The National Security Archive has made public the complete set of formal and informal interviews carried out by the FBI with Saddam Hussein following his capture in Iraq in late 2003.

RAW STORY reported last week on the emergence of documents that showed the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation techniques" were not needed to get Saddam to talk -- instead, the FBI chose to build a rapport with the ex-dictator, a strategy that resulted in Saddam eventually opening up to his interrogators.

Now, the National Security Archive has released the FBI's records of 20 interviews and four informal discussions between agents and Saddam, which took place between February and June of 2004 in the detention cell at Baghdad International Airport where Saddam was held.

In the documents, "Saddam denied any connections to the 'zealot' Osama bin Laden, cited North Korea as his most likely ally in a crunch, and shared President George W. Bush's hostility towards the 'fanatic' Iranian mullahs," the archive's press release states.

Saddam took the chance, during the interrogations, to dispel myths about himself, "like his purported use of body doubles," the Archive states. "Instead he says that to evade his enemies he never used the telephone and traveled constantly from one dwelling to another (he describes the farm where he was captured in a 'spider hole' as the same place where he took refuge after a failed 1959 coup attempt.)"

But, as the Archive points out, there is plenty missing from these wide-ranging conversations:

Not included in these FBI reports are issues of particular interest to students of Iraq’s complicated relationship with the U.S. – the reported role of the CIA in facilitating the Ba’ath party’s rise to power, the uneasy alliance forged between Iraq and the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war, and the precise nature of U.S. views regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons policy during that conflict, given its contemporaneous knowledge of their repeated use against Iranians and the Kurds.

This series of interviews also does not address chemical warfare in Kurdish areas of Iraq in 1987-1988, although an FBI progress report says Saddam was questioned on the topic. One interview, #20, is redacted in its entirety on national security grounds, although it is not clear what issues agents could have discussed with Saddam that cannot now be disclosed to the public.

-- Daniel Tencer

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