Fri Dec 19,12:11 PM ET
BAGHDAD (AFP) - Controversy mounted over the planned trial of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) as violence continued to rock Iraq (news - web sites) and US overseer Paul Bremer said he escaped an attack earlier this month.
With Iraq's interim leadership insisting Saddam should be tried by Iraqis, calls came for the United States too to be held to account for its past support for the Iraqi strongman.
A US newspaper report appeared set to fuel the debate by giving details of 1980s visits to Baghdad by then presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld, now defense secretary.
The Washington Post said Rumsfeld, a main architect of the war that toppled Saddam in April, went to Iraq in 1984 to deliver the message that the United States wanted to improve relations despite its public criticism of Baghdad's use of chemical weapons.
As president Ronald Reagan (news - web sites)'s Middle East envoy, Rumsfeld was instructed to tell then Iraqi foreign minister Tareq Aziz that the US statement on chemical weapons did not affect the US desire "to improve bilateral relations, at a pace of Iraq's choosing," said the daily, quoting from newly declassified documents.
The trip followed a visit in December 1983 when Rumsfeld was instructed to persuade Iraq to resume diplomatic relations with the United States.
Saddam was at the time waging war on neighboring Iran and using chemical weapons against enemy troops and Kurds in northern Iraq.
Former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani demanded Friday that the United States be tried for crimes committed by Saddam because it once supported his regime.
"From the day the Baathist regime began its fight against the Muslims and the Shiites, the United States, Britain and other oppressor powers rallied around Saddam Hussein," Rafsanjani said during weekly prayers.
"They were accomplices in all the crimes committed by Saddam."
Tehran is preparing its own legal case against Saddam for his use of chemical weapons in the 1980-88 war against Iran, and to support its claim for heavy reparations for the damage caused by the conflict.
In Amman, controversial French lawyer Jacques Verges, who is preparing to defend Tareq Aziz and has said he would be willing to represent Saddam, insisted that "all Western heads of state," from the time of the Iraq-Iran war to the latest Iraq conflict should take the stand when former Iraqi officials go on trial.
"Right now the former Iraqi regime is being blamed for certain events that took place at a time when its members were treated as allies or friends by countries that had embassies in Baghdad and ambassadors not all of whom were blind (to Iraqi crimes)," Verges said.
"When we reprove the use of certain weapons (we need to know) who sold these weapons," he said about Iraq's past purchase of arms from France, Britain, the United States and Russia.
The UN human rights arm meanwhile said it hoped Saddam's trial would meet "international standards" and reiterated its opposition to the death penalty.
"If there is a trial we hope it will conform to international human rights standards," the UN Commissioner for Human Rights' spokesman Jose Diaz told journalists in Geneva.
Asked about the possibility that Saddam could be executed, Diaz said there was "a gradual movement towards the abolition of the death penalty that we would like to see extended throughout the world."
Here in Baghdad, members of the US-sponsored interim leadership responded to calls for an international trial for Saddam by insisting he should be tried by Iraqis and in his own country.
"All the Governing Council members agree that Saddam must be tried in Iraq by Iraqi judges," council spokesman Hamid al-Kifai told AFP.
He said Saddam, who was captured by US forces on Saturday, "was still undergoing questioning by the Americans," who would subsequently hand him over to Iraqi authorities.
"We reject demands to try the former president in an international tribunal, and we emphasize that he must be tried in Iraq," said interim Justice Minister Hashem al-Shebli.
Bremer appeared to endorse this position, telling reporters in the southern city of Basra Friday that the deposed dictator "will be tried by the Iraqi courts when the Iraqi courts are ready."
As fresh violence hit Iraq, Bremer said he had survived an attack against him, but an aide said he did not seem to have been specifically targeted.
"That's correct," Bremer said when asked whether there had been an attack against him earlier in December.
In Washington a senior US defense official said a roadside explosion blew out tires of a lead vehicle in Bremer's convoy as he returned from seeing off Rumsfeld at Baghdad airport on December 6.
The windshield in Bremer's vehicle further back in the convoy was cracked by the force of the explosion, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
However he said the attack was not believed to be specifically directed at Bremer but at "targets of opportunity" on an airport road that had been the scene of past attacks on convoys with improvised explosive devices.
On Friday a woman died and eight other people were hurt in the collapse of a homeless shelter run by Iraq's largest Shiite political group, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
SCIRI officials said a bomb had been detonated in the building and blamed Saddam supporters, but US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, quoting police, said there was a structural defect.
In another blow to SCIRI, a Shiite preacher of a west Baghdad mosque was shot dead by unknown gunmen on Thursday, an official of the group's security force said.
A bomb also exploded just west of the Iraqi capital Friday morning, wounding the driver of a tanker truck under US military escort, a witness said.
It was unclear whether the victim was an American soldier.
An Iraqi police officer said police shot and wounded two men trying to lay explosive charges on a road used by American troops near the oil-rich northern town of Kirkuk.
On a more positive note, US envoy James Baker headed home from Moscow after a whirlwind European tour which secured support for easing Iraq's crushing 120-billion-dollar debt even from countries that opposed the war.
The special envoy of US President George W. Bush (news - web sites) received pledges of support from war opponents France, Germany and Russia, as well as from US allies Italy and Britain.