GLENN KESSLERin Washington examines the newly declassified records of the Iraqi dictator's interrogation
FORMER IRAQI president Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released on Wednesday.
Saddam also denounced Osama bin Laden as “a zealot” and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.
Saddam, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from “fanatic” leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a “security agreement with the United States to protect it [Iraq] from threats in the region”.
Former US president George Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq six years ago on the grounds that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to international security.
Administration officials at the time also strongly suggested Iraq had significant links to al-Qaeda, which launched the September 11th attacks on the US.
Saddam, who during the interviews was often defiant and boastful, at one point wistfully acknowledged that he should have permitted the United Nations to witness the destruction of Iraq’s weapons stockpile after the 1991 Gulf War .
The FBI summaries of the interviews – 20 formal interrogations and five “casual conversations” in 2004 – were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute, and posted on its website.
The detailed accounts of the interviews were released with few deletions, although one, a last formal interview on May 1st, 2004, was completely redacted.
Thomas Blanton, director of the archive, said he could conceive of no possible national security reason to keep Saddam’s conversations with the FBI secret at this point. An FBI spokesman, Paul Bresson, said he could not immediately explain the reason for the redactions.
The 20 formal interviews took place in 2004, between February 7th and May 1st, followed by the casual conversations between May 10th and June 28th. Saddam was later transferred to Iraqi custody and was hanged in December 2006.
The formal interviews covered Saddam’s rise to power, the invasion of Kuwait and his crackdown on the Shia uprising in extensive detail, while the subject of the weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda were raised in casual conversations after the formal interviews were completed.
Blanton said this suggested that the FBI received new orders from Washington to delve into topics of intense interest to Bush administration officials.
The FBI spokesman could not immediately explain why those subjects were raised in the later casual meetings.
In an interview last year on CBS’s 60 Minutes, the agent who conducted the interviews – George Piro – said he purposely put Saddam’s back against the wall in order “psychologically to tell him that his back was against the wall”, but he did not use coercive interrogation techniques because “it’s against FBI policy”.
The interviews released on Wednesday do not suggest any use of coercive techniques.
During the interviews, Piro, who conducted them in Arabic, often appeared to challenge Saddam’s account of events, citing facts that contradicted his recollections.
He even forced Saddam to watch a graphic British documentary on his treatment of the Shias, although that did not appear to shake the former Iraqi president.
At one point, Saddam dismissed as a fantasy the many intelligence reports that he used a body double to elude assassination.
“This is movie magic, not reality,” he said with a laugh. Instead, he said he had only used a phone twice since 1990 and rarely slept in the same location two days in a row.
Saddam’s fear of Iran, which he said he considered a greater threat than the US, featured prominently in the discussion over weapons of mass destruction.
Iran and Iraq had fought a grinding eight-year war in the 1980s and Saddam said he was convinced Iran was trying to annex southern Iraq – which is largely Shia.
“Hussein viewed the other countries in the Middle East as weak and [believed they] could not defend themselves or Iraq from an attack from Iran,” Piro recounted in his summary of a June 11th, 2004, conversation. “The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of UN inspectors.
“Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq.”
Saddam noted that Iran’s weapons capabilities had increased dramatically while Iraq’s weapons “had been eliminated by the UN sanctions” and that eventually Iraq would have to reconstitute its weapons to deal with that threat if it could not reach a security agreement with the US.
Piro raised bin Laden in his last conversation with Saddam, on June 28th, 2004, but the information he yielded conflicted with the Bush administration’s many efforts to link Iraq with the terrorist group.
Saddam replied that throughout history, there had been conflicts between believers of Islam and political leaders. He said that “he was a believer in God but was not a zealot . . . that religion and government should not mix”.
Saddam said that he had never met bin Laden and that the two of them “did not have the same belief or vision”.
When Piro noted that there were reasons that Saddam and al-Qaeda should have co-operated – they had the same enemies in the United States and Saudi Arabia – Saddam replied that the United States was not Iraq's enemy: he was simply opposed to its policies. – ( Los Angeles Times- Washington Post service)