Saddam Hussein did not like Osama bin Laden, the American interrogator

Two decades ago on March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the US invasion of Iraq. Bush and senior administration officials had repeatedly told Americans that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons of mass destruction and was working closely with al-Qaeda.

One published on the website of the American news channel CNN topic I Peter Bergen details a conversation with an FBI official investigating Saddam.

These claims led most Americans to believe that Saddam was involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks. Pew Research Center A year after 9/11, two-thirds of Americans said the Iraqi leader had aided terrorists, according to a poll by the U.N. was charged.

American and British forces defeated Saddam’s forces within weeks, but an insurgency against the invaders began that lasted for years. On December 13, 2003, US special operations forces found Saddam hiding in a small pit in northern Iraq.

The FBI decided that 30-year-old Lebanese-American special agent George Pirro, who spoke Arabic, was the right person to interrogate Saddam. George Perro’s work ethic was impressive: He would arrive at the FBI gym in downtown Washington, D.C. at 6 a.m. to work out so he could start work at 7 a.m. in the office. The office was full of books on the history of the Middle East.

On George Saddam There was intense pressure to learn the truth about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to al-Qaeda. CIA Director George Tennant told Bush that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction were a ‘powerful opportunity’.

The Iraq war was also sold to Americans as too easy or a ‘cake walk’. Instead, hundreds of American soldiers had died in Iraq by the time Saddam was captured.

The CIA interrogated Saddam first. For the next seven months, George Perro talked to him for several hours every day. No one else was allowed to enter the interrogation room except him. He learned from the Iraqi dictator that he had no WMDs and that Saddam hated al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

‘Iraq war a sin of America’

The dictator’s conversation with George confirmed that at the beginning of the twenty-first century Iraq war America had a sin – a war fought under false assumptions, a conflict that killed thousands of American soldiers and millions of Iraqis.

The war damaged America and its government’s reputation in the world. Even the official history of the US military in Iraq concludes that the real winner of the war in Iraq was not America. That was … Iran.

After interrogating Saddam, George Perro rose to senior positions in the FBI, retiring in July as special agent in charge of the Miami field office. He is now writing a book for Simon & Schuster based on his lengthy interrogation of the Iraqi dictator.

As the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War approaches, Peter Bergen talks to George about what some consider the most successful investigation in FBI history.

George Pirro tells Peter that he received a call at five o’clock on Christmas Eve from a senior executive in the counter-terrorism division. He told me that I had been selected by the FBI to interrogate Saddam Hussein.

In the beginning. I’ll be honest. I was horrified to know that I was now going to be interrogating someone who had been on the world stage for so many years. It seemed like an important undertaking on the part of the FBI. I went to Barnes & Noble and bought two books about Saddam Hussein to build my understanding of who he was and all the things that would be important in developing an investigation strategy.’

‘I had already been to Iraq once, the first deployment of an FBI agent. I started to learn about Iraqi culture and the Baath Party, which was led by Saddam.’

Saddam was born on April 28, 1937, in a small village near Tikrit, al-Ajwa. His childhood was extremely difficult as he did not have a father and his mother was married to his uncle.

His childhood instilled in him a deep desire to prove everyone wrong about him and to trust no one but only his instincts. As a young man he joined the Ba’ath Party and one of his first tasks was to assassinate the then Prime Minister.

The assassination attempt failed and Saddam was forced to flee Iraq. But upon his return he was seen as a tough guy, a perception he continued to promote throughout his career.

Within 30 seconds of George’s first meeting with Saddam, he says he knew two things about me. ‘I told them my name was Jorge Pero and I was in charge. He immediately said, you are Lebanese. I told him that my parents are Lebanese and then he said, ‘You are a Christian.

‘I asked him if that was a problem and he said absolutely not. He loved the Lebanese people. The Lebanese people loved him. I said, ‘Okay, great. It will be good in us.’ (Saddam was a Sunni while most Iraqis are Shia Muslims.

A question from Peter, how long were you with Saddam? So George said for seven months. ‘Initially I used to meet him in the morning. I used to translate for their medical staff. And then formal interrogations took place once or twice a week for several hours. As time went on, I started spending more and more one-on-one time with them. I held him for five to seven hours each day, one on one, two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, and then formal questioning sessions twice a week.

‘We talked about everything, especially in the first few months my goal was just to talk to him. I wanted to know what they value in life and what their likes, dislikes and thoughts are. So we talked about everything from history, art, sports to politics. We used to talk about things that I knew he wouldn’t hesitate to talk about.

‘Most of that first discussion was about his published novel because I knew he wouldn’t lie about it. I researched this book. It was a worst novel. Zabeba and the King۔‘

‘Zubaiba was a beautiful Arab woman and she was married to an old man. Of course, Zaiba represented Iraq. The old man represented America. The handsome king saved Zabeba from her suffering life and they lived happily ever after.

As an FBI agent, and especially as an investigator, I knew I wanted to know everything about Saddam because the inconsistencies in his story were indicators of deception.

