"Shaking his hand, I tell Jacques Vergès, it's impossible not to feel a direct connection to all those other palms he's pressed. His friends have included such men as the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, and Illich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, who blew up Marseille railway station and shot dead - among others - two French policemen: a soldier, as Vergès once described the Venezuelan terrorist, "in a noble cause".

[....]

"Saddam Hussein will be defended by a team of lawyers, Vergès chief among them, if the Iraqi's family is allowed any say in the matter. He is already representing former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz ("a gentleman") who surrendered a year ago. That said, there is probably no lawyer the allies would less like to see coaxing the former leader to reminisce on those happier days when the US counted him among its friends. His proclamation of his leading role is thought by some to be premature: it's possible the Americans might seek to exclude him, for instance by stipulating that all participating attorneys hold a permit to practise in Iraq.

"If and when a trial does take place," Vergès says, "I will argue that Mr Rumsfeld cannot escape being charged as a co-conspirator, since he was the intermediary for arms sales to Saddam Hussein. I am preparing the case on that basis."

[....]

"Whatever the level of western hypocrisy in this affair," I ask Vergès, "how can you contemplate defending a man who ordered the gassings at Halabja and who, according to a study by the group Human Rights Watch, was responsible for the death of up to 100,000 Kurdish non-combatants in the first eight months of 1988 alone?"

"My position on that, as a defence lawyer," replies Vergès, "is that you must first prove to me those acts were committed, and secondly that they were committed by Saddam Hussein. But in any case - even if those things were done on his orders - they were done with weapons supplied by the US. If you provide a country with poison gas and biological weapons it is for one purpose only. When a crime is committed, you can't pursue only one of the guilty parties."

"The charge against the US being?"

"Complicity, by reason of supplying the means to commit a crime. I don't see how, in an international court of law, the Americans * could begin to justify supplying Iraq with chemical weapons. And there is absolutely no doubt that they did."