Don't get me wrong. I'm not about to slap an "I love Saddam" sticker on the bumper of my car.

But when he spoke at his hearing earlier this month, he made a perverse kind of sense.

No, not the stubborn insistence that "I am Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq" or the rant about the 10-dinar whores or even his claim that President Bush is the worse criminal.

He spoke the truth when he said that the court was under the thumb of the United States.

So far, the crimes against humanity that Saddam Hussein has been charged with are the invasion of Kuwait; crushing Kurdish and Shiite revolts after the 1991 Gulf War; ethnic cleansing of Kurds in 1987-1988 and gassing them in Halabja; killing religious leaders in 1974; and bumping off political opponents over three decades.

I have no doubt that every one of those accusations is true. But I'm not the one who needs convincing. Convince the Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world.

To do that you'll have to show that this is an independent Iraqi tribunal. It's not.

The first blunder the United States made was appointing Salem Chalabi as the head prosecutor of the war crimes tribunal.

There was no compelling reason why the head prosecutor had to be appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority rather than by the Iraqi interim government. Unless we were looking for a puppet. Hello, Pinocchio.

Much has been made of Chalabi being the nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, the same Ahmad Chalabi who was trying so hard to be the U.S.-backed president of Iraq that he fed false information about weapons of mass destruction to the Pentagon to nudge the administration towards war.

Nice lineage. But let's not let the sins of the uncle descend on the nephew.

Salem Chalabi was a London lawyer who opened the Iraqi International Law Group, or IILG, in Baghdad last year to facilitate government contracts and bring business into Iraq. More experience with drafting contracts than prosecuting genocidal maniacs.

Back in September, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported that the IILG Web site was registered to the Washington, D.C., office of Zell, Goldberg & Co., an Israeli law firm with offices also in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Seattle and Moscow.

Mark Zell, one of the principals, was, until 2001, the law partner of Douglas Feith, now the deputy undersecretary of defense for policy and one of the most energetic cheerleaders for this war on Iraq. Salem Chalabi has acknowledged that Zell was acting as marketing director for IILG.

Both Zell and Feith are strong backers of Ariel Sharon's Likud party.

Salem Chalabi's close ties to America make him suspect to Iraqis and the Arab world; the association with right-wing Israelis is the kiss of death.

Somewhere in Iraq there must be a judge or a lawyer who has experience in international criminal law, who isn't closely related to Saddam's most bitter political rival and who doesn't have close ties to the United States and Israel. And I bet the Iraqis themselves could have found him.

Blooper Two happened at the arraignment earlier this month.

When Saddam entered the courtroom, he faced Salem Chalabi, a Chalabi-appointed judge and four Americans.

The Iraqis have been advocating an open, transparent trial. Televised, every word of it. Let the people see and hear the horrifying details of 34 years of death and destruction under Saddam's brutal reign.

The Americans nixed that idea. They let a few television cameras into the courtroom but no Iraqi media (go figure). Americans set the rules: no sound, just visuals.

Cameramen smuggled out the soundtrack this time. Now, Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world wonder what Americans are trying to hide. Who will Saddam implicate? What secrets are the Americans trying to hush up?

Despite President Bush's exclamation of "let freedom reign," it's clearly freedom on American terms, with American keepers and an American muzzle.

If this is sovereignty, you can keep it.

Susan Ives can be reached at suives@texas.net.