IRAQ. SADDAM READY FOR HANGMAN

former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has resigned himself to being sent to the gallows. "I am ready to die," he told his lawyer and confidante in an interview in his Baghdad prison. "I am not scared of execution."
"I do not attend this trial to spare my life," he said. "I attend it to defend Iraq."
Saddam, who refuses all visits from his family, was talking to Bushra Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer in her forties who is now the only woman he meets. In their meetings Saddam often prefers to talk to her about poetry or international relations rather than the minutiae of the defence case.
Khalil told The Sunday Times of an intimate five-hour interview conducted with Saddam in his prison.
He confided that he had no fear of death and seemed to have accepted his fate. "I took the decision to die the day I tried to assassinate Abdel Karim Qasim," he said, referring to a botched coup against a former leader that forced him to flee the country in 1959.