A trial began today in Detroit for a former El Cajon resident and U.S. military translator who is charged with feeding information to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime. Associated Press is reporting that Issam Hamama, 60, of El Cajon, is charged with conspiring to act as an unregistered agent and making false statements to investigators.
Hamama, a naturalized U.S. citizen and Iraqi Christian who lived among other Chaldeans in Detroit before moving to El Cajon, which also has a large Chaldean population, left Iraq in 1979. He was reportedly identified as agent 6129 in documents seized by the U.S. government after Hussein's fall in 2003. Hamama applied to become a U.S. translator in Iraq that same year and declared he had never had contact with foreign governments.
According to the AP, defense attorney Haytham Faraj acknowledged Hamama had contact in the 1990s with Iraqi officials stationed in the U.S., but said he simply passed along benign information in the 1990s about Iraqi Christians in the United States.
