Saddam's DNA - where did we get it?

Where did we get Saddam’s DNA the first time, I know we’ve tested him since he was captured, and the DNA confirms he is who we think he is, but when did we find out this information, and how?

Just walked up to him, jabbed in the needle and said ‘Thanks mate’? And how do we know it was him that we jabbed the needle inot (or however we did it)? Doesn’t he have loads of doubles?

It’s really bugging me, anyway, so if anyone knows…!
Lil

His late sons would be a good match, maybe.

well we definitely killed his sons and a male always passes the same y chromosome(well give or take a few inconsequential mutations) on to his sons. All they would have to do is check the y chromosome they got from him agains that of one of his sons, so there is one possibility anyway.

this is the method they used to establish that jefferson has living black relatives.

or I could be completely wrong, who knows.

There would have been plenty of DNA in his various palaces that we occupied. All you need is some hair from a hair brush, for example.

That’s a good point about the Y chromosomes, I guess that’s how they did it.

About the DNA in the places we occupy, I don’t think we could have used that as we couldn’t be certain it was his DNA or one of his doubles.

Or did we maybe demand his DNA when we installed him in power - ‘No, don’t worry Mr Hussein, just part of the routine dictator setting up procedures, ok?’

Hmmmmm…

Lil

But I seem to recall that they were identified by DNA matching too. Again, against what?

referring to the sons

WAG: How about against each other? We start off with reasonable evidence to suggest that they were who we thought they were, a DNA test ought to be able to tell us if the subjects were brothers: what are the chances that the Uday’s double and Qusay’s double were brothers themselves?
If we have reason to believe they are who we think they are to begin with, then the DNA shows them to be brothers, it would be a nearly inconceivable coincidence that they might turn out not to be the right brothers (not the Wright Brothers).
Next they match the guy who we expect is their father. The margin of error is growing slimmer.

But there is still a margin of error. So technically wouldn’t the news reporters etc have to be saying ‘We think we got him’?

Lil

I heard a while back (while rulling out a ‘phony Saddam’ IIRC) that we got his DNA when he attended some function, possibly in the US during the Regan Admin.

But then we’re back to the question, how do we know it was him that attended the function?

Lil

We got it from Monica Lewinski?

You’d think a despot might have some kind of despotic assistant to do that for him.

I assumed they did a comparison to his sons’ DNA, but it sounds like they had other sources. Which is an interesting thought in and of itself. I’d like to know how they could ever be certain that a sample actually came from Saddam in the first place. But perhaps with a large enough collection of matching DNA from sources that you believed were Saddam’s, you could be reasonably sure that you had the right stuff.

Regarding Bienville’s theory, I doubt they just tested his sons againt one another, since that gives you circumstantial evidence rather than a positive ID. Is it unlikely that doubles for Uday and Qusay (or however it’s spelled) would also happen to be brothers? Not necessarily. Facial features are genetic, so the brother of someone who looked like Uday might just bear a resemblance Qusay, and their father could very well resemble Saddam. It’s certainly not the most likely thing, but it’s not completely unlikely.

Well they said we had his dental records (one of the reasons they were looking in his mouth), couldn’t we also have a blood sample or something similar from his doctor too?

Fast-track DNA tests confirm Saddam’s identity

"{T}he military appear to already have Hussein’s genetic profile stored away for comparison. US forces claimed to have samples from the dictator in April 2003. This could be from personal items such as a toothbrush or cup he drank from, Kobilinsky (Lawrence Kobilinsky, a DNA expert at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York) told New Scientist.

“They certainly had access to the two sons, Uday and Qusay, who were killed,” he says. A “very quick way” of identifying Saddam Hussein would be to compare the new sample with variable regions called short tandem repeats on the sons’ Y-chromosomes. As this male sex chromosome is passed directly from father to son, it should match.

Kobilinsky suspects both Y-chromosome DNA and other DNA from the nucleus’s of Hussein’s cells would have been tested."

Didn’t one of his sons defect for a while, a few years ago? We had him in custody, and then let him go, I think. That gives us access to some of the family DNA. That and then the subsequent brothers tested similarities would give us a fairly good map of the probable father’s profile.

Tris

That was a son-in-law (ie. related by marriage, no DNA match), not U. or Q., though I forget his name. The story on him was that after defecting and giving away a lot of government secrets, he was somehow enticed to return to Iraq so he could enjoy the privilege of being executed.
D

Haven’t there been defector daughters?

His mistress also defected, she did that rather TMI interview with one of the US news programs a while back. Perhaps she had some DNA ala Monica (barf barf barf) that she gave to officials.

I reckon it would be cool to know how they really found the DNA and were certain it was Saddam’s, I bet it would be just like the Tom Clancy novels.

The thing I keep coming back to is A) they have to be CERTAIN it is Saddam otherwise any legal trial would fall totally apart and make the Americans and the rest of the western world look like complete idiots, therefore they have to be absolutely positive of the DNA match, therefore B) they must have KNOWN where Saddam was in April 2003. So why the hell didn’t they (whoever got that close) kill him? Wasn’t that their main purpose in life in April 2003?

Lil

I would suspect they lifted it from him in a covert op. I am sure they thought of this back in 91 and have been working on it ever since. It would not be difficult for the CIA to buy a used snot rag from a butler, etc. If you get 100 snot rags over the course of 10 years from a variety of sources and they all have the same DNA, and this DNA is consistent with the deceased sons, then you have high reliability. I would expect they used a variety of sources besides snot rags. I also doubt they waited until 2003 to get some.