Iraqi told FBI that Saddam 'delighted' in 1998 embassy bombings, but had no links to bin Laden

Source: AP

WASHINGTON - Former Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz, a prominent member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle, told the FBI that the dictator "delighted" in the 1998 terrorist bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa but had no interest in partnering with Osama bin Laden, declassified documents show.

"Saddam did not trust Islamists," Aziz said, according to handwritten notes of a June 27, 2004 interrogation, although he viewed al-Qaida as an "effective" organization.

The FBI notes are among hundreds of pages of interrogation records of top Iraqi officials — including Saddam — provided to the AP this week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. While most of the Saddam records had been previously released, the National Security Archive, an independent research institute at George Washington University, said the FBI had previously refused to declassify Aziz's records.

The records are from an FBI operation code-named Desert Spider, which sought to compile evidence of the Saddam regime's war crimes and to test the theory that Saddam and his intelligence services had some form of co-operation with al-Qaida prior to the U.S. invasion.

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Saddam considered bin Laden and other Islamic extremists to be "opportunists" and "hypocrites," Aziz told the FBI, during one of four interrogations in a U.S. detention facility in Baghdad.

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The FBI interrogators also questioned Ibrahim Samir Al Ani, an Iraqi intelligence operative who was serving in the Iraqi Embassy in Prague at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks. He said he had never heard of bin Laden until after the 9/11, and denied reports he had met Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers.



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