Cairo, Egypt ? With a U.S. invasion looming, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein reached out to his people Sunday issuing a decree meant to empty his jails of everyone from pickpockets to political prisoners.

Freshly liberated inmates were seen streaming out of Iraqi prisons carrying their belongings in plastic shopping bags and some chanting: “We sacrifice our blood and souls for Saddam.”

The government called the amnesty a way of thanking the nation for re-electing Saddam last week in a referendum, but exiled Iraqis said the hearts-and-minds move was too little, too late.

U.S. officials dismissed it as a ploy to rally domestic and international support.

Wahid Abdel Meguid of the Al-Ahram Center for Strategic Studies, a Cairo-based think tank, said Saddam’s move was an attempt to buy time. “Saddam has zero credibility. Nobody will trust him,” Abdel Meguid said in an interview.

Saddam’s decree, read on national television, said the “full and complete and final amnesty” applied to “anyone imprisoned or arrested for political or any other reason.”

Justice Minister Munthir al-Shawi said the amnesty would not cover those who spied “for the Zionist entity,” referring to Israel, and the United States.

Amnesty International accuses Iraq of holding tens of thousands of political prisoners and of torturing and executing its opponents. There was no figure available as to how many inmates the amnesty would involve.

Hundreds of Iraqis storm the Abu Ghraib jail northwest of Baghdad following the announcement by President Saddam Hussein that most prisoners were going to be freed. Tens of thousands of prisoners were greeted by their relatives and friends Sunday upon their release throughout Iraq. Critics of the amnesty gesture have called it a desperate publicity stunt.

Akram al Hakim, a member of the steering committee preparing an opposition conference on a post-Saddam Iraq, said the amnesty was a sign of “weakness and deep frustration.”

Some 3 million Iraqis have fled the country since Saddam came to power in 1979, most of them after Iraq’s defeat in the 1991 Gulf War.

Bush has called for Saddam to be toppled, accusing him of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and harboring terrorists.