Debriefing
the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein – John Nixon (Blue Rider
Press)
The United States, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
was founded in 1947; since that time they have had a history dotted with major failures
and misses. Things ranging from the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, the collapse
of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 attacks are some of the highest profile fails.
So I guess I was wasn’t too surprised when reading
former CIA analyst John Nixon’s account of his time questioning captured Iraqi
dictator Saddam Hussein, Debriefing the
President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, that the CIA comes off like
the Keystone Cops. Nixon details the internal squabbles, the ill-prepared
nature of their questioning of Hussein and what amounts to an utter failure to
gain much in the way of valuable insights from the tyrant.
Nixon spends much of his time point fingers at CIA
director George Tenet, the George W. Bush administration and his take on
ranging from the intel leading up to the war in Iraq, his belief the
waterboarding and other stress based interrogation techniques don’t produce
results and the high cost of the war. This from a so-called “Saddam expert” who
was an analyst, not a field officer partaking in enhanced interrogations, who
apparently didn’t have a prepared list of questions at the ready in the event
of a Saddam capture.
An example of how unprepared Nixon and his cohorts
where to interrogate Saddam was showcased when Nixon recounts how he was
introduced by his boss (“Mr. Jack”) in Iraq as “Mr. Steve” but then during a
later session Hussein spotted Nixon’s Coalition ID badge hanging around his
neck and demanded “who are you?!” An amateur mistake at best.
Liberals will gravitate towards this book because in
reinforces their beliefs about the wasted cost of the war and the George W Bush
administration. Any clear headed examination however reveals this to be a
jumbled mess of crossed timelines, ill-prepared career employees and a real
indictment of how the Congress and it’s often ax grinding oversight has truly
hamstrung and crippled the U.S. intelligence services since the mid-1970s when
the so-called Church Committee, led by Senator Frank Church (D-ID) clamped down
on the tools available to the CIA to actually do their job.
