Judge Ra'id Juhi Hamadi Al-Sa'edi, former chief investigative judge of the Iraqi High Tribunal, has the perilous distinction of being the man who not only indicted Saddam Hussein but also grilled the former Iraqi president face-to-face in close quarters. As a result, according to Al-Sa'edi, the voluble Saddam put the noose around his own neck, revealing far more than he intended in his stream of invective and rhetoric.

"Anyone who talks a lot will make a mistake," said Al-Sa'edi, now Cornell Law School's first Clarke Middle East Fellow, at his first public lecture, given March 24 in the law school. "We learned from [the investigations in] Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Yugoslavia: Don't let the accused manipulate the court by using the time factor, but let them think they are comfortable, allow them to talk."

Dressed in a dark suit sans the traditional gold-trimmed robe of his office, the former judge calmly described the overwhelming challenges in developing and running the tribunal. Despite the lack of full international support, the Iraqi government created the high court in 2003, said Al-Sa'edi, to help establish rule of law in large part by bringing Iraqis accused of committing genocide and other crimes against humanity to justice.

Among the defendants: Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid (also known as Chemical Ali), the man who oversaw the gas attacks that killed thousands of Kurdish villagers; also Iraq's former vice president, former deputy prime minister and other former senior officials in the deposed Baathist regime. Al-Sa'edi also indicted the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr for murder in 2004, which became an important factor in the Iraqi insurgency, although al-Sadr remains at large.

In the prosecution of Saddam, evidence had to be gathered from the mass murders of an estimated 100,000 Kurds before 1990 and of the annihilation of some 200,000 Shiites in the brutal quashing of the post-Gulf War revolution against Saddam's regime in 1991. The crimes had to be tied directly to policies of Saddam's regime, said Al-Sa'edi.

That meant the investigations required documentation from witnesses and human rights organizations, for one. Al-Sa'edi said that 10 tons of files were procured and taken to a specially built secure facility where they were culled by case down to 6 million relevant documents and then to 14 cases that had to be electronically scanned into a database.

Establishing the time of the crimes was crucial to the investigation. Dates, times and locations required forensic evidence and permission to open mass graves. Of 250 sites containing anywhere from 80 to 100 individual human remains, five were selected.

At each isolated site, a fully equipped camp had to be erected, said Al-Sa'edi. "We had to build a city in the desert, with showers, rest places, dining facilities and refrigerators -- one for food and one for remains."

Throughout the process, the tribunal faced numerous political challenges, including a De-Baathification Commission that led to the purging of numerous judges on the grounds that they were former members of Saddam's Baath party.

Al-Sa'edi, a Shiite who had served for a decade as a judge under Saddam, also was targeted by the commission. But he and other remaining judges ultimately received full support from the Iraqi government following no small amount of pressure from the United States.

In the end, the court accomplished its task of bringing Saddam and company to trial. It also sent an important message to the Iraqi people.

"Our responsibility was to send the message that no one is above the law," Al-Sa'edi said. "We also sent a strong message to judges and legal experts that it is [their] responsibility to handle and improve the situation in Iraq. And we also sent a message to politicians: that they must [not interfere] with the rule of law and must show respect for the [Iraqi] constitution."