Saddam boosted fitness training for hanging- lawyer

AMMAN, Jan 10 (Reuters) Less than 48 hours before he was hanged, Saddam Hussein said he had doubled the workout on his treadmill to be in good shape when he faced the gallows, according to his Iraqi lawyer.

Wadood Fawzi Shams Deen, who met the ousted leader at a US military camp in one of his former palaces on December 28, says Saddam told him and another lawyer that he had done 35 minutes of exercise in the previous two days.

''I am making extra effort to prove to them that an Arab dies with honour and dignity defending honourable principles,'' Shams Deen quoted Saddam as saying.

Saddam's hanging, secretly recorded in footage distributed on the Internet, has turned him into a martyr in parts of the Arab world, overshadowing memories of his often brutal and bloody rule and of his conviction for crimes against humanity.

Pictures of his composed conduct and erect bearing in the face of taunting at a shambolic execution has helped the supporters who have already begun burnishing his image as a hero -- even as the court still trying Saddam's associates shows pictures of thousands of Iraqi Kurds killed in chemical attacks.

The value of posterity was not lost on Saddam. ''The execution will turn Saddam Hussein into a symbol for another hundred years,'' he said, according to the lawyers, who took extensive notes of their last conversation with him.

Saddam, smoking a Cuban Cohiba cigar and wearing the same black overcoat he wore when he was hanged on December 30, told the lawyers he had turned down an offer of tranquilisers from a US doctor when the appeals court upheld his death sentence.

''I told him that God has given me enough faith to do without them,'' Shams Deen said Saddam told him and Bander Awad al-Bander, the lawyer son of one of Saddam's co-defendants.

''I will face my creator with a brave heart and clean hands.'' Offering cigars to his visitors and a nearby US guard, Saddam said he had been crossing the Tigris River in broad daylight, swimming part of the way and using a small fisherman's boat for the rest, only days before his arrest in a tiny farmhouse cellar near his hometown, Tikrit, in December 2003.

POEMS Saddam recited poems about chivalry, endurance, heroism and holy war (jihad), saying poetry had helped him deal with his years in U.S. captivity, much of it in solitary confinement, Shams Deen said.

''We have humbled the long nights and it has not broken our will,'' he quoted Saddam as saying. ''Poetry was my window to the world.'' Saddam said he had read the Koran, the Muslim holy book, eight times over during the holy fasting month of Ramadan.

Other titles he requested and got were poetry by the eminent Arab poet Al-Mutanabi and a copy of the UN human rights declaration.

Saddam said he had predicted to a senior American interrogator a week after his arrest in December 2003 that Iraq would be a magnet for all the groups that ''hated America'': ''They will fight America in Iraq, all in their own way and with their own agenda. It is better that you leave sooner rather than later.'' Iraq would be a ''bigger quagmire than Vietnam for the United States'', Shams Deen quoted Saddam as saying, and by early 2007 US troops would have been ''driven out of Iraq in humiliation''.

''They have reached a point of powerlessness,'' Saddam said, adding that the insurgency had gained strength throughout his detention.

''Maybe in the first three months they were in need of Saddam.

But the resistance now doesn't need Saddam Hussein ... and will, God willing, defeat the occupiers of great Iraq,'' he said, according to the lawyers.

As he said farewell to his visitors, Saddam said he would leave his people ''content that the moment of America's end in Iraq is fast approaching''.

Reuters AKJ DB1004