Photo Above: Saddam being executed by hanging by masked men Saturday, December 30. 2006.
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FBI agent George Piro, a Lebanese-American and one of the few FBI agents who spoke Arabic, was assigned to debrief Saddam after his December 2003 capture. He spent seven months in the interviews, winning Saddam's confidence along the way. In a bombshell interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes to be broadcast on Sunday, George Piro describes conversations with the ex-Iraqi leader in the debriefing. "He told me he initially miscalculated . . . President Bush's intentions.Thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998 . . . a four-day aerial attack;" George Piro said in the interview. "For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong and defiant Saddam," said Piro. "He thought that faking having the weapons would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq;" according to Piro. Months before his capture, Saddam was in a bunker in southeast Baghdad when it was bombed but survived the raid, Piro told CBS.

Iran and Iraq fought a bitter eight year war from 1980 to 1988 that took over one million lives. Iraq triggered the war with an invasion of Iran and Saddam fearing a revenge invasion faked possession of WMD as a deterrent to Iran.

Saddam: From monster to martyr? - Patrick Cockburn

It takes real genius to create a martyr out of Saddam Hussein. Here is a man dyed deep with the blood of his own people who refused to fight for him during the United States-led invasion three-and-a-half years ago. His tomb in his home village of Awja is already becoming a place of pilgrimage for the five million Sunni Arabs of Iraq who are at the core of the uprising. During his trial, Saddam himself was clearly trying to position himself to be a martyr in the cause of Iraqi independence and unity and Arab nationalism. His manifest failure to.......    More 

Photo Above: Saddam Hussein being dragged from his "spider hole" by U.S. forces on December 13, 2003 after his capture.