The CIA and other intelligence agencies learnt virtually nothing of value from former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during more than six months of interrogations that ended this week with his handover to Iraqi legal custody, three senior US officials said today.

The officials, who had access to secret transcripts of Saddam's debriefings, said he provided no clues to the fate of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and no information on whether his regime had contacts with terrorists.

In them, Saddam reminisced at length over his rise to power 35 years ago and the history of his Baath Party, he said. Those familiar topics apparently were raised by his CIA interrogators in a tactic meant to put captives at ease. "Maybe they never asked him the hard questions," the official said.

"There would still be the hope that we could get more. But, it's their (the Iraqis') country," the second senior official said.

But a Defence Department official, who like the senior officials spoke on condition of anonymity, said he knew of nothing that would prohibit members of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-led effort to trace the fate of Saddam's illicit weapons programs, from checking new leads with the former dictator or his co-defendants.

A few of the Saddam aides have provided useful information, but none has been completely open, officials said. The 11 include former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and Ali Hasan al Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for his role in chemical weapons attacks on Iraq's Kurds in the late 1980s.

Revelations of Saddam's negligible intelligence value contrast with official US statements in the days after his December 13, 2003, capture.

Brigadier General Mark Hertling of the US Army's 1st Armoured Division was quoted as saying after the capture that information provided by Saddam, and documents captured with him, had led to the detention of several leaders of the anti-US insurgency and helped clarify its structure.

But the former top CPA official said the United States still lacked good intelligence on the Iraqi insurgency led by former regime members, which threatens the US-supported interim government.

"It's disappointing that we haven't been able to have better insight into the command and control of the insurgency," he said. "You've got to have that if you're going to have effective military operations. You need to know who you're going to target."

http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/07/02/1088488127583.html