Hatred doesn’t begin to describe the emotion Al-Idrissi and many other Iraqis, especially Shiites, feel for the fallen leader. To have him captive “is a treasure for the people who were oppressed by him,” says Al-Idrissi. In his mind, such loathing should be savored: “We have been growing our hatred for him for 35 years, so we don’t want to lose this hatred for Saddam in a short while.” Let him be tortured, let him confess, let him be killed as horribly as he killed others, Al-Idrissi suggests: “All religions say ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ Saddam has taken millions of eyes, and we’re only taking his two. It is less than he deserves.”
Iraqis have a record of dragging bloodied corpses of deposed rulers through the streets, or throwing them into the Tigris, never to be seen again. But this time, with the Americans in charge in Baghdad, that’s not going to happen. Righteous vengeance and scriptural justice will have no place in the interrogation and trial of Saddam Hussein.
What’s more likely is a long, drawn-out process that focuses, first, on extracting as much information as possible from the incarcerated dictator. Interrogators will begin with operational intelligence that might be useful in fighting the Iraqi insurgency, as well as any leads about weapons of mass destruction or links to Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, if such links exist.
As for the trial, much is left to be decided. It will most probably be held in an Iraqi court with international observers of some sort, but not in an international tribunal as such. Administration officials tell NEWSWEEK that, in any case, the Iraqi trial is not going to happen until there’s a sovereign government in Baghdad, probably sometime next summer. Administration lawyers, in the words of one official, concluded that any attempt to try Saddam in Iraq before then would be tantamount to “handing him over to a rabble.”
Even if the basic agenda of interrogation and trial is agreed, there lies behind it a maze of difficult and often contradictory choices about how to handle the dictator in the coming months and years. How best to extract the most information? And what kind of information: to help prosecute the war today, or help the prosecutors at his trial tomorrow? How deep and how wide should the questioning go? Should it look, for instance, at the history of his secret relations with other governments in the 1980s, including France, Russia, Germany and the United States? Already, potential defense attorneys for Saddam see those embarrassing links as keys to his defense.
The Iraqi government was in power for decades," says French attorney Jacques Verges, who has defended a long list of unsavory clients. ranging from former Gestapo commander Klaus Barbie to the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and has been asked to defend Saddam’s aide Tariq Aziz. “Western countries sold Saddam’s weapons to him. Western countries encouraged the war against Iran. Western countries were present in Iraq through their diplomatic delegations. They weren’t blind,” says Verges. “In the course of a trial, the fundamental element will be ‘You treat me like a pariah, but I was your friend. What we did, we did together. I fired the bullet, but you’re the one who gave me the gun. You even pointed out the enemy’.” The dossier is so politically fraught, in fact, that authoritative U.S. government sources tell NEWSWEEK that the Central Intelligence Agency is far from happy that it’s been given the lead role in the interrogation. The CIA doesn’t think Saddam is “going to yield much information,” says a U.S. official, adding that the agency had already “been through the wringer” with congressional complaints about inaccurate predictions on Iraqi WMD and the failure to find Osama bin Laden. However the CIA handles Saddam and whatever information he reveals, when bits and pieces of his confessions surface at any future trial, agency officials fear they will suffer some sort of public embarrassment.
Even the rules under which Saddam can be interrogated have been confused by administration statements. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Saddam is being “accorded the protections” of a prisoner of war, although he’s not legally described as such. “The lawyers are carefully looking at the status,” he said.
The CIA and other government agencies flatly refuse to discuss any methods they might use to make Saddam talk. But the general techniques are well known from CIA interrogation manuals declassified under the Freedom of Information Act in the 1990s, and from briefs filed in some of the legal cases pending against alleged terrorists with suspected links to Al Qaeda. As Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote in a federal court filing, “DIA’s approach to interrogation is largely dependent upon creating an atmosphere of dependency and trust between subject and interrogator.”
That is done, according to to the manuals, by using many different techniques to disorient the prisoner until he reaches some stage of “regression.” The heart of interrogation techniques lies in controlling every aspect of the captive’s environment. “The interrogator can and does make the subject’s world not only unlike the world to which he had been accustomed but also strange in itself–a world in which familiar patterns of time, space and sensory perception are overthrown,” according to one CIA interrogation manual.
American units in the field have rattled Iraqi prisoners under interrogation by playing loud, scratchy recordings of heavy-metal music–even bluegrass. “They started freaking out when they heard that,” explained one sergeant in psychological operations. “They don’t like that twang sound.”
Interrogators have the power to grant or withhold permission for every bodily function, including sleep. It’s amazing how fast most people break down under such circumstances–and these are considered “noncoercive” techniques.
No matter how Saddam is classified, interrogators are unlikely to use methods that are more obviously coercive, not least of all because the CIA won’t want to be publicly embarrassed during a trial. But all the interrogation techniques described in CIA literature, whether noncoercive or coercive, are of questionable legality under the Geneva Conventions: “Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.” No wonder Rumsfeld’s got his lawyers going over those definitions.
Whether Saddam confesses to all his alleged crimes or none, and under what circumstances, might seem beside the point for many Iraqis. After all, they just want him dead. Or think they do. But international human-rights workers point to other countries where tribunals investigating war crimes–and crimes against humanity–have been created, along with truth-and- reconciliation commissions, to discover the unvarnished facts about past atrocities. The combination gives people a sense not of vengeance, but of vindication.
“In Iraq, not all victims are going to be able to speak before the war-crimes tribunal about what took place,” says David Crane, the lead prosecutor at the Special Court addressing Sierra Leone’s horrific war crimes. “People come up to me in Sierra Leone and they tug on my sleeve and say, ‘I just want to tell you what me and my family went through’.” In Iraq, hundreds of thousands of families are waiting to tell those stories, and in the end, it’s the truths they have to tell, the stories of all those photocopied faces taped to the wall, that will be most important to healing the wounds of the country.
