WASHINGTON — Former Iraqi President 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 Wednesday. Hussein 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 it (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 launched the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
Hussein, who during the interviews was often defiant and boastful, 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 nongovernmental research institute, and posted on its website Wednesday.
The detailed accounts of the interviews were released with few deletions, although one, a last formal interview on May 1, 2004, was completely redacted.
Thomas Blanton, director of the archive, said he could conceive of no possible national security reason to keep Hussein’s conversations with the FBI secret at this point. FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said he could not immediately explain the reason for the redactions.
The 20 formal interviews took place in 2004, 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 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 were completed.
Blanton said this suggested that the FBI received new orders from Washington to delve into topics of intense interest to Bush administration officials.
Bresson could not immediately explain why those subjects were raised in the later casual meetings.
In an interview last year on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” the agent who conducted the interviews — George Piro — said he purposely put Hussein’s back against the wall in order to “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 Wednesday do not suggest any use of coercive techniques.
