Saddam Hussein said “you can’t trust anyone with a beard like that” when asked about Osama bin Laden

Saddam Hussein said “you can’t trust anyone with a beard like that” when asked about al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the FBI interrogator of the toppled Iraqi dictator has revealed.

George Piro — a Lebanese-American special agent who spent several hours a day interrogating the Iraqi tyrant — said Saddam joked with him as he tried to establish the dictator’s ties to the terror network.

But while also trying to find out if Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, Piro said he found he had nothing but contempt for the terror group.

Piro was the lead interrogator for the Saddam Hussein interrogation team after the leader’s capture by US soldiers in Iraq in 2004.

The now-retired FBI agent also said Saddam lied about possessing weapons of mass destruction because he wanted to frighten Iraq’s neighbor and enemy Iran.

Saddam Hussein reportedly said ‘you can’t trust anyone with a beard like that’ when asked about al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (pictured)

For months, Piro spent several hours a day interrogating and interrogating the Iraqi dictator.

“Saddam told me that he didn’t like Osama bin Laden and that he didn’t believe in al-Qaeda’s ideology because it was aimed at creating an Islamic state across the Arab world,” Piro told CNN – now 20 years old. after the invasion. from Iraq.

He said Saddam had this view because he had “no desire to hand over power or to give anything to anyone else.”

During the lengthy interrogation sessions, Piro said he realized that Saddam’s claim to possess weapons of mass destruction was a bluff. He suggested that he lied to upset Iran.

His greatest enemy was not the United States or Israel. His biggest enemy was Iran, and he told me he was constantly trying to balance or compete with Iran,” Piro said.

Saddam’s greatest fear was that if Iran discovered how weak and vulnerable Iraq had become, nothing would stop them from invading and taking southern Iraq. So his goal was to keep Iran at bay.”

Piro said he could use the hour-long interrogation sessions to get Saddam to admit he would have rebuilt a weapons of mass destruction program if the US lifted sanctions against the country.

Former FBI interrogator George Piro (pictured) said Saddam Hussein lied about weapons of mass destruction to upset Iraq’s eastern neighbor Iran

He told CNN: “I asked Saddam, ‘What were you going to do when the sanctions were lifted?'”

“He said, ‘We were going to do what we had to do, or what we ought to do to protect ourselves’ — which was his way of saying he would have reassembled his entire WMD program.”

After spending hours with Saddam, Piro said the Iraqi predicted that events following his removal from power would be protracted and brutal, and that restoring governance to the country would be more complicated than the West had assumed.

“Saddam is one of the most ruthless dictators of our time and was responsible for some of the most heinous atrocities in history, but on the other hand he told me we had no idea how hard it was to rule Iraq, but we’d find out by removing it.’

Piro is now writing a book about his sessions with the Iraqi leader after he retired from the FBI last year.