Debriefing the president: the interrogation of Saddam Hussein

Description

Prologue: unfinished business -- Holy shit, it's Saddam! -- Dare to be right -- Destination Baghdad -- Winging it -- Getting under Saddam's fingernails -- The Persian menace -- Turbans in politics -- Death to Shiites and Zionists -- Saddam blows his top -- Deep dive in the Oval Office -- Crosswise with the president -- In the shadow of his father -- The first draft of history -- Leaving with regrets -- Epilogue: a hanging in the middle of the night.;December 2003. After one of the largest, most aggressive manhunts in history, US military forces captured Iraqi president Saddam Hussein near his hometown of Tikrit. The Bush administration needed positive identification of the prisoner, and John Nixon, a senior CIA leadership analyst who had spent years studying the Iraqi dictator, was called upon. Looking for telltale scars and tribal tattoos and asking Hussein a list of questions only he could answer, Nixon identified the man as Saddam Hussein, but learned in the ensuing weeks that both he and America had greatly misunderstood just who Saddam Hussein really was. 2016. Prologue: unfinished business -- Holy shit, it's Saddam! -- Dare to be right -- Destination Baghdad -- Winging it -- Getting under Saddam's fingernails -- The Persian menace -- Turbans in politics -- Death to Shiites and Zionists -- Saddam blows his top -- Deep dive in the Oval Office -- Crosswise with the president -- In the shadow of his father -- The first draft of history -- Leaving with regrets -- Epilogue: a hanging in the middle of the night.