdict void and unrecognized.

This proceeding should only have taken place in the sole independent venue constituted for this purpose - the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague established by the Rome Statute of 1998 that gained its authority to try cases in 2002. This court is a permanent tribunal created to prosecute individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide as defined under the Nuremberg Charter of 1945. Saddam wasn't sent there because allowing him a legitimate trial might have exposed the culpability of US administrations and the West in his crimes and would also have denied the Bush administration the ability to have the show trial it wanted and not a fair one according to international laws and norms.

It got all that and more. The eleven month "trial" began in October, 2005 and concluded last July with a verdict delayed for when it could be used most effectively for an administration in big trouble with mid-term congressional elections approaching. Forty-eight hours ahead of them seemed about the right positioning. The whole production leading to the November 5 climax was a theatrical, made-for-US-television extravaganza and sham from the start, right up to the staged theatrics in the streets following the announced verdict TV cameras just happened to be around for as they were when Saddam's statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square was toppled at an earlier scheduled-for-a-US-television audience on April 9, 2003 with a brought-in-for-the-occasion "crowd" of "tens" to watch and cheer.......just like it's done on a Hollywood sound stage.

The SICT was established, funded and staged-managed from Washington with US-approved judges and a team of American lawyers working out of the US Embassy in the Green Zone preparing the case and directing the whole process from beginning to end. It was a classic case of victor's justice in full view assuring whatever the outcome justice would never be served even for a man like Saddam. It wasn't. Along the way from beginning to end, it was a show trial circus best characterized in the terminology of the "down under" marsupial (whose name this trial besmirches) that's known to be shy and retiring by nature and unthreatening to humans unless provoked. The judgment rendered in Washington and announced by the Baghdad SICT on November 5 provoked all people of conscience wanting justice according to the rule of law, not the brand of it practiced out of the Bush White House and Pentagon these days.

The entire process was flawed, unfair and illegal according to virtually all standards of international law. It violated UN Resolution 1483 that required the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Iraq to be responsible for "promoting the protection of human rights" in the country. He did not. Nor did his boss, Kofi Annan, take any action to guarantee them or speak out against the violations he witnessed, a clear abdication of the oath he was sworn to uphold: "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war; to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights; to establish conditions (promoting) justice....equal rights of men and women (in all nations)....(respect for) international law....promote social progress....to ensure....armed force shall not be used." Kofi Annan, his representative and the UN body they serve failed on all counts allowing a criminal occupation and trial of Saddam to go on with barely a whimper.

The trial itself violated almost every provision in Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Its Preamble cites the UN Charter that's binding international law and Universal Declaration of Human Rights stating "civil and political freedom....can only be achieved (if) everyone may enjoy his civil and political rights (and that it is the) obligation of States under the Charter of the United Nations to promote....human rights and freedoms." The US is one of those states so obligated.

Article 14 precisely stipulates the rights of the accused which all signatories to the UN Charter are obligated to observe under international law. In the trial of Saddam Hussein, the US failed by almost every measure and stands exposed and condemned in the eyes of the free world for not having done so.

-- Provision 1 under Article 14 states "All persons shall be equal before the courts and tribunals (and) everyone shall be entitled to a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal established by law." The Bush administration was in complete violation of this provision.

-- Provision 2 guarantees "Everyone charged with a criminal offense....the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law." Saddam was pronounced guilty the moment George Bush signed off on going to war, invading and occupying Iraq.

-- Provision 3 guarantees the accused the following rights:

-- To be told clearly and promptly "of the nature and cause of the charge against him."

-- "To have adequate time and facilities (to prepare a) defence and to communicate with counsel of his choosing."

-- "To be tried without undue delay."

-- "To be tried in his presence, and to defend himself in person or through legal assistance of his own choosing....."

-- "To examine, or have examined, the witnesses against him (and those) on his behalf (under equal conditions)."

-- To have an interpreter if needed.

-- "Not to be compelled to testify against himself or confess guilt."

