Who is setting the fires in Baghdad? - Page 3

"America, yes, it got rid of Saddam. But Iraq belongs to us. Our oil belongs to us. We will keep our nationality. It will stay Iraq. The Americans must go."

Obviously American officials such as Rumsfeld have been quite enthusiastic in working with Saddam and his regime in the past.

Are they simply working with the regime once again, minus Saddam?

At the end of the Second World War, German-speaking British and US intelligence officers hoovered up every document in the thousands of Gestapo and Abwehr bureaux across western Germany. The Russians did the same in their zone. In Iraq, however, the British and Americans have simply ignored the evidence.

There's an even more terrible place for the Americans to visit in Baghdad - the headquarters of the whole intelligence apparatus, a massive grey-painted block that was bombed by the US and a series of villas and office buildings that are stashed with files, papers and card indexes. It was here that Saddam's special political prisoners were brought for vicious interrogation - electricity being an essential part of this - and it was here that Farzad Bazoft, the Observer correspondent, was brought for questioning before his dispatch to the hangman.

It's also graced with delicately shaded laneways, a creche - for the families of the torturers - and a school in which one pupil had written an essay in English on (suitably perhaps) Beckett's Waiting for Godot. There's also a miniature hospital and a road named "Freedom Street" and flowerbeds and bougainvillea. It's the creepiest place in all of Iraq.

I met - extraordinarily - an Iraqi nuclear scientist walking around the compound, a colleague of the former head of Iraqi nuclear physics, Dr Sharistani. "This is the last place I ever wanted to see and I will never return to it," he said to me. "This was the place of greatest evil in all the world."

The top security men in Saddam's regime were busy in the last hours, shredding millions of documents. I found a great pile of black plastic rubbish bags at the back of one villa, each stuffed with the shreds of thousands of papers. Shouldn't they be taken to Washington or London and reconstituted to learn their secrets?

Even the unshredded files contain a wealth of information. But again, the Americans have not bothered - or do not want - to search through these papers. If they did, they would find the names of dozens of senior intelligence men, many of them identified in congratulatory letters they insisted on sending each other every time they were promoted. Where now, for example, is Colonel Abdulaziz Saadi, Captain Abdulsalam Salawi, Captain Saad Ahmed al-Ayash, Colonel Saad Mohammed, Captain Majid Ahmed and scores of others? We may never know. Or perhaps we are not supposed to know.

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Article Author: Brian Flemming

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