Posted on 06/20/2003 6:58:55 PM PDT by Mister Magoo
June 20, 2003, 8:12PM
Captured aide says Saddam, sons fled to Syria Copyright 2003 New York Times News Service
WASHINGTON -- A top lieutenant to Saddam Hussein has told U.S. interrogators that the Iraqi leader and his two sons survived the U.S.-led war in Iraq and that he himself had fled to Syria with the sons after the conflict, Defense Department officials said today.
The officials said they had not yet assessed the accuracy of the claims by the aide, Abid Hamad Mahmud al-Tikriti, who was arrested in Iraq earlier this week. But they said the United States regarded the information as having enormous potential significance, and that it had ignited an intense burst of clandestine U.S. military activity aimed at capturing the sons, Odai and Qusai, and perhaps even Saddam himself.
A conviction among Saddam's loyalists that he is still alive, picked up by U.S. intelligence intercepts, has emerged as a powerful motivating factor in the military resistance to U.S. forces in Iraq, according to U.S. officials. If it is truthful, the account that Mahmud has provided to his interrogators would be the most authoritative confirmation that neither Saddam nor his sons were killed in U.S. attacks in March and April. U.S. officials would not say whether Mahmud had revealed a link between the resistance and Saddam and his sons.
On the basis of those intercepts and other recently obtained evidence, U.S. intelligence agencies have shifted their view, and now say that Saddam and at least one of his sons, Qusai, is probably still alive and still in Iraq. But Mahmud's claim that he and the sons had spent time after the war in Syria before being expelled by Syrian authorities adds a new element to that working theory.
A senior Defense Department official declined on Friday to provide any details about the newly energized search for Saddam and his sons, which others said was being carried out by Task Force 20, a secret military organization that includes Army and Navy counterterrorist personnel, and other special military teams. But the official made clear that the operations had been prompted by information provided by Mahmud, who has been questioned over the last four days at a U.S. military facility in Baghdad.
"You follow up every lead that you can get, and when you get a person who's that high up in the regime, it's obviously in your benefit to move quickly on anything he tells you," the senior Defense Department official said. "Because when Saddam Hussein learns that his top deputy is in detention, he's going to try to erase any trail that he'd know of."
Mahmud, who ranked behind only Saddam and his sons in importance in the Iraqi regime, has told the interrogators that during the weeks after the war with the United States he spent time in hiding with the former Iraqi leader himself. But Mahmud told interrogators that the group split up at an unspecified time before he left for Syria with Odai and Qusai, according to the U.S. officials.
Along with the information about Saddam's sons, the U.S. officials said, he was providing information about Iraq's suspected program of weapons of mass destruction, and that he had contradicted evasive accounts from other former senior Iraqi officials now in U.S. detention.
The officials said they did not know or would not share the timeline that Mahmud had provided for his whereabouts or those of Saddam and his sons, in the more than two months since the fall of the Iraqi government and the capture of Baghdad. Mahmud, 46, who as personal secretary to Saddam controlled access to the Iraqi leader, was arrested on Monday in the vicinity of Tikrit, Saddam's hometown and stronghold.
While U.S. forces were moving swiftly to check out leads provided by Mahmud, the senior Defense Department official said that U.S. authorities were also treating his claims with some skepticism. "This is a person who is very close to Saddam Hussein, who was for many many years, and who was part of the lies and deception for so long that you have to be very careful about what he tells you."
Bush administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, had said publicly in the weeks after the war that at least a handful of senior Iraqi officials had fled across the border into Syria, and they called on the Syrian government to hand them over. Until now, however, there has never been any credible suggestion that those who fled to Syria might have included Saddam's sons.
Damascus has vociferously denied any knowledge of senior Iraqi officials taking refuge in Syria. But the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, assured Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in Damascus last month that his government would not provide refuge to Iraqi fugitives.
The whereabouts of Saddam and his son have been a mystery since at least March 20, when the United States initiated the war against Iraq with a strike by cruise missiles and bombs on an installation in Baghdad where the top Iraqi leadership was believed to be hiding.
U.S. officials said afterward that they were uncertain whether Saddam and his sons had been there. The United States made a second attempt to kill them on April 7, with a bombing attack on a building in the Mansour district of Baghdad, where two intelligence sources said they were meeting.
Together, those strikes prompted some optimism at the White House that Saddam had been killed. As late as April 4, Iraqi television broadcast two videotapes showing Saddam, including one in which he made reference to the downing of an American Apache helicopter on March 24, but American officials said it was unclear when the tapes were made.
Within U.S. intelligence agencies, the shift toward a view that Saddam and his sons are probably alive has been prompted in part by the failure of excavations of the two bombing sites to turn up DNA or other physical evidence of their bodies. It has also been prompted by interrogations of senior Iraqi officials now in U.S. custody who have said that Saddam and his sons were not at the sites of either of the U.S. bombings.
Apart from Mahmud's uncorroborated claims, however, U.S. government officials have said the most compelling indications that Saddam is still alive are the intercepted communications among fugitive members of the Saddam Fedayeen, a paramilitary organization, and the Iraqi intelligence service, discussing the importance of protecting the former Iraqi leader's life.
Today, a senior military officer said U.S. intelligence operatives and military forces in Iraq were using the information to redouble the search for Saddam and his two sons, or to find their remains if they are dead. "There is a level of great intensity to locate those individuals," the officer said. "Whether they are all still living or not, to identify where they are is of great interest."
If that's true, when the joint US SOC & UK SAS/SBC go in to Syria to snatch them for trial snatch that little lying Syrian Twit King of theirs as well and try his sorry butt in Gitmo for being so stupid!
GW meant what he said; you sleep with terrorists; you're a terrorist and we will nail you!
Let's roll.
P.S.Road Hogs!
Syria: Go Fish!
Did they have any LARGE suitcases that might contain WMD???? My guess is Syria has the WMD....this is like a giant game of "keep away"
Should have just turned the region into glass.
I think they didn't comply cuz they didn't want to energize their own Kurds. The Kurds have a terrorist band attacking innocent Turkish citizens.
Best not to stir the ole Muslim Jihad pot.
Well there is a good way to get the WHOLE world completely pissed off at us
Oh, I know it's not realistic...just idealistic...lol
We are WAY BEYOND "Diplomatic niceties," & we owe NO MIDDLE EAST "NATION" ANY compassion.
Considering the Peril the Wahhabi psychopaths have created for us, the "Leader" of a potential "safe Harbour" for Saddam et. al. is FAIR GAME.
SQUEEZE HIM!!
The world would lose LITTLE if Damascus was radioactive glass.
Saddam's Fate should mirror that of Mussolini.--& Mussollini killed FAR FEWER people!!
For many years America has been a "Gentle Giant," beset--like Gulliver--by self-important pygmies that America has no wish to harm (despite Their attempts to attack & harm us).
9/11 changed all that.
The "Game" has changed. Those who attack us are in GRAVE PERIL for their lives--& Those who "sponsor" them are held equally responsible.
The next few years ought to be VERY INTERESTING!!
Doc
Let's Roll
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