‘I wanted to understand Saddam and to know Saddam as much as he knew himself. Let me give you an example: Saddam’s decision to invade Kuwait in 1990. I interviewed all the other ‘key prisoners’ and we talked specifically about this decision. ‘There was an important meeting where Saddam decided to invade Kuwait. I knew where everyone sat in the conference room, what Saddam did, where he kept his gun belt and how he kept it.

‘When I spoke to him I would bring up these little details so he could gauge how well informed I was and how difficult it would be to misrepresent the facts or lie.’

The FBI agent denied using ‘more effective investigative techniques’ in the interview. ‘It’s against the US Constitution, it’s against FBI policy and it’s really against the core values ​​of the FBI. It wasn’t really an option for me because I’ve never used them, don’t know how to use them and don’t want to.’

‘What we wanted to know was buried in Saddam’s head and it was strategic. And it was making him share it. Developing an effective long-term investigation strategy was really key.’

Regarding Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the September 11, 2001 incident, George Perro stated that Saddam did not like Osama bin Laden and did not believe in al-Qaeda’s ideology of establishing an Islamic state throughout the Arab world. ‘Saddam had no desire to cede power or hand it over to someone else. Saddam used to joke about Osama bin Laden that you can’t really trust anyone with a beard like that.’

Other Iraqi prisoners also confirmed that they had no operational ties to al-Qaeda. Saddam believed that he was the third greatest warrior in Arab Muslim history. ‘He considered himself after the Prophet of Islam and Saladin. He was very secular. He promoted Arab nationalism versus an Islamic perspective. They focused more on the Arab side of Iraq versus the Islamic side.’

Wide range of weapons

Regarding the wide range of weapons, he said, it was clear that Saddam was initially very reluctant to talk about WMD and al-Qaeda. ‘They were very careful.’

George said that in prison on Saddam’s 67th birthday, he saw on TV that the Iraqi people had a chance to show not only the world, but also him, how they really felt about him. And they did what was a great hate. ‘My mum made some homemade cookies and I took them to them which we ate over tea.’

He said that I did not talk about big weapons for five months. ‘What they told me was that Iraq did not have the WMDs we suspected. Saddam gave a speech in June 2000 in which he said that Iraq had WMDs and many people want to know why he gave this speech if he did not have WMDs. He wanted me to ask him about the speech.

“When he told me about that speech, he said that his biggest enemy was not America or Israel. Their biggest enemy was Iran. They were constantly trying to balance or compete with Iran. Saddam’s biggest fear was that if Iran found out how weakened Iraq had become, no one would be able to stop them from invading and occupying southern Iraq. So their aim was to keep Iran away.’

During the 1980s, Iraq and Iran fought a nearly eight-year long war in which millions of people died on both sides. Iran managed to capture some Iraqi territory during the first phase of the war, after which a stalemate ensued.

George said Saddam could not afford to let Iranians feel that he had lost the ability to strike inside Iran because of US sanctions and weapons inspections in Iraq. He deceived his greatest enemy into believing that he was still as powerful and dangerous as he was during the 1987-88 time frame.

George said that he was not surprised by the American attack. Initially, he did not think that the US would attack, but that it would be limited to air action.

‘That is why they realized in September 2002 that President Bush was planning to invade Iraq. So they reversed their position and allowed weapons inspectors in Iraq to try to stop it. He told me that it was probably by October or November 2002 that he realized that war was inevitable and then began to prepare himself and his leadership and army for war.

The future of Iraq

Do you have an idea of ​​where Iraq is now and what the future might look like? “I am not very optimistic about the future of Iraq,” George said, “primarily because Iraq needs a leader who will put the country first.” ‘Saddam did one thing and in a sense put Iraq first and united everyone. When you see how divided it is, unless someone cares about your religious or ethnic background and thinks of Iraq as a country, its future will be a challenge.’

Saddam was eventually executed in December 2006 by the Shia-majority Iraqi government. A video aired on state television showed the guards who brought him into the room moments before his execution taunting him by calling out the name of a famous Shia cleric. George said it didn’t bother him.

With the institution’s approval, George is writing a book about the experience. ‘My aim is to allow the reader to be present inside the interrogation and to feel that they are sitting there and watching it live, not just what Saddam said because some of it is already available, but About the experience, the challenges, the chess game he and I used to play.

‘I also got an inside look at the copy he kept while he was in prison. Saddam told me that I knew him better than his two sons because I spent more time with him than his two sons. All this will be present in the book so that the reader can get an insight not only about the brutal dictator but also about other aspects of Saddam Hussein.

Peter Bergen is a national security analyst for CNN, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of the book ‘The Cast of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World’.

Burial

Meanwhile, former Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi has claimed that the body of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was “buried” near the former prime minister’s house in Baghdad after Hussein’s execution in 2006.

In an interview with the Arabic daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat, al-Kadhimi clarified that Saddam’s body was left in the fortified Green Zone area of ​​the city between his home and that of Nuri al-Maliki, who was prime minister at the time.

He added that ‘[صدام] was buried in Tikrit. After 2012 when [علاقہ] When it came under the control of ISIS, the body was dug up and moved to a secret location, which no one knows about till now. His children’s graves were also tampered with.’