Saddam and the seven former members of his regime face possible execution by hanging if they are convicted in connection to the crackdown launched in Dujail following a July 8, 1982, shooting attack on Saddam's motorcade in the town.

Last month, Saddam stood up in court and boldly acknowledged that he ordered the 148 Shiites put on trial before his Revolutionary Court, which eventually sentenced them all to death. But Saddam insisted it was his right to do so since they were suspected in the attempt to kill him.

Before Saddam's testimony, his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim, who headed the feared Mukhabarat intelligence agency at the time of the Dujail attack, was questioned for more than three hours by the chief judge and prosecutor, who presented him with half a dozen Mukhabarat documents and memos about the crackdown.

Barzan, a secular Sunni, interspersed his commentary with passages from the Koran, Logan reports. At times, this drew laughter from the Iraqi journalists listening in the gallery, Logan says.

One after another, Ibrahim insisted that the documents were fake and that his signatures on them were forged. "It's not true. It's forged. We all know that forgery happens," he said.

In previous sessions, Dujail residents have testified that Ibrahim personally participating in torturing them during their imprisonment at the Baghdad headquarters of the Mukhabarat intelligence agency, which Ibrahim headed. One woman claimed Ibrahim kicked her in the chest while she was hung upside down and naked by her interrogators.

But Ibrahim insisted the Mukhabarat agency was not involved in the investigation into the attack on Saddam and denied any personal role in the crackdown.

"I didn't order any detentions. I didn't interrogate anyone," he said, adding that he resigned from the Mukhabarat in August 1983. "There is not a single document showing that I was involved in the investigation."

Chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi showed the court a series of Mukhabarat documents on the Dujail case from 1982 and 1983, some of which bore signatures he said were Ibrahim's. One of them was a memo from Ibrahim's office asking Saddam for rewards for six Mukhabarat officers involved in the Dujail crackdown.

"This is not my signature. My signature is easy to forge, and this is forged," Ibrahim said.

He said the same of another document that listed Dujail families whose farmlands were razed in retaliation for the shooting. Another document, signed by an assistant to Ibrahim, talked of hundreds of Dujail detainees being held by the Mukhabarat at its headquarters and at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Ibrahim said that memo as well was false.

At the end of Wednesday's session, Abdel-Rahman ordered forensic tests on the signatures to determine their veracity.

Ibrahim insisted that the General Security agency, not the Mukhabarat, carried out the Dujail crackdown. He said his sole role came on the day of the shooting, when he went to the village and ordered security officials to release Dujail residents who had been arrested.

The defense has argued that Saddam's government acted within its rights to respond after the assassination attempt on the former Iraqi leader. The prosecutor has sought to show that the crackdown went well beyond the authors of the attack to punish Dujail's civilian population, saying entire families were arrested and tortured and that the 148 who were killed were sentenced to death without a proper trial.