Airlifting Saddam

The United States has secretly flown Saddam Hussein out of Iraq and imprisoned him under high security at avast American air base in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar.

After his capture last December, he was initially taken by helicopter to a US aircraft carrier in Gulfwaters for extensive interrogation. After lengthy questioning, he was transferred to Qatar, although theemirate's royal family was not even told of his presence.

Amid the bloody and growing insurgency in Iraq, by both Sunnis and Shias - which continued across thecountry yesterday - US officials refused to discuss Saddam's place of imprisonment. Many Iraqis still believehe is in Iraq, possibly at the big American base at Balad, 60 miles north of Baghdad on the road to Tikrit,Saddam's home.

But, the increasingly sophisticated guerrilla attacks against the Americans raised fears that insurgentswould try to stage a spectacular prison escape for the former Iraqi dictator, so Qatar was chosen as thesafest place to hold him within the Middle East.

Under international law and the Geneva Conventions, it is legal for an occupying power to move a prisonerof war outside the frontiers of the country of which he is a citizen, which is why the Americans almostimmediately made Saddam an official PoW, an act which initially surprised both US politicians and members ofthe Iraqi Governing Council.

Under the terms of the Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross visited Saddam earlierthis year but will not say where the meeting took place. Ironically, the world knows almost less about Saddamsince his capture by US special forces in northern Iraq than they did when he was still on the run. Evensenior Qatari intelligence officers - who have just arrested two Russian agents for the murder of a Chechenrefugee in the capital, Doha - were not informed of Saddam's presence in the emirate, home to the largest USmilitary base in the Middle East.

With thousands of US troops and hundreds of intelligence men, Saddam is as well-guarded as he would be atGuantanamo Bay.

Unhappily for the Americans, however, Saddam's repeated interrogations are yielding little of interest. Hedoes not want to help the FBI-CIA team who are questioning him and gives vague replies to many of thequestions he is asked, often stating the Iraqi government's official position on the Iran-Iraq war, theinvasion of Kuwait and UN sanctions.

Several of the FBI interrogators have concluded that Saddam was surrounded by so many sycophants during hisdictatorship - who said only what their master wanted to hear - that he had no real idea what was going on inIraq.

But Saddam himself remains equally ignorant of his immediate future. Although a War Crimes Tribunal was setup in Baghdad within six weeks of his capture - with 15 judges, 45 Iraqi lawyers and a team of Americanassistants to advise them - Iraqi legal sources say the US government is increasingly reluctant to open trialproceedings against the ex-dictator before the American elections in November.

They say that an almost equal reluctance is being displayed over Tariq Aziz, Saddam's former deputy primeminister, who is being held prisoner by the US at Baghdad airport.

Both men, the sources point out, have an intimate knowledge of Washington's constant support for theBaathist regime in the 1980s and would undoubtedly try to avoid responsibility for their war crimes by makingspeeches in court that would provide details of the close relationship between the regime and USadministrations. Saddam personally met the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in 1983 - when Iraqi forceswere using gas against the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war - and Mr Rumsfeld, who was on a mission fromPresident Ronald Reagan to improve relations with Iraq, later met Tariq Aziz.

Mr Rumsfeld said last year that he warned Saddam at their 1983 meeting against employing chemical warfare,but American journalists later discovered US documents that proved he had made no such comments. Mr Rumsfeldthen said he had given his warning to Tariq Aziz the following year. Either way, the present US administrationis in no mood to have a public debate on the subject at a Baghdad court in the run-up to the Novemberelections. US researchers have proved that some of the ingredients of the chemicals used by Saddam's army inthe early 1980s were exported by US companies.

Saddam's trial has been made even more problematic by the probable appearance in Iraq of the French lawyerJacques Verges, who says that Saddam's nephew, Ali Barzan al-Tikriti, has sent him a formal invitation todefend the ex-dictator.

Mr Verges defended the Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie in France and is head of an organisation to supportSlobodan Milosevic at the Hague trials. He has already agreed to defend Tariq Aziz in Baghdad.

The only possible war crimes trial to take place in the near future is likely to be of Saddam's cousin, AliHassan al-Majid, nicknamed "Chemical" Ali for his gassing of the Kurds at Halabja. Since he is alsolikely to be charged with war crimes against the Shias of southern Iraq, Mr Ali- Hassan's trial would have thesupport of two of Iraq's principal communities at a time when the US and any new Iraqi authority will beanxious to prevent the resistance war spreading from the Sunni cities of central and northern Iraq.

Smaller fry are thus likely to have their day in court long before their former master. Saddam's appearanceat the "Mother of All War Crimes" trial may still be a long way away.

Courtesy, Znet