You can't be serious

Khalil al-Dulaimi, one of Saddam's lawyers was quoted as saying to an Aljazeera reporter..

"there is a campaign of character assassination"

what!?!
I actually thought I had read the quote wrong at first.
Maybe Saddam did alot of charity work no one knew about, maybe he nursed a sick puppy back to health or maybe he was just a murdering megalomaniac with tendencies for Kurdish genocide.