Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein thinks he is smarter than his interrogators, but the United States has extracted much from the world’s most famous captive that might be used at his trial, a U.S. official said Thursday.
“He’s turned out [to be] a pretty wily guy who seems to be enjoying the give-and-take with his interlocutors. He sure thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, that’s for sure,” Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said in Washington in an interview with Reuters.
Armitage had said earlier this week Saddam was giving up little information, but he explained Thursday that there were also leads from the interrogation that could be analyzed to produce evidence.
“I’ve seen some of the results of these debriefs, and we’ve got a lot of dots to connect before we throw these out publicly,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Armitage did not say in what areas CIA-led interrogators had made progress since U.S. troops hauled him from a hiding hole in the ground in December.
But officials have said a focus of the questioning is to understand how the Iraqi insurgency against the U.S. occupiers is run, as well as to unearth evidence to prosecute Saddam on an array of charges.
Armitage said he was confident that Saddam, 66, who was declared a prisoner of war in January, would be successfully prosecuted in Iraq.
“There’s a good deal, I think, of interest in Iraq for seeing the tyrant finally brought to his knees,” he said.
Poll finds unhappiness with U.S.Indeed, the majority of Iraqis say life is better a year after U.S. and British troops invaded, according to a poll released this week. But many have little faith in occupying troops and the U.S.-led administration — and nearly 1 in 5 say attacks on foreign soldiers in Iraq are justified.
Asked whether their lives were better now than in the spring of 2003, nearly 6 in 10 Iraqis said the situation was somewhat better or much better than it was, according to the survey of 2,500 people, which was conducted for a group of broadcasting organizations by Oxford Research International.
Iraqis often complain about a lack of security, the scarcity of jobs and their fears for the future, but the survey suggests that despite those concerns, most feel life has improved.
Asked how things were going in their lives these days, 7 in 10 said the situation was very good or quite good, while only 15 percent said things were very bad. Looking ahead, 71 percent said they expected conditions in their lives to be much better or somewhat better a year from now.
But there are grievances and inconsistencies in the way Iraqis feel 12 months after Saddam. One is the effectiveness and continued presence of U.S. and British forces in Iraq.
While half of those questioned believe the invasion was the right thing to do, compared with 39 percent who said it was wrong, more than 4 in 10 said they had no confidence whatsoever in the British and U.S. forces, and 51 percent opposed the presence of any coalition forces in Iraq.
An Iraqi government is due to take power from July 1 this year, but it is likely to be many more months before security is restored. U.S. and British troops have made plans to maintain a presence in Iraq at least through the end of 2005.
