The Trial: It was meant to be straightforward: a Nuremberg-style trial to show the world that dictators could be made to face justice in the land they once terrorised. Almost two years after being hauled from a hole in the ground, Saddam Hussein would finally enter the dock to answer for his crimes before a fully functioning Iraqi court.
The case, the torture and execution of 148 Shia men and boys from Dujail after a failed assassination attempt against the then president in 1982, would not rank as the greatest of Saddam's crimes, but they were relatively easy to prove. The Bush administration hoped the hearings would expose the nature of Saddam's crimes, which the Americans had used, in part, to justify their invasion. They also hoped a guilty verdict, and Saddam's resulting execution, would take the sting out of the Sunni insurgency.
America spent more than $140 million preparing for the trial, fortifying the court and training Iraqi officials. "We hoped it would set a new standard for justice, not just in Iraq but across the Middle East, showing citizens that their leaders could be held to account," a senior US legal adviser said.
In the dock with Saddam were Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former vice-president; Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and a former head of the Iraqi secret police; Awad Ahmad al-Bander, a former chief judge of Saddam's revolutionary court; and four Baath Party officials.
Such was the prosecutors' confidence that lawyers predicted it would be over in a month.
There was an air of triumphant expectancy as Saddam and the seven co-accused were called into court shortly after midday on October 19th last year, in the former Baath Party headquarters, now inside the Green Zone. Saddam was the last to appear.
Saddam, his beard trimmed and his dyed hair cut and combed, was calm and self-assured. Yet from the moment the senior judge on the five-man panel asked him to stand and identify himself, Saddam brought the proceedings to the verge of anarchy, setting the tone for the next nine months.
"Those who fought in God's cause will be victorious . . ." he declared, clutching the Koran. "I am at the mercy of God, the most powerful." The judge asked him again to identify himself.
"You know me," came the response. "You are an Iraqi and you know that I don't get tried." Despite refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the court, Saddam would later mutter that he was "not guilty", his plea echoed by his co-defendants.
"From the moment Saddam Hussein refused to tell the judge his name and recognise the legitimacy of the court, their strategy for the trial became clear," said the US legal adviser. That strategy, according to Khalil al-Dulaimi, Saddam's chief defence lawyer, was to use the proceedings to stoke the insurgency and keep the trial going, so a frustrated US would release Saddam in return for his help in restoring order to the country.
Try as they might, the US and Iraqi legal experts could not insulate the trial they had organised from the violence and instability coursing through Iraq.
Three defence lawyers were killed - possibly by Shia death squads, linked to the interior ministry or to Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army - and another fled abroad. More than 30 witnesses were too intimidated to come to court, and many gave evidence from behind screens.
The sessions were dogged by procedural wrangling and technical faults, and repeatedly disrupted by anti-American tirades, hunger strikes, walkouts and boycotts by Saddam and his defence team, who complained that they were not given access to vital documents.The proceedings were criticised by human rights groups and bodies such as Amnesty and the UN, which described them as "incompatible" with standards of international justice.