U.S.: Saddam Provided No Information

By ROBIN WRIGHT

Washington — During nearly seven months in captivity, former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein never provided any meaningful information about his government, his suspected weapons programs or his alleged links to extremist groups during interrogations by American intelligence officials, U.S. officials in Washington said Thursday.

Eleven other senior Iraqi leaders who, like Saddam, appeared before an Iraqi judge Thursday to face various charges for mass killings and other atrocities also did not crack during intensive interrogations, the officials said.

At the White House, President Bush on Thursday morning briefly watched television news coverage of Saddam’s appearance in court in Baghdad, Iraq, but had no reaction to Saddam’s comment that the proceedings were all “theater” orchestrated by “Bush the criminal” to aid the president’s reelection campaign.

“Saddam Hussein is going to say all sorts of things,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters. “What’s important is that justice is being served to Saddam Hussein and his band of oppressors by the Iraqi people in an Iraqi court. ... And this step today begins a process by which the Iraqi people can help bring closure to the dark chapter of their history.”

McClellan said Bush “is pleased that Saddam Hussein and his regime leaders are facing justice.” He said Saddam “is facing the justice he denied the Iraqi people, most notably, the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis who were victims of his brutality.”

Bush later attended a swearing-in ceremony for John Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri, as the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Danforth replaces John Negroponte, who assumed new duties Tuesday at the first U.S. ambassador to Iraq since 1990.

Bush said he was sending Danforth to New York “with a clear mandate: America will work closely with the United Nations to confront terror and to fight the suffering and despair that terrorists exploit.” He said Danforth “will be a strong voice for the humane and decent conscience of America.”

Danforth said he would work to “build on the momentum” of a U.N. Security Council resolution last month that endorsed the transfer of sovereignty to a new Iraqi interim government.

In Iraq, the Bush administration had been particularly interested in getting Saddam and his senior military and political aides to talk about Iraq’s programs to build nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the main U.S. justification for launching the 2003 war to oust the Iraq leader.

But a former senior administrator from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority just back from Baghdad said Saddam provided “very little, almost nothing” during interrogations. Saddam also did not provide any information on Baghdad’s relationship with al-Qaida or other Middle East extremist groups, U.S. officials said. The senior administrator spoke on condition that he not be identified in accordance with ground rules set by the White House.

Saddam was so uncooperative that senior U.S. officials in Iraq concluded fairly quickly that neither the former Iraqi leader nor his aides were going to be helpful.

“At a certain point, I didn’t read them very carefully. I concluded fairly early, after a couple months, that I wasn’t going to see much useful out of them,” the former senior U.S. official said about the interrogations.

To get Saddam to talk, U.S. interrogators, mainly from the FBI and CIA, attempted to build a relationship with the Iraqi dictator by discussing his past activities, such as the creation of the Baath Party. But the Iraqi leader never would discuss more sensitive issues, said the official.

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