I was no al-Qaeda ally, Saddam told FBI

[rabiddog]

You should read some of the bulltulip thay came out with whilst 'justifying' ever growing troop presence in Vietnam History just keeps repeating on me.

Mind you, so does my curry

[snaw]

From the sydney morning herald

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 just released. The former Iraqi president 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 "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".

The then 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. At the time Bush administration officials strongly suggested Iraq had significant links to al-Qaeda, which was responsible for the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001.

Saddam, who during the interviews was often defiant and boastful, at one point wistfully acknowledged he should have permitted the United Nations to witness the destruction of Iraq's weapons stockpile after the 1990-91 Gulf War.

The FBI summaries of the interviews - 20 formal interrogations and five "casual conversations" in 2004 - were obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a non-government research institute, and posted on its website this week. The detailed accounts of the interviews were released with few deletions, though one, a last formal interview on May 1, 2004, was blacked out.

The director of the archive, Thomas Blanton, said he could conceive of no possible national security reason to keep Saddam's conversations with the FBI secret. 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 7 and May 1, followed by the casual conversations between May 10 and June 28.

Saddam was later transferred to Iraqi custody, and hanged in December 2006.

Not exactly news, but interesting all the same.