So what happens when a top aide of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein disappears into the Twighlight Zone of confinement?
According to London’s Times, this:
IT WAS their first meeting in 28 months, and the family of Tariq Aziz, 69, wept as they described their reunion in an American prison outside Baghdad this week with the man who served for more than a decade as the public face of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
“He looked like he had turned 80,� his wife, Violette, told The Times. “He was frail and too tired to walk, even inside the small meeting room. He had to lean against his American military escort to move a step down.
“Much of his thick hair and moustache had shed and greyed,� she added, tears running down her cheeks.
She said that he had lost more than 30lb (14kg). Doctors had pulled out most of his decaying teeth to make way for dentures. He was taking more than a dozen pills a day to control high blood pressure, diabetes and heart problems.
But he was still able to crack jokes. His daughter, Zainab, 38, said: “He told my Mum: ‘You had been nagging me for years to loose some weight. Now the Americans have helped me achieve that’. �
Don’t give any of the corporate types any ideas…
Mr Aziz — urbane, confident and bespectacled — was Saddam’s leading apologist, serving as his Foreign Minister before the Gulf War and as Deputy Prime Minister before the US-led invasion of Iraq.
He was No 43 — the eight of spades — in the coalition’s “most wanted� pack of cards but he surrendered meekly when US troops arrived at the house in Baghdad where he had been hiding for some weeks after the invasion. Since then Mr Aziz, Saddam and other leading regime members have been held in solitary confinement in the heavily fortified army base next to Baghdad airport.
Mr Aziz has yet to be charged and there are signs that his captors are beginning to treat him more leniently. Two weeks ago he was allowed to telephone his family for the first time and now they have been allowed to visit him, albeit for only 30 minutes.
The piece then details the process for getting into the prison and their trip (they live in Jordan where they fled after the invasion) and seems to try to stir up some sympathy for the fact they could only hug him behind a partition. But there’s nothing really shocking in the fact that he’s in a prison and is treated like a prisoner.
The most telling comment comes at the end when Aziz shows he’s worried about the fact his family has no money (the Aziz family’s old home has been commandeered by a Shia leader).
He asked for news of his younger son, Saddam, who was named after the former Iraqi leader and who is now studying dentistry at a university in Yemen.
“While he was talking about Saddam he looked at one of the guards, and told him: ‘Don’t worry, I am talking about my son, not him’,� Zainab said.
This is an interesting story for two reasons (a) he WAS the face of the Saddam regime, (b)with Saddam’s trial presumably he’ll be called on to testify or will have given the Americans some info. On the other hand, perhaps he is remaining loyal to the end.
We thank reader Swaraaj Chauhan of India for sending us the link to this story.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.