TIME Exclusive: Notes from Saddam in Custody

TIME ^ | Dec. 14, 2003 | BRIAN BENNETT

[FairOpinion]

Saddam is talking, but he isn't cooperative. New details on his capture and his first interrogation

Saddam Hussein was captured on Sunday without a fight. But since then, according to a U.S. intelligence official in Iraq, the fallen dictator has been defiant. “He’s not been very cooperative,” said the official, who read the transcript of the initial interrogation report taken during the first questioning session.

After his capture, Saddam was taken to a holding cell at the Baghdad Airport. He didn’t answer any of the initial questions directly, the official said, and at times seemed less than fully coherent. The transcript was full of “Saddam rhetoric type stuff,” said the official who paraphrased Saddam’s answers to some of the questions. When asked “How are you?” said the official, Saddam responded, “I am sad because my people are in bondage.” When offered a glass of water by his interrogators, Saddam replied, “If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?”

The interrogators also asked Saddam if he knew about the location of Captain Scott Speicher, a U.S. pilot who went missing during the first Gulf War. “No,” replied the former Iraqi president, “we have never kept any prisoners. I have never known what happened.”

Saddam was also asked whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. “No, of course not,” he replied, according to the official, “the U.S. dreamed them up itself to have a reason to go to war with us.” The interrogator continued along this line, said the official, asking: “if you had no weapons of mass destruction then why not let the U.N. inspectors into your facilities?” Saddam’s reply: “We didn’t want them to go into the presidential areas and intrude on our privacy.”

The official is doubtful that the U.S. will get a significant amount of intelligence from Saddam’s interrogations. “I would be surprised if he gave any info,” he said. Other high-ranking regime members, he said, have by and large remained mum. “Tariq Aziz [former deputy prime minister] hasn’t really spoken,” he said, “and Abid Mahmoud [Saddam’s former personal secretary] hasn’t really given any information.”

The raid on the farm in al-Dawr, a village 15 miles from his hometown of Tikrit, initially came up empty, the official said. There was no Saddam Hussein in sight. Then one man on the property, apparently realizing the game was up, pointed out a bricked-in wall inside the basement of a small house on the property. Saddam is in there, he told the special forces operators from Task Force 121, who took down the farm with the aid of soldiers from the 1st Brigade of the Fourth Infantry Division. Saddam was bricked into his hiding place, he added. “They couldn’t get him out at first and had to dig, from either side of the hole,” said the official. The soldiers finally made a large enough passageway to drag him out. When he came out, he looked bedraggled, said the official: “He looked like a homeless man at the bus station.”

Along with the $750,000 in cash, two AK 47 machine guns and pistol found with Saddam, the U.S. intelligence official confirmed that operatives found a briefcase with Saddam that contained a letter from a Baghdad resistance leader. Contained in the message, the official said, were the minutes from a meeting of a number of resistance leaders who came together in the capital. The official said the names found on this piece of paper will be valuable and could lead to the capture of insurgency leaders around the Sunni Triangle.

The official said it may soon be clear how much command and control over the insurgency Saddam actually had while he was in hiding. “We can now determine,” he said, “if he is the mastermind of everything or not.” The official elaborated: “Have we actually cut the head of the snake or is he just an idiot hiding in a hole?”

[Chad Fairbanks]

Placemarker Bump...

[mylife]

“if you had no weapons of mass destruction then why not let the U.N. inspectors into your facilities?” Saddam’s reply: “We didn’t want them to go into the presidential areas and intrude on our privacy.”

I placed the entire population in danger over a privacy issue.....Ya Right...eyes rolling

[rightbanker]

Think like an evil dictator on his last leg, defeated and humiliated by a president who is finally going to outlast him in power.

Ask yourself what can you do to bring him down, even now?

Not much you answer. But there is this:

You can let him take you alive, rather than dead. You can count on getting a trial, which will give you a platform to speak to Iraq and the world.

From your platform, you declare that Iraq had abandoned its lust for WMD as a fruitless. You declare that you offered Bush a way out before the war and he refused.

With your last desparate breath, you try to paint Bush's war as a war of pure aggresion, a war based on lies, on lust for Iraqi oil, on an imperialist desire to import "western" values and forms of life into the cradle of Arabic "civilization."

It's pretty desparate. But you know that Bush wanted you dead rather than alive and you know why. So when the game is up rather than take your own life or go down fighting, you live to tell your tale on the world stage.

[mylife]

“If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when"....I Have No Gold Toilet

[fourhorsemen]

The Iraqis need to be able to confront Hussein in a trial. And no one would truly know the truth if he had not been captured alive.

Screw the Iraqi's, I'd like to see him put on trial here in the U.S. for his involvement in 9/11.

[MeekOneGOP]

Caption this: Billionaire Tyrant captured
posing as homeless man in RatHole

DISC JOCKEYS RAVING ABOUT SADDAM'S LATEST HIT!

[Alas Babylon!]

Well, I could simply counter that with the fact that Bush did indeed take him alive. If he wanted him dead, he would now be dead.

[Maria S]

Somewhat unrelated to the article, but...

As I was watching Dan Rather this morning, I wondered how he felt about all of this. Remember the interview he did with Hussein...and how he basically gushed over him?

Also, I couldn't believe Peter Jennings was nowhere to be seen this morning. The other two anchors were going strong (Rather and Brokaw), but Charles Gibson was anchoring on ABC.

[wattsmag2]

mustache hair? I'd aim a bit lower.

[Polybius]

“If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?”

[duckbutt]

Ha! I agree about Lt. Col West -- it was worth saying twice!!

[2nd Amendment]

Time makes the National Enquirer Pulitzer Prize material

[tutstar]

Yes and because Saddam has such an impeccable reputation , he would never lie!!

[jwalsh07]

These are the same lunatics who claimed that Saddam sucked us in by "allowing" our warriors to conquer Iraq so as to fight a Viet Cong style guerilla war with Saddam at the helm manipulating the puppets. Finding him in a pit doing an imitation of a squeegee man at the entrance to the Queens Midtown Tunnel absent even a can with a string on it for command and control has effectively ended that lunacy.

Of course the question remains, will the lunatics expounding such crap be placed in the care of Nurse Ratchet?

[Finalapproach29er]

2 more:

hypodermic needle

[Donna Lee Nardo]

And tomorrow morning, oh my ... hatie no-brains kouric will "hopefully" be weeping openly about how sadam never made it to Syria. Boo hoo ...

[Finalapproach29er]

speicher bump

[Darksheare]

*chuckle*
"Get me my golden chamber pot!"
Gotta love the quote he gave..
IF the Times isn't making the whole quote up.

[Polybius]

The raid on the farm in al-Dawr, a village 15 miles from his hometown of Tikrit, initially came up empty, the official said. There was no Saddam Hussein in sight. Then one man on the property, apparently realizing the game was up, pointed out a bricked-in wall inside the basement of a small house on the property. Saddam is in there he told the special forces operators from Task Force 121......

Well the first thing you know Abdul's a millionaire,
Kinfolk sez "Hey, move away from there!"
Said "Californy is the place you ought to be"
So they loaded up the camel and moved to Beverly.

Hills, that is. Swimmin' pools, movie stars.

[JustPiper]

Bump!