The FBI interviewed deposed and captured Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein before he was executed. Transcripts of those interviews were recently made public by a non-governmental think-tank as a result of a Freedom of Information request. The interviews show that it might have been possible to avoid war with Iraq, had then-President GW Bush and his cronies wanted to. A Washington Post story, excerpted below, summarizes important findings from the transcipts.
Hussein Pointed to Iranian Threat
By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post
Thursday, July 2, 2009
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 yesterday. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as “a zealot” and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.
Hussein, 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 [Iraq] from threats in the region.”
Former president George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq six years ago on the grounds that Hussein 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 carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Hussein … wistfully acknowledged that he should have permitted the United Nations to witness the destruction of Iraq’s weapons stockpile after the 1991 Persian 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 Web site yesterday. The detailed accounts of the interviews were released with few deletions, though one, a last formal interview on May 1, 2004, was completely redacted.
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The 20 formal interviews took place between Feb. 7 and May 1, followed by the casual conversations between May 10 and June 28. Hussein was later transferred to Iraqi custody, and he was hanged in December 2006.
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In an interview last year on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” George L. Piro, the agent who conducted the interviews, said he … did not use coercive interrogation techniques, because “it’s against FBI policy.” …
During the interviews, Piro, who conducted them in Arabic, often appeared to challenge Hussein’s account of events, citing facts that contradicted his recollections. He even forced Hussein to watch a graphic British documentary on his treatment of the Shiites, though that did not appear to shake the former president.
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Hussein’s fear of Iran, which he said he considered a greater threat than the United States, featured prominently in the discussion about weapons of mass destruction. Iran and Iraq had fought a grinding eight-year war in the 1980s, and Hussein said he was convinced that Iran was trying to annex southern Iraq — which is largely Shiite. “Hussein viewed the other countries in the Middle East as weak and could not defend themselves or Iraq from an attack from Iran,” Piro recounted in his summary of a June 11, 2004, conversation.
“The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of UN inspectors,” Piro wrote. “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.”
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Piro raised bin Laden in his last conversation with Hussein, on June 28, 2004, but the information he yielded conflicted with the Bush administration’s many efforts to link Iraq with the terrorist group. Hussein 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.” Hussein 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 why Hussein and al-Qaeda should have cooperated — they had the same enemies in the United States and Saudi Arabia — Hussein replied that the United States was not Iraq’s enemy, and that he simply opposed its policies.
