head of the Iraq Special Tribunal (which was established to try Hussein), accused interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi of pushing for a hasty show trial and execution, stating: "Show trials followed by speedy executions may help the interim government politically in the short term but will be counterproductive for the development of democracy and the rule of law in Iraq in the long term." First hearing: 1 July 2004 The 67-year-old President, Saddam Hussein, appeared confident and defiant throughout the 46-minute hearing. Alternating between listening to and gesturing at the judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin, he questioned the legitimacy of the tribunal set up to try him. He called the court a "play" aimed at Bush's chances of winning the US presidential elections. He emphatically rejected charges against him. "This is all theater. The real criminal is Bush", he stated. When asked by the judge to identify himself in his first appearance before an Iraqi judge (three of the five judges and the prosecutor were never identified nor photographed for security reasons), he answered, "You are an Iraqi, you know who I am." Also during the arraignment, Saddam defended Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait and referred to Kuwaitis as "dogs" who were trying to turn the women of Iraq into "two-penny whores", which led to an admonition from the judge for using coarse language in court. Later on 1 July, Kuwait's information minister Abul-Hassan said crude language was "expected" of Saddam. "This is how he was raised", said the minister. Although no attorneys for Saddam were present at the 1 July hearing, his first wife, Sajida Talfah, hired a multinational legal team of attorneys, headed by Jordanian Mohammad Rashdan and including Ayesha Gaddafi (Libya), Curtis Doebbler (United States), Emmanuel Ludot (France) and Marc Henzelin (Switzerland). Towards the end of the first hearing, the deposed president refused to sign the legal document confirming his understanding of the charges. Pre-trial events In a leaked transcript of a February 2003 meeting between Bush and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Aznar, Bush expressed a willingness to have Saddam tried at the International Tribunal of Justice in The Hague. In December 2004, Clive Stafford Smith prepared a 50-page brief for the defense team arguing that Saddam Hussein should be tried in the US under US criminal law. The London-based Arab-language daily newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported in early May 2005 that during a meeting with Donald