Saddam's FBI confessions

[The Original Nex]

The Washington Post has an article on the recently released FBI interviews of Saddam Hussein after his capture. There's some fascinating stuff therein:

Hussein Pointed to Iranian Threat
Specter of Arms Allowed Him to Appear Strong, He Told U.S.

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
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, who was often defiant and boastful during the interviews, 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 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.

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the archive, said he could conceive of no national security reason to keep Hussein's conversations with the FBI secret. Paul Bresson, a bureau spokesman, said he could not explain the reason for the redactions.

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.

The formal interviews covered Hussein's rise to power, the Kuwait invasion, and Hussein's crackdown on the Shiite uprising in extensive detail, while the subject of the weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda were raised in the casual conversations, after the formal interviews. Blanton said this suggests that the FBI received new orders from Washington to delve into topics of intense interest to Bush administration officials.

The FBI spokesman did not know why those subjects were raised in the later meetings. In an interview last year on CBS's "60 Minutes," George L. Piro, the agent who conducted the interviews, said he purposely put Hussein's back against the wall "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 yesterday do not suggest any use of coercive techniques.

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.

At one point, Hussein dismissed as a fantasy the many intelligence reports that said he used a body double to elude assassination. "This is movie magic, not reality," he said with a laugh. Instead, he said, he had used a phone only twice since 1990 and rarely slept in the same location two days in a row.

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."

Hussein 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 United States.

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.

Yes Saddam was a gigantic asshole who slaughtered his own people, but remind me again WHY we invaded Iraq instead of any of the number of countries with regimes just as brutal as his was?

[Ziggy Stardust]

I attended a lecture Mr. Piro gave at American University (or was it Georgetown? I forget) a few months ago. He talked a lot about the issue of coercive interrogation techniques, and how, in his opinion as an interrogator, it's a stupid thing to do. "Normal" psychological techniques are far more effective. For example, although he was a green agent at the time (it was one of his first assignments with the FBI, he was a cop before that; and was picked to interview Saddam because he looks Arabic ... seriously), they told the guards and personnel at the facility holding Hussein to treat him as though he were a high-ranking official. He pulled off lots of little displays of power, and tricked Hussein into respecting/fearing him, essentially.

The lecture was really fascinating, Piro had some interesting insights into Hussein's character that this article does not delve into. For example, he was obsessive-compulsive or germophobic, and Piro used access to clean wipes as a leverage tool during interrogations. Apparently the two got on pretty good terms with one another, and Hussein wanted Piro to come to the execution, but Piro refused.

[Solauren]

Yes Saddam was a gigantic asshole who slaughtered his own people, but remind me again WHY we invaded Iraq instead of any of the number of countries with regimes just as brutal as his was?

Because Bush the lesser needed to

#1 - Find another scab-goat besides Bin Laden, who had completly evaded him
#2 - prove he was better then Daddy by actually beating Saddam

[General Zod]

So I guess this means we can say without a doubt the excuse that "we were acting on the best of limited information we had at the time" is nothing more than complete and total bullshit. Though I'm sure the delusional will stick to the lines that Saddam was lying out his ass or something like that.

[The Original Nex]

This link has all the interrogations/conversations themselves. The last one is completely redacted. I wonder what the hell could have been said within that one?

[The Spartan]

Yes Saddam was a gigantic asshole who slaughtered his own people, but remind me again WHY we invaded Iraq instead of any of the number of countries with regimes just as brutal as his was?

Because they were the only ones with oil who were weak enough for us to actually conquer without heavy casualties (to us or our allies, see North Korea), who unambiguously "had" WMD's and who were not poor starving Africans but who were of a similar appearance to the 9/11 hijackers and because we'd already fought a war with them and needed to "finish the job."

Besides he'd let Bin Laden escape and needed to take our focus away from that. The fact that he'd been masturbating over the fantasy of invading Iraq since at least 1999 was just an added bonus.

