Robert Fisk, The Independent  --  Arab News

BAGHDAD, 8 March 2004 — The United States has secretly flown Saddam Hussein out of Iraq and imprisoned him under high security at a vast American air base in Qatar.

After his capture last December, he was initially taken by helicopter to a US aircraft carrier in Gulf waters for extensive interrogation. After lengthy questioning, he was transferred to Qatar, although the authorities were not even told of his presence.

Amid the bloody and growing insurgency in Iraq, by both Sunnis and Shias — which continued across the country yesterday — US officials refused to discuss Saddam’s place of imprisonment. Many Iraqis still believe he 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 insurgents would try to stage a spectacular prison escape for the former Iraqi dictator, so Qatar was chosen as the safest 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 prisoner of war outside the frontiers of the country of which he is a citizen, which is why the Americans almost immediately made Saddam an official POW, an act which initially surprised both US politicians and members of the Iraqi Governing Council.

Under the terms of the conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross visited Saddam earlier this year but will not say where the meeting took place. Ironically, the world knows almost less about Saddam since his capture by US special forces in northern Iraq than they did when he was still on the run. Even senior Qatari intelligence officers — who have just arrested two Russian agents for the murder of a Chechen refugee in the capital, Doha — were not informed of Saddam’s presence in the emirate, home to the largest US military base in the Middle East.

With thousands of US troops and hundreds of intelligence men, Saddam is as well-guarded as he would be at Guantanamo Bay. Unhappily for the Americans, however, Saddam’s repeated interrogations are yielding little of interest. He does not want to help the FBI-CIA team who are questioning him and gives vague replies to many of the questions he is asked, often stating the Iraqi government’s official position on the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait and UN sanctions.

Several of the FBI interrogators have concluded that Saddam was surrounded by so many sycophants during his dictatorship — who said only what their master wanted to hear — that he had no real idea what was going on in Iraq. But Saddam himself remains equally ignorant of his immediate future.

Although a War Crimes Tribunal was set up in Baghdad within six weeks of his capture — with 15 judges, 45 Iraqi lawyers and a team of American assistants to advise them — Iraqi legal sources say the US government is increasingly reluctant to open trial proceedings against the ex-dictator before the American elections in November.

They say that an almost equal reluctance is being displayed over Tareq Aziz, Saddam’s former deputy prime minister, who is being held prisoner by the US at Baghdad airport.

Both men have an intimate knowledge of Washington’s constant support for the Baathist regime in the 1980s and would undoubtedly try to avoid responsibility for their war crimes by making speeches in court that would provide details of the close relationship between the regime and US administrations.