Global Policy Forum

US Interrogations Net No Evidence

By Walter Pincus and Kevin Sullivan

Despite vigorous efforts, the U.S. government has been unsuccessful so far in finding key senior Iraqi scientists to support its prewar claims that former president Saddam Hussein was pursuing an aggressive program to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, according to senior administration officials and members of Congress who have been briefed recently on the subject.

The sources said four senior scientists and more than a dozen at lower levels who worked for the Iraqi government have been interviewed by U.S. officials under the direction of the CIA. Some scientists have been arrested and held for months, others have made deals in return for information and at least one has agreed to be interviewed outside Iraq.

No matter the circumstances, all of the scientists interviewed have denied that Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program or developed and hidden chemical or biological weapons since United Nations inspectors left in 1998. Several key Iraqi officials questioned the significance of evidence cited by the Bush administration to suggest that Hussein was stepping up efforts to develop new weapons of mass destruction programs.

The White House, for instance, has cited the case of nuclear scientist Mahdi Obeidi, who recently dug up plans and components for a gas centrifuge that he said he buried in 1991 at the end of the Persian Gulf War. The White House has pointed to the discovery as a sign of Hussein's continuing nuclear ambitions, but Obeidi told his interrogators that Iraq's nuclear program was dormant in the years before war began in March.

The sources said Obeidi also disputed evidence cited by the administration -- namely Iraq's purchase of aluminum tubes that various officials said were for a new centrifuge program to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs. Obeidi said the tubes were for rockets, as Iraq had said before the war.

CIA analysts do not believe he has told the whole truth, said one Bush administration official. Obeidi has left Iraq under CIA auspices after being arrested briefly by U.S. Army troops.

Jaffar Dhai Jaffar, who once was jailed by Hussein for not working on the nuclear program and later came back to head it in the 1980s, was also interviewed recently by CIA personnel outside Iraq, and he, too, denied the nuclear program had been restarted.

Bush administration officials have hoped that extensive debriefings of former top officials of Hussein's government would provide some of the backing for its prewar assertion that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States. So far, the United States has discovered no undisputed physical evidence that Hussein had stocks of chemical or biological weapons or was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.

David Kay, the CIA's representative in Iraq to coordinate the search for weapons of mass destruction, returned to Washington this week and met with President Bush on Tuesday. Kay is scheduled to appear today before the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Administration officials said they expect Kay to tell the senators there have been no breakthroughs but that progress is being made in understanding Hussein's weapons programs and research that could be associated with them. The United States is still interviewing lower-level Iraqi security and intelligence officials associated with the programs, but the searching of alleged weapons sites has all but halted, officials said.

Bush indicated yesterday that he still expects evidence of weapons of mass destruction to surface in Iraq. He said Kay described a complex process that includes the need to "analyze the mounds of evidence, literally the miles of documents that we have uncovered."

"It's going to take awhile, and I'm confident the truth will come out," Bush said.

As described by government officials and their families, the United States has used aggressive tactics to find and question key Iraqi scientists. Amir Saadi, Iraq's 65-year-old chief liaison with United Nations weapons inspectors since last year, has been held incommunicado since his voluntary surrender in Baghdad to U.S. military police more than three months ago, according to his wife, Helma.

The night before he gave himself up, Saadi saw himself listed on BBC satellite television as one of the men being sought by U.S. forces. In a recent interview at her home in Baghdad, Helma Saadi said that he told her, "I want to surrender. I want to cooperate. It will be just a matter of a few hours, and I'll be back."

Just hours before his April 12 surrender, Saadi gave a television interview to a German television reporter during which he said, "There were no weapons of mass destruction, and time will bear me out." It is the same sentiment he sent to U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix in a message that arrived at U.N. headquarters on March 19.

Saadi's surrender encouraged the wife and daughter of Gen. Hossam Amin, head of Iraq's National Monitoring Directorate, to get him to surrender, and he, too, has not been heard from since, Helma Saadi said.

Helma Saadi said her husband was a chemical engineer who worked on Iraq's rocket programs, not chemical weapons. He served in the military during his career and reached the rank of general, though after the Gulf War he was acting minister of oil and later minister of industry. After his retirement in 1994, when she said his position went to a Baath Party member, he was given the honorific title of science adviser to Hussein. She described that as a "way of keeping him and others on the payroll even after retirement and using them when needed."

Since her husband's arrest, Saadi said she has had no official notification of where he is being held, although she believes it is somewhere near Baghdad International Airport. She has had one communication with him, a June 15 letter delivered by the Red Cross that stated: "Today the Red Cross visited me and I was happy just to talk to someone. I am in good health and being treated correctly . . . love and kisses, Amer."

Helma Saadi believes he is being kept in solitary confinement, because he said in his letter he was glad to have someone with whom to talk. U.S. sources familiar with the process say Saadi may have knowledge of Hussein's chemical weapons program, and perhaps is being held to give testimony about that. His wife said she suspects her husband is being held out of sight because "he is telling the truth. . . . They have realized there are no weapons of mass destruction and the quagmire they have created. They want to hold someone as a scapegoat."

After hiring a lawyer, Helma Saadi sent a written request to L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator for Iraq. She did not receive an answer from Bremer to that letter or to one sent more recently. She did receive a response to a letter she sent asking whether her husband could be represented by a lawyer. On June 27, Col. Marc L. Warren of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, assigned to Bremer's office, said her husband's status "is being investigated" under the Geneva Conventions to see whether he is entitled to prisoner of war status or some other category.

Meanwhile, former government officials, scientists and professionals are still being arrested.

Family members of Abdel Ilah Hameed, the former Iraqi minister of agriculture, were interviewed in Beiji and described his arrest. Hameed, a native of Hussein's home town, Tikrit, tried twice to surrender after he saw how U.S. troops were searching all homes, according to his son, Usama. On April 15 and 16, he was turned back by U.S. officers at checkpoints, although one took his name after the second attempt.

On April 22 at 3 a.m., soldiers backed by helicopters overhead knocked down the door, searched the house and took Hameed away, leaving his two older sons in plastic handcuffs that had to be cut away by a younger brother, Usama said. They have had no direct contact with their father since.

Two weeks ago, a professor whose expertise is satellite communications and who is the father of an Iraqi interpreter employed by Bremer's office was seized, according to another employee. "Coalition snatch-and-grab guys busted their door in at 2 AM and turned the house upside down for an hour, then hauled him off in handcuffs," this employee wrote in a message home. The wife told a friend that the troops did not say the reason for the arrest, and it took a day for other U.S. officials to find that the man was being held at the airport and being interrogated.

Sullivan reported from Baghdad.

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