Or you can sum it up neatly like Solauren did.

[Ziggy Stardust]

This link has all the interrogations/conversations themselves. The last one is completely redacted. I wonder what the hell could have been said within that one?

*shrug* It could be anything. The rules for classifying documents in the U.S. are really convoluted (IIRC, to the point that different agencies have mutually incompatible schemes). It could be something as silly and bureaucratic as the FOIA request as it was filed didn't apply to that section for some reason (I don't know too much about it, but I am pretty sure when they file the request they have to state the information they are looking for and why they are looking for it).

[Pint0 Xtreme]

A few days ago, we had a US Army Colonel give a talk on interrogation with 25+ years of experience in the subject matter and he made very similar testimonies in regards to coercive methods. He also remarked that coercive and torturous methods were counter-productive. They are historically used for a completely different purpose. Non-coercive interrogation methods are used to extract objective information from someone whereas the opposite are historically used to force someone to recant their beliefs or confess to a confession. It's also important to note that torturous methods also affect the prisoner from recollecting properly even if he/she was trying to cooperate.

[Pablo Sanchez]

Yes Saddam was a gigantic asshole who slaughtered his own people,

This has always bugged me, the practice of erroneously calling the victims of Saddam's massacres "his own people" to make it seem extra bad. By what definition were Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and Shi'as "his own people"? They resided in the same country as him, and were under his authority, but only because of the fiat of the post-WWI British Empire, which drew haphazard borders around a heterogeneous population and placed it in the hands of a Sunni Arab minority. The fact is that, among those who really were "his own people," the Sunni Arabs of Salahaddin province, Saddam was actually quite popular. We accuse the United States of the wanton slaughter of American Indians during the 18th & 19th centuries, we accuse the Serbs of massacring Kosovar Albanians, we accuse the Hutus in the genocide of the Tutsis, but only in Saddam's case is it said to be the particularly egregious species of murder called fratricide. Why is this?

I'm not disputing that Saddam was a vicious cunt, of course, just the terms in which his villainous behavior is couched.

[Tanasinn]

As to "psychological" interrogation, wasn't the singlemost successful Nazi interrogator a Luftwaffe officer who never laid a hand on a PoW, relying instead on developing a relationship with isolated soldiers and giving the occasional "push" with threats of the possibility of being turned over to the Gestapo?

[Lord of the Abyss]

As to "psychological" interrogation, wasn't the singlemost successful Nazi interrogator a Luftwaffe officer who never laid a hand on a PoW, relying instead on developing a relationship with isolated soldiers and giving the occasional "push" with threats of the possibility of being turned over to the Gestapo?

Yes, Hanns Scharff aka the Master Interrogator.

Hanns-Joachim Gottlob Scharff (December 16, 1907 – September 10, 1992) was a German Luftwaffe interrogator during the Second World War. He has been called the "Master Interrogator" of the Luftwaffe and possibly all of Nazi Germany; he has also been praised for his contribution in shaping U.S. interrogation techniques after the war. Merely an Obergefreiter (the equivalent of a senior lance corporal), he was charged with interrogating every German-captured American fighter pilot during the war after his becoming an interrogation officer in 1943. He is highly praised for the success of his techniques, especially considering he never used physical means to obtain the required information. No evidence exists he even raised his voice in the presence of a prisoner of war (POW). Scharff’s interrogation techniques were so effective that he was often called upon to assist other German interrogators in their questioning of bomber pilots and aircrews, including those crews and fighter pilots from countries other than the United States. Additionally, Scharff was charged with questioning V.I.P.s (Very Important Prisoners) that funneled through the interrogation center, namely senior officers and world-famous fighter aces.

After the end of WWII, Scharff was invited by the United States Air Force to give lectures on his interrogation techniques and first-hand experiences. The U.S. military later incorporated Scharff’s methods into its curriculum at its interrogation schools. Scharff's methods are still taught in US Army interrogation schools.