A Saddam Aide's Aborted Execution

[Dale_M]

This is a strange story. It sounds as if the man was very helpful in reducing bloodshed during the invasion of Iraq. The U.S. government was grateful and is sheltering him… for the moment. But I don’t understand why he was left to fend for himself in Iraq, rather than given sanctuary in the U.S.

Saddam Hussein’s last defense minister was saved from the gallows last month by an unlikely savior — the United States. On the night of September 10, Sultan Hashem was five hours away from his death, his will written and the executioner ready, a senior Iraqi official told TIME. The Iraqi government had planned to carry out his death sentence at 3 a.m. on the sixth anniversary of 9/11. But Hashem, like all high-value prisoners from the former regime, was in U.S. custody. And at 10 p.m., word came that the helicopter from the U.S. prison at Camp Cropper was not coming, and the condemned man would not be handed over. Hashem’s life was spared — for the moment.

But Iraqi officials in Maliki’s office suspected that Hashem was being shielded because of his key role in secret contacts with the U.S. before the invasion of Iraq — contacts that U.S. intelligence sources say led Hashem to assist the U.S. in minimizing resistance by the Iraqi Army, which largely faded away in the face of the invading Americans. Hashem’s influence was over the professional army rather than the Republican Guard or other elements personally loyal to Saddam, said a former officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency in Iraq. Yet, his actions on behalf of the U.S. “saved American lives,” says the same source, and perhaps the lives of quite a few Iraqi troops as well.

A former CIA officer with long experience in Iraq told TIME that turning over Hashem for execution would be a “gross miscarriage of justice.” The CIA officer also confirmed longstanding reports that the U.S. had, in fact, sought to bring Hashem into a senior role in a post-invasion Iraqi government because of his identity as a Sunni, and as a “soldier’s soldier” who was respected by a broad spectrum of the military.

time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1670970,00.html