Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Iraq

Seeking justice in Saddam's shadow

Tampa attorney Greg Kehoe has returned from Iraq after 10 months building criminal cases in a land of bullets and bombs.

By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD
Published March 24, 2005

TAMPA - As a high-profile target in the world's most dangerous country, Greg Kehoe carried a sidearm and crossed long, lonely stretches of desert with a heavily armed escort. He slept - when he could sleep - in a trailer behind Saddam Hussein's former presidential palace.

He worried when he heard incoming mortar rounds, and he worried when he couldn't hear them. Once, in June, he was standing outside the palace when a piece of shrapnel whizzed by, inches from his ear. "One foot this way, one foot that way," and he would have been in its path, Kehoe said.

The 50-year-old Tampa attorney came home Saturday night, after a 10-month stint running the office that is building criminal cases against Saddam Hussein and his former top henchmen. It was a period of relentless 16-hour workdays and seven-day work weeks, overseeing a staff of American and international specialists and a $75-million operating budget.

Kehoe and his staff dug through mountains of documents, assembling a matrix of paperwork to establish the chain of command for atrocities committed under Saddam. He supervised the exhumation of bodies from the desert, some of the graves full of women and children killed with shots to the head.

Part of the task: proving victims fell to Saddam's execution squads, rather than to battlefield injuries, as from the Iran-Iraq war that raged in the 1980s. "There was no dearth of bodies to be found," Kehoe said Wednesday, addressing a lunch crowd of about 75 people at the University Club in Tampa.

Kehoe spoke of the struggle to establish the rule of law in a country characterized for decades by terror, show trials and mass disappearances. "For telling a joke about Saddam Hussein, the sentence and penalty was death; that's the world these people lived in," he said.

Kehoe met Saddam himself several times and came away with the impression that the incarcerated former Iraqi dictator "knows he has to answer for what he has done."

Evidence assembled by Kehoe's staff is now in the hands of the Iraqi Special Tribunal for Crimes Against Humanity, a body of Iraqi judges and prosecutors. Kehoe said they will begin trying members of Saddam's regime in the coming months, in a building refurbished to withstand rocket fire.

Earlier this month, gunmen killed an investigating judge and his son, a lawyer for the tribunal, outside their Baghdad home.

Critics, including members of Saddam Hussein's defense team, have questioned the legitimacy of the tribunal, which was established in December 2003 by the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council. Critics call it the handiwork of an occupying power that launched an illegal war.

Kehoe said he was moved by the spectacle in January of Iraqis lined up single-file for miles to vote, despite threats and attacks by insurgents. "No one ever expected the cry for freedom to reach out the way it did on that day," Kehoe said. "I'm here to tell you this country is on its way."

Kehoe is a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted members of the Outlaws motorcycle gang. In the late 1990s, serving on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, he successfully prosecuted a Croatian general for war crimes.

Now, Kehoe will return to work at the law firm of James, Hoyer, Newcomer and Smiljanich, where he is a partner and chief of the trial division.

"Short-term goals are probably getting a steak and a bottle of wine and going to spring training games," Kehoe said.

Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report. Christopher Goffard can be reached at 813-226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com

[Last modified March 24, 2005, 01:51:15]