July 21-27, 2005

city beat

Shock and Law

call to action: After 9/11, Mike Flowers traded a cushy job for a rewarding one. : courtesy of mike flowers

A Temple Law grad will help prosecute Saddam.

by Mike Newall

A year ago, Mike Flowers was a highly paid white-collar criminal defense attorney. Today, he is in Baghdad, a member of the investigative team working to send Saddam Hussein to the gallows.

From 1999 to 2003, Flowers, 36, a Havertown native and Temple Law School graduate, loved his job prosecuting perps for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. "After 9/11, I felt could never leave public service but by early 2003," he recently e-mailed from Baghdad, "I was deep in student loan debt and just couldn't afford NY on 40-45k anymore."

So, Flowers put his dream of becoming a U.S. Attorney on hold and accepted a position at the Washington, D.C. law firm which, incidentally, represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial. Life in the nation's capital was plush: Pretty fiancée. Fat paycheck. Fancy pad. But then the war came.

"I felt overwhelmingly guilty," he writes. "My country was at war and I was making a quarter million a year and living in a very nice townhouse."

A colleague at the firm had a friend working as an attorney in Iraq. After discussing the matter with his fiancée, an interview with the head of the Justice Department's Regime Crimes Liaison Office (RCLO) was arranged. Based in Baghdad, the RCLO is assisting the Iraqi Special Tribunal, a criminal court formed in April consisting of Iraqi judges and attorneys, in prosecuting Saddam Hussein. Flowers quickly accepted a job as an attorney advisor to the tribunal and five weeks later was on a flight to Baghdad.

"We flew into Baghdad International Airport on a C-130," he said. "You sit on jump seats, strap yourself up and put in earplugs the plane makes a corkscrew landing to avoid [shoulder to air missiles]. When you walk off the plane, you're bombarded with noise and heat and dust."

Today, Flowers is stationed in the International Zone, the heavily guarded area of closed-off streets in Central Baghdad where U.S. occupation authorities live and work.

"I've had my close calls," he wrote, "but relative to the Iraqis I work alongside or the coalition forces operating in the country, I have zero to complain about."

Many of the Iraqis working in the tribunal office have lost family or friends to insurgent attacks.

"They know that when they get up in the morning, or drive in to work, or walk into the building, or grab lunch, or drive home, they or their families could be targeted by people who don't hesitate to plow explosive-laden cars into groups of children," he writes of his Iraqi co-workers. "But they refuse to allow that to stop them from continuing their investigations."

Last week, tribunal officials announced the first formal charges against Hussein. The charges stemmed from the dictator's role in the massacre of 150 Shiites in the Iraqi town of Dujail in 1982. Because of security constraints, Flowers cannot get deep into strategy. But in a press release announcing the initial charges, tribunal officials said last Saturday that investigators have pored over millions of documents and interviewed thousands of witnesses. The trial related to the Dujail killings — a relatively minor incident compared to other Hussein atrocities like the brutal repression of a 1991 Shiite rebellion in which 150,000 people were killed — could begin as early as September. If convicted, Hussein could face the death penalty.

As part of the investigations, Flowers has visited the site of a mass grave of Hussein victims. "During my time as a NYC prosecutor, I had experience with corpses, some quite sadistically mutilated," wrote Flowers. "I also came across random body parts while working on the debris pile at Ground Zero, but this was different simply because of the scale. Thousands of bodies. The vast majority women and children with their clothes in bags — refugees. Slaughtered."

Flowers will be in Iraq at least through next April. His fiancée, also a government attorney, has since joined him in Iraq. The two are taking a short leave in September to be married but have put their honeymoon plans on hold.

"When I'm done here," he wrote, "we're going to fly out to the Northwest, buy a car and just drive it home at a leisurely place, stopping to hike or kayak or mountain bike along the way."