http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/07/03/world/AP-US-Saddam-FBI-Interviews.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=print
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July 3, 2009
FBI Notes: Saddam Hussein Sought Familiar Refuge
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:15 a.m. ET
BAGHDAD (AP) -- After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein stayed in
Baghdad until he saw ''the city was about to fall.'' Months later, he was
caught hiding at the same farm where he had fled in 1959 after taking part in
an attempt to kill the country's prime minister.
Unclassified FBI interviews conducted during his incarceration at a U.S.
detention center offered new details Thursday about the late Iraqi dictator's
life on the run -- both before and after he was ousted.
The documents also confirm previous reports that Saddam falsely allowed the
world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction -- the main U.S.
rationale behind the war -- because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran,
the hostile neighbor he considered a bigger threat than the U.S.
Saddam was captured by American soldiers on Dec. 13, 2003, just over eight
months after his regime was toppled by a U.S.-led invasion. An Iraqi tribunal
convicted him of crimes against humanity, and he was hanged at the end of 2006.
He said he was never in the neighborhood on the outskirts of Baghdad that was
bombed on March 19, 2003, in an attempt to kill the Iraqi leader at the start
of the war. The U.S. military had received a tip that he was hiding there.
Saddam made his last public appearance in Azamiyah on April 9, 2003, the day a
bronze statue of him was brought down in a central Baghdad square in what
became the defining image of his overthrow.
But, he said, he stayed in Baghdad until April 10 or 11 when ''it appeared that
the city was about to fall.'' He held a final meeting with leaders from his
inner circle and told them, ''We will struggle in secret.''
Then he fled the capital, gradually shedding his bodyguards along the way to
avoid attracting attention, telling them they had fulfilled their duty.
The new details were among more than 100 pages of notes written by George Piro,
an FBI special agent who interviewed Saddam after he was found huddling in a
so-called ''spider hole'' on a farm near his hometown of Tikrit, 80 miles north
of Baghdad.
The notes of the FBI interviews were made public Wednesday by the National
Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute.
Saddam said the farm was the same place he took refuge after participating four
decades ago in a failed assassination attempt against then-Prime Minister
Abdul-Karim Qassim.
Saddam denied the widespread belief that he used body doubles to avoid
detection. ''This is movie magic, not reality,'' he was quoted as saying in the
transcript.
Instead, he said, he evaded enemies by using the telephone just twice in more
than a decade and constantly moving from one dwelling to another. He
communicated mainly through couriers or met personally with officials.
''He was very aware of the United States' significant technological
capabilities,'' the agent wrote in notes after one interview.
In a series of interviews between February and June of 2004, Saddam also told
Piro that he falsely allowed the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran, which Iraq fought
in a ruinous, eight-year war in the 1980s that involved the use of chemical
weapons.
Saddam denied having unconventional weapons before the U.S. invasion but
refused to allow U.N. inspectors to search his country from 1998 until 2002.
The inspectors returned to the weapons hunt in November 2002 but still
complained that Iraq was not cooperating.
''By God, if I had such weapons, I would have used them in the fight against
the United States,'' he told Piro.
Former President George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq in large part on
the assertion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and could provide
them to terrorists. Saddam had used chemical weapons previously, and the Bush
administration maintained that he was pursuing biological and nuclear weapons.
No such weapons were found after the war.
In the interviews, Saddam dismissed Osama bin Laden as a ''zealot'' and said he
had never personally met the al-Qaida leader. He said the Iraqi government did
not cooperate with the terrorist group against the U.S.
The National Security Archive obtained the FBI summaries through a Freedom of
Information Act request and posted them on its Web site. The New York Daily
News also wrote about the Hussein files last week after obtaining summaries of
the interviews through a FOIA request.
Saddam also stated that the United States used the Sept. 11 terrorist attack as
a justification to attack Iraq and said the U.S. had ''lost sight of the cause
of 9/11.'' He claimed that he denounced the attack in a series of editorials.
Piro had described the discussions with the Iraqi dictator in an interview with
CBS's ''60 Minutes'' last year. Saddam told him he had ''miscalculated'' Bush's
intentions and expected only a limited U.S. attack.
''Hussein stated Iraq could have absorbed another U.S. strike, for he viewed
this as less of a threat than exposing themselves to Iran,'' according to a
June 11, 2004, FBI interview report.
He also provided details about the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War following his
invasion of Kuwait, reporting that former U.S. Secretary of State James A.
Baker III warned Saddam's then-Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz during a January
meeting that if Iraq did not comply with American demands ''we'll take you back
to the pre-industrial stage.''
And he took personal responsibility for ordering the launching of Scud missiles
against Israeli targets during the 1991 Gulf War, saying he did it because he
blamed Israel and its influence in the United States for all Arab problems.
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