FBI Ignored Bush-Hussein Ties

By Robert Parry
July 2, 2009

The FBI has released reports on 20 interviews and five conversations conducted with Iraq’s deposed dictator Saddam Hussein before he was put to death, but none of the disclosed Q and A deals with the role of the Reagan administration in delivering key components for Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons in the 1980s.

Either those questions weren’t asked or they are still being hidden by the U.S. government. The contents of one interview on March 21, 2004, were almost entirely redacted for supposed national security reasons.

As the National Security Archive, a private non-profit group that obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, wrote:

“Not included in these FBI reports are issues of particular interest to students of Iraq’s complicated relationship with the U.S. – the reported role of the CIA in facilitating the Ba’ath party’s rise to power, the uneasy alliance forged between Iraq and the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war, and the precise nature of U.S. views regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons policy during that conflict, given its contemporaneous knowledge of their repeated use against Iranians and the Kurds.”