Seeking testimony of those who interviewed Baath or al Qaeda detainees in Iraq

[jmm99]

from ME blog
... more on Farris's [sic ! Faddis - name is correct in other parts of paragraph] thoughts on the topic will be shared in a yet to be published interview with this website....

more than one here will be interested in what Sam Faddis had to say about all of this. Thanks in advance.

[Mark Eichenlaub]

more than one here will be interested in what Sam Faddis had to say about all of this. Thanks in advance.

Very nice and classy guy. He was one of the first into Northern Iraq and said he interviewed dozens of al Qaeda/Ansar detainees. I can spoil the piece for you if you want....

A paranoid psychopathic sadistic one. Anyone trying to replace Saddam with Islamist would've been tortured and killed. To suggest otherwise is to suggest Saddam "wasn't that bad" that he actually believed in a cause and wasn't just out for himself.

I think he attempted build all those mosques and add religious slogans to the Iraqi flag to pre-empt that sort of thing and act like he needn't be a target of the Islamists...though he still was.

[Mark Eichenlaub]

more than one here will be interested in what Sam Faddis had to say about all of this. Thanks in advance.

Here is that Faddis interview for those interested.

Link.

[jmm99]

Way to come through. Good catch.

CF's comments parallel what he stated in his portion of the book Operation Hotel California. For those not familiar with the book, it is really two books in one. The one by Mike Tucker, which is editorializing, etc. The other by Sam Faddis which is basically straight-forward. The portions are in different typefaces. So, you read the book and then re-read Faddis' portion at least once more.

A point not covered in the interview - not a criticism, Mark, since your focus and locus were on-topic (Saddam-AQ ties or not) - was Saddam's possession of WMD. From the book, Faddis' informants (who addressed that topic) were pretty much uniform in their beliefs that Saddam had or was working on WMD; but none had any direct evidence of that. Since you can't prove a negative (Faddis makes that point - still a lawyer, and a prosecutor in a prior life), the intelligence on that topic was ambiguous - as you note in your Analysis.

Good job.

[Mark Eichenlaub]

Way to come through. Good catch.

CF's comments parallel what he stated in his portion of the book Operation Hotel California. For those not familiar with the book, it is really two books in one. The one by Mike Tucker, which is editorializing, etc. The other by Sam Faddis which is basically straight-forward. The portions are in different typefaces. So, you read the book and then re-read Faddis' portion at least once more.

A point not covered in the interview - not a criticism, Mark, since your focus and locus were on-topic (Saddam-AQ ties or not) - was Saddam's possession of WMD. From the book, Faddis' informants (who addressed that topic) were pretty much uniform in their beliefs that Saddam had or was working on WMD; but none had any direct evidence of that. Since you can't prove a negative (Faddis makes that point - still a lawyer, and a prosecutor in a prior life), the intelligence on that topic was ambiguous - as you note in your Analysis.

Good job.

Thanks JM.