Read Part 2 here.
John Nixon
Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein
Blue Rider Press. 242 pp. $25
Eric Maddox with Davin Seay
Mission Black List #1: The Inside Story of the Search for Saddam Hussein
—As Told by the Soldier Who Masterminded His Capture
HarperCollins. 267 pp. $32
George Piro
“Saddam’s Confessions” CBS 60 Minutes, 27 January 2008;
“Saddam’s Interrogator,” PowerPoint presentation, George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, 7 November 2008;
Saddam Hussein Talks to the FBI: Twenty Interviews and Five Conversations
with High Value Detainee # 1 in 2004, 2009;
“Interrogating Saddam Hussein,” National Geographic Channel, 30 May 2010
Robert Ellis with Marianna Riley
Caring for Victor: A US Army Nurse and Saddam Hussein
Reedy Press. 200 pp. $42
By Gary Kern
Tyrants are charming, especially when they hold power, but sometimes even after they have lost it. What is that power? A chain of command with men in position to carry out orders and enforce them, a government structure prepared to legalize and record them, a body of collaborators and admirers happy to approve and applaud them, and a mass of subjects obliged to suffer and obey them. Plus one thing more: the mentality of the commander who believes himself supremely entitled to give them, and considers himself correct–or at least justified–in every one that he gives.
The charm comes when he temporarily suspends his brutalities and sits down to tea with a guest or interviewer; here he reveals unexpected style and grace, though not really much more than does the common man. The difference is that he could kill you–or once could–but chooses not to, and that gives his personality a boost. He tells a little joke or funny story, and when you laugh, he laughs along with you. It’s the gentleness of the butcher–wily Uncle Joe Stalin, fascinating Marshal Hermann Göring, lovable Fidel Castro. And the Butcher of Baghdad, charming Saddam Hussein.
Despite the humiliating and deflating photos of his capture, his rumpled appearance in front of the camera and the dismal “spider hole” from which he was evicted, plus a video shown repeatedly on the world screen of military medics searching his head for lice and shining a flashlight in his mouth in search of anything else (indicating that they must have shined it in the end as well), the deposed president of Iraq soon recovered his aplomb and sense of superiority–all it took was a good bath, a lot of rest, regular meals, a haircut and a trim of his new beard. Add a suit and a crisp white shirt without tie, and voilà!–his body lightened by nine months of roughing it cut a dashing figure. (The tie no doubt was denied so that he couldn’t hang himself.) John Nixon, the first man to get a chance to question him, describes how the tyrant at his very first debriefing subtly favored the translations of one interpreter over another, sowed dissension between the two (CIA and Army) and chuckled for an hour as the Americans squabbled in front of him. In the twinkling of an eye, he sat in the driver’s seat, except that, of course, he was a prisoner and wasn’t going anywhere.