The US occupier denied Saddam his legal right to a proper defense according to most of the above provisions.

-- Provision 4 pertains to juveniles and was not pertinent to the trial.

-- Provision 5 guarantees "Everyone convicted of a crime....the right to his conviction and sentence being reviewed by a higher tribunal...." What pretense of a review process occurs from here guarantees only a continuation of more show trial theatrics if the proceeding is made public. If it isn't, it will merely be a sham made-in-Washington pro forma final sentencing staged-for-television hanging, even if visuals of Saddam on a rope aren't shown to a US audience.

-- Provision 6 pertains to those wrongfully convicted being entitled to proper compensation. Whatever Saddam's crimes were, and there's little doubt he committed many, what he was convicted of on November 5 would never hold up in a real tribunal. The Bush administration will never pay him damages, if so ordered, just as the Reagan administration ignored the World Court judgment against it in 1987 to pay Nicaragua $17 billion for losses that country sustained from US state terrorism committed against it during the Contra war years in the 1980s. Hegemons never pay for their crimes. They make their victims pay for them.

-- Provision 7 guarantees no one shall be subjected to double jeopardy. This hasn't yet come up in the proceedings that are continuing, but as long as this show trial goes on, the issue of "jeopardy" is not on the table, and the US authority will do as it pleases just as it has up to now.

By nearly all accepted standards of jurisprudence, the Bush administration failed to comply with the above provisions. It spent $75 million (approved by the Pentagon and State Department) on the prosecution that included the special "court room" that was more like a Hollywood sound stage than a court of law. That compared to the meager resources volunteer defense lawyers had at their disposal. Saddam's lawyers requested the right to visit their client from December, 2003 when he was seized but weren't allowed to do it as well as to have adequate and confidential consultations vital to the preparation of a defense. No visitations of consequence were allowed prior to the trial, and, at each one permitted thereafter, US officials claimed the right to read all materials brought to the visiting room. This violated lawyer-client confidentiality as did US monitoring of all meetings audibly and visually. The defense was also denied access to evidence to be used in the trial, the investigative hearings preceding it, any notice of witnesses the prosecution intended to call, and the right to visit the site of the alleged crime to obtain helpful evidence therefrom.

After the trial began, the US made and broke all the rules of proper procedure besides what's explained above. It removed four of the five judges initially assigned to the trial while the chief judge in charge during one portion of it resigned in protest against government involvement in the proceedings. Shortly thereafter two defense lawyers were murdered because they weren't given proper protection even knowing they were vulnerable for representing a controversial "client." Later a third one met the same fate. A defense witness was then murdered. These are the kinds of things that go on in an inquisition under "banana republic" justice. If played out on Broadway, it would be called a farce, but happening in an illegally constituted Baghdad tribunal stage-managed out of Washington and the Green Zone US Embassy, it's a real life tragedy even for someone as notorious as Saddam.

In a concluding act of arrogance and defiance, the latest presiding US-installed hanging judge ejected former US Attorney-General and noted human rights defender Ramsey Clark who was serving as one of the volunteer attorneys for Saddam - trying but failing to assure he was given due process. Clark is an international law expert and was a strident critic of the procedure from the start. His ejection occurred after handing the judge a memorandum calling the trial a travesty of justice. Judge Raud Abdel Rahman responded in his characteristic fashion saying "Get him out of the hall. He came from America to ridicule the Iraqi people and ridicule the court."

The judge neglected to mention he and his US bosses ridiculed and defiled every proper standard of jurisprudence now continuing in the next stage for a US audience, of course. Saddam is currently on trial by the same tribunal along with six others on separate charges related to the so-called Anfal Kurdish minority who were subjected to mass killings and other abuses in 1988. Can we stand another round of this as the Bush administration wants to squeeze every ounce of political capital out of this man before they let twist in the wind and be forgotten. The world will never forget the travesty of justice that took place in that so-called Baghdad tribunal that showed the world who the real criminals are who should have been front and center in the dock of justice but never will be in a world ruled by victor's justice.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.