Amman: Less than 48 hours before he was hanged, Saddam Hussein said he had doubled the workout on his treadmill to be in good shape when he faced the gallows, according to his Iraqi lawyer. Wadood Fawzi Shams Deen, who met the ousted leader at a US military camp in one of his former palaces on December 28, says Saddam told him and another lawyer that he had done 35 minutes of exercise in the previous two days.
"I am making extra effort to prove to them that an Arab dies with honour and dignity defending honourable principles," Shams Deen quoted Saddam as saying. Saddam's hanging, secretly recorded in footage distributed on the internet, has turned him into a martyr in parts of the Arab world, overshadowing memories of his often-brutal and bloody rule and of his conviction for crimes against humanity.
Pictures of his composed conduct and erect bearing in the face of taunting at a shambolic execution has helped the supporters who already have begun burnishing his image as a hero. The value of posterity was not lost on Saddam.
"The execution will turn Saddam Hussein into a symbol for another hundred years," the Iraqi dictator said, according to the lawyers, who took extensive notes of their last conversation with him. Saddam, smoking a Cuban Cohiba cigar and wearing the same black overcoat he wore when he was hanged on December 30, told the lawyers he had turned down an offer of tranquilisers from a US doctor when the appeals court upheld his death sentence.
"I told him that God has given me enough faith to do without them," Shams Deen said Saddam had told him and Bander Awad al-Bander, the lawyer son of one of Saddam's co-defendants.
"I will face my creator with a brave heart and clean hands," Saddam said. Offering cigars to his visitors and a nearby US guard, Saddam said he had been crossing the Tigris River in broad daylight, swimming part of the way and using a small fisherman's boat for the rest, only days before his arrest in a tiny farmhouse cellar near his hometown, Tikrit, in December 2003.
Saddam recited poems about chivalry, endurance, heroism and holy war (jihad), saying poetry had helped him deal with his years in US captivity, much of it in solitary confinement, Shams Deen said. "We have humbled the long nights and it has not broken our will," he quoted Saddam as saying. "Poetry was my window to the world."
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