Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein Hardcover – December 27, 2016

John Nixon has written a very good book. All we saw about Saddam on television was that he was a lunatic, a terrorist helper, a keeper of WMD, an enemy of the world. Bush, Rumsfield, Chaney, Blair all screamed this message. Of course each story always has two sides. Painted as a leper by the west, Saddam was puzzled by Americas treatment of him according to Nixon. He saw himself engaged in a war against terror himself. I don't believe he was delusional on this point reading Nixons words. He truly believed his purpose was in defending his country from terror inside or out, and stopping the Persian menace on his eastern flank. I remember the conflicting message sent to Saddam by George HW Bushs rep during the Kuwait incident where America spoke of no interest in local disputes. Then bam, Bush shows up and drives Saddam back to Iraq. The neocons drove George W Bushs agenda I believe. Everything is always painted with a Jewish brush. Saddam never threatened america, we're too far away; but he did represent a threat to Isreal, real or imagined. America became Isreals policeman, doing what they could not do themselves because of Arab backlash. The leaders of Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria. Chaos has followed their removal. Only a weakened Assad holds out. To make matters worse for this writting, CIA's office of review pulled out the redact pen. One whole page of Saddams thoughts are gone. Nixon says nothing missing would have compromised sources or methods. A lot of times you can read between the lines and fill in the blanks, but not an entire page!!! Shame on you Virginia farmboys.Nixon talks about the Agency going off course. Have seen this same charge in James Risens State of War. Political pandering not intellegence production. Then again CIA and others like them are insulated because of the illiterate ignorant mob called citizens. They don't read books (Harvard study), can't read chapter books, attention span too short (Stanford study), consumed by political correctness to the point of anarchy, (Yale). Reading is hard, comprehension is harder. Takes work and practice. Television and 140 character tweets is not a good foundation. What are we to do? People like Risen and Nixon are yelling about danger and no one hears them. Thomas Jefferson worried about an uneducated population. Even our elected leaders call us a democracy. Excuse me; but we are a representative constitutional republic. We are not mob ruled. Watching the current level of social media activism, the issues they embrace and the cut and past rehtoric employed says a lot. Confused to the point of serious stupidity. Driven to the placard carrying street by out of touch college professors. The sixties was bad for order, the twenties look to be a lot worse. All thinkgs begin at the college level. Higher education tenured trouble makers. Socialist and communist all or so it seems. Educate please not activate. Thank you. Americas future will thank you.mNixon showed several potential areas of neglect at CIA. Namely human Intel, needing someone on the street who understands the language, culture and history. The Bush W boys did not understand any of this in relation to Iraq and didn't really care I believe. I've read all their books, Bush, Rumsfield, Chaney, Blair, this understanding is missing. It's replaced with an underlying undefined hatred of Saddam. A point made by Nixon, after meeting the president, was the fact Bush seemed ignorant of the Sunni Shia divide. This in itself is troubling. How can you fight a people and not know the basics? Their Muslims aren't they? No, there is a difference in how they see the future and its important when considering this culture. Bush was touted by many as a student of history and a voracious reader. The president also demonstrated a classic first born arrogance coupled with a temper in his meetings with Nixon. Looked on others as truely subordinate. That comment the president made about Nixons salary was really freshmanisk. Not the picture portrayed from Crawford, ah shucks cowboy cutting weeds and trees on his ranch, driving a pickup truck. He seems complicated beyond his book, decision points. More like things known and unknown, punning Rumsfield sorry. Even George HW Bush went so far as to pronounce his name Sad dam, with an am not the om. I'm told it was an insult. This hatred led to a misrepresentation of the facts. Even Colin Powell showed up with his vial of powder at the UN.Anyway, for those who care, Nixons book is a good read. It balances the issue and he has done a good service. Another look inside an administration at war with terror.

In "Debriefing the President," former CIA Analyst John Nixon recalls his time debriefing Saddam Hussein, the former leader of Iraq. While the book discusses the various interrogation sessions and the information gleaned from those discussions, there are much larger underlying themes that run throughout the narrative.First, Nixon discusses America’s choice and justification for entering Iraq based on intelligence that Nixon finds opaque and exceedingly difficult to accurately verify.Second, Nixon discusses Saddam Hussein’s contentious tactics and techniques for maintaining relative stability in Iraq and hints that if Saddam were left to continue his reign of power in Iraq, it may have resulted in a much different situation than the one that is currently being faced by citizens throughout the Middle East.Lastly, Nixon discusses the role of the intelligence community in advising the President and the various shortfalls that come with defending your analysis rather than toeing the party line.Overall, the book was well written and a good read. It should be noted, however, that “Debriefing the President” is less about the interrogation of Saddam Hussein and more about the political nature of the United States. I would highly suggest this work for anyone interested in Middle Eastern affairs or matters that effect the American decision making process.

CIA Analyst John Nixon spent years studying the Iraqi dictator and was responsible for the positive identification of Saddam Hussein after his capture in December 2003. He was also part of the team that first debriefed (CIA-speak for "interrogate") the toppled dictator. What Nixon learned changed him, and this is his story.What we were fed prior to the war, all the way back to the Clinton Administration, was a caricature of a man, a cross between Hitler and Yosemite Sam. As an example, in 2003, while the United States was preparing to go to war, Saddam was busy writing a novel and sending it to his ministers for critique. The CIA knew this, but thought that the novel must be ghostwritten and paid this detail no significance, because it ran counter to our assumptions about Saddam. In hindsight, it showed that Saddam in his later years paid little attention to the affairs of state, let alone masterminding the death and destruction of the United States.The 2nd Iraqi war cost literally burned 3 trillion dollars. This number is difficult to fathom, but it's basically the total sum of all auto loans, student loans and credit card debt in the United States from Alabama to Wyoming. This, not counting thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, not only didn't make us safer, but made the world a much more dangerous place and gave rise to ISIS and lit the entire region on fire. It's too late to change any of that, but it's still instructive to understand what went wrong.This story is John Nixon's attempt at telling the story for the sake of history, and provide a critique from his view deep inside the CIA on the entire process that led us to his colossal mistake in the first place. The CIA, like any large bureaucracy, is full of talented but inexperienced young people, with a layer of middle-managers that are intelligent enough to get promoted but not wise enough to see the big picture, and an executive branch that is more concerned with finding facts that prove it right, rather than gathering intelligence to understand the real world. But before you think that Nixon has an axe to grind with Bush the 2nd, he in equal measure criticize the actions and attitude of the Clinton and the Obama administrations.This book is very readable and the story in of itself is fascinating. But more to the point, it provides the intelligent reader with a deeper, realistic view into national intelligence machinery. He left the parts that were redacted by the CIA in place, sometimes a word is blacked out, sometimes an entire paragraph. That is the only unfortunate and annoying aspect of the book, but through no fault of the author's. What's left, is still a story that needed to be told.