Have Degree, Will Travel

Jimmy Breslin
December 18, 2003

First yesterday, I meet a bodega owner in Corona who said he had a cousin, Wadah, who is from the West Bank and is something in the Al-Jazeera network. Bendek said that the cousin was willing to give him the audio rights to the torture of Saddam Hussein.

"You can hear him scream while you drive your car," Bendek said.

"How do you make money with it?" I asked.

"I don't know. Do you?"

"No."

"My cousin says he will have a microphone there so you can hear when they do something to Saddam. I just don't know what to do with it."

I left him certain of one thing. If he gets that audio out there on the air, his prime listener, George Bush, will be sitting in the White House with the radio on loud.

Later, as I am walking along Queens Boulevard at noon, I run into Natalie Rea, an old friend. She is a pretty 41-year-old widow who stands against state violence wherever she can. I asked her, being that she was in Rwanda and then Afghanistan as a lawyer, if she would work on the Saddam Hussein defense team.

"You're the second person who has asked me that," she said.

The first was the bartender at Jerry's in SoHo when she was having pizza and wine at the bar and the bartender said, "What about being the lawyer for Saddam?"

It would be nothing for her to go over there with a cause in her eyes. She figures to be over there sometime. "Iraq is hard because you're an American," she said.

"How many don't like Americans?" she was asked.

The lawyer with Natalie, Mary Ross, said, "All."

"That makes it harder to be a defense lawyer," Natalie said. "In Afghanistan, I wore a scarf. I shouldn't have given in, but it was hard enough to be defending somebody in a country that has no idea of what a defense lawyer was. There were only three in the country. Why put a second burden on the client with the defense lawyer a woman going around uncovered?"

I met Natalie when she was out of the University of Pittsburgh and became a dentist and opened an office at 93rd and Columbus on the West Side. She had a 350-pound woman who had been a man until some weeks before. The patient had bad teeth and a worse temper and that was the end of dentistry for Natalie. >>>> continue