last book review of 2022...
Jan. 4th, 2023 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavDebriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein by John Nixon
(free to read on archive.org)
In the last ~20 years of focusing on nonfiction books, I've really enjoyed reading about interrogators. (A part of it is due to RPing as one or two back in the day, along with other cough pertinent interests cough, but then another large chunk is just a morbid fascination of the dark power plays that goes on. it's very intimate, as pain is, even with its impact on world news.)
Nixon is a CIA agent who worked the Iraq circles way back in the early 00's, and was one of the first dudes to interrogate Hussein.
technically the army got to him first and the FBI got to him after, so "first" is debatable here. He claims there was no waterboarding, physical, or psychological torture that went on with Hussein vs the flagrant abuses in Abu Ghraib (or at least, not in his line of sight). in essence, the first 3/5 is his notes and recalled memory of the 3-5 hour talking sessions he and an interpreter had with Hussein, with the overarching goal to see if they could wheedle out information about WMD if they just kept this dude talking. and man, this dude liked to talk about history and himself and well, mostly himself. this dude would not shut up about himself.
(I am finding dictators tend to be a pretty arrogant bunch, unsurprisingly.)
but he was pretty canny about what he chose to mention; he got butthurt (lol) when the spooks tried to remotely approach the subject of war crimes ('so uh, you say you like kurds, but what about that instance when you gassed a bunch...'), and when he wanted to redirect the topic, he'd read his own previously written poetry and plays to the spooks, with embellishments and clarifications on history. he was not cosmopolitan, as Nixon says, but he was street-smart and had genuine respect for historians. he also had a bit of a desert-dry sense of humor, remarking once when they were talking in circles that "the spirit of dialogue (is not here)".
some specific bits i thought was cool is that this dude had been studying up Hussein for a long time, decades before - knew that in order to confirm that this indeed was the guy, they'd have to pay attention to some tribal tattoos on his hand and an old gunshot wound on his back from a failed coup Hussein tried to lead, and there's some similarly cool psychological remarks on when and why Hussein was lying back to them, when he was trying to be coy, when he tried to play several of the spooks off of each other - he was mentally well prepared for this.
Amusing is the wrong word entirely, but you definitely get the sense of enigmatic interest that Hussein felt like an unsolved puzzle to Nixon when those sessions were up, and when Hussein shook hands with him voluntarily (he didn't shake hands with any other spook). with a sense of respect of ... not what he did, certinally - (gestures at the documented war crimes) - but that he was not wholly the cartoon caricature villain that the media and GWB's white house made him to be.A problematic favorite blorbo, to put it in modern parlance :P (sorry not sorry)
What surprised me is that 3/5 of this book was about Hussein himself as expected; the last chunk was about the two instances Nixon got to debrief GWB with briefs and topics that were somewhat tangential.
Man, holy shit, GWB was an asshole to him, especially the second go around. I had to get up several times and walk around in 'wtf dude' disbelief because the sheer amount of like. anti-curiosity? anti-basic respect? to people who are paid for all of their lives to give you accurate intel of the region and then to sort of wave them aside with a flap of the hand and a mocking joke or two is just ... it doesn't sit well with me. it's like a very bratty prince who bullies his tutors by base of his power station (and Nixon mentioned some very interesting personal insights that GWB always compared himself to his daddy, which, i mean, if anyone's going to notice Freud-y complexes, an interrogator will...)
that was fascinating to see a frankly, very unflattering portrait of the dude - i as a rule don't trust CIA spooks but hearing it from a first hand account of this dude versus the '~alphabet networks have a hate boner for GWB~' thing is. illuminating. It's pretty impressive when this guy's measured impression of Hussein is almost more favorable than GWB. He even compares the two at the end, and there's a heck of a lot more comparisons than contrasts.
Anyway - this isn't a must read book, but for people laser-focused on this as a favorite topic, it's definitely readable. I zoomed through this one during the car trips, and I'll be keeping this one for reference.
(free to read on archive.org)
In the last ~20 years of focusing on nonfiction books, I've really enjoyed reading about interrogators. (A part of it is due to RPing as one or two back in the day, along with other cough pertinent interests cough, but then another large chunk is just a morbid fascination of the dark power plays that goes on. it's very intimate, as pain is, even with its impact on world news.)
Nixon is a CIA agent who worked the Iraq circles way back in the early 00's, and was one of the first dudes to interrogate Hussein.
technically the army got to him first and the FBI got to him after, so "first" is debatable here. He claims there was no waterboarding, physical, or psychological torture that went on with Hussein vs the flagrant abuses in Abu Ghraib (or at least, not in his line of sight). in essence, the first 3/5 is his notes and recalled memory of the 3-5 hour talking sessions he and an interpreter had with Hussein, with the overarching goal to see if they could wheedle out information about WMD if they just kept this dude talking. and man, this dude liked to talk about history and himself and well, mostly himself. this dude would not shut up about himself.
(I am finding dictators tend to be a pretty arrogant bunch, unsurprisingly.)
but he was pretty canny about what he chose to mention; he got butthurt (lol) when the spooks tried to remotely approach the subject of war crimes ('so uh, you say you like kurds, but what about that instance when you gassed a bunch...'), and when he wanted to redirect the topic, he'd read his own previously written poetry and plays to the spooks, with embellishments and clarifications on history. he was not cosmopolitan, as Nixon says, but he was street-smart and had genuine respect for historians. he also had a bit of a desert-dry sense of humor, remarking once when they were talking in circles that "the spirit of dialogue (is not here)".
some specific bits i thought was cool is that this dude had been studying up Hussein for a long time, decades before - knew that in order to confirm that this indeed was the guy, they'd have to pay attention to some tribal tattoos on his hand and an old gunshot wound on his back from a failed coup Hussein tried to lead, and there's some similarly cool psychological remarks on when and why Hussein was lying back to them, when he was trying to be coy, when he tried to play several of the spooks off of each other - he was mentally well prepared for this.
Amusing is the wrong word entirely, but you definitely get the sense of enigmatic interest that Hussein felt like an unsolved puzzle to Nixon when those sessions were up, and when Hussein shook hands with him voluntarily (he didn't shake hands with any other spook). with a sense of respect of ... not what he did, certinally - (gestures at the documented war crimes) - but that he was not wholly the cartoon caricature villain that the media and GWB's white house made him to be.
What surprised me is that 3/5 of this book was about Hussein himself as expected; the last chunk was about the two instances Nixon got to debrief GWB with briefs and topics that were somewhat tangential.
Man, holy shit, GWB was an asshole to him, especially the second go around. I had to get up several times and walk around in 'wtf dude' disbelief because the sheer amount of like. anti-curiosity? anti-basic respect? to people who are paid for all of their lives to give you accurate intel of the region and then to sort of wave them aside with a flap of the hand and a mocking joke or two is just ... it doesn't sit well with me. it's like a very bratty prince who bullies his tutors by base of his power station (and Nixon mentioned some very interesting personal insights that GWB always compared himself to his daddy, which, i mean, if anyone's going to notice Freud-y complexes, an interrogator will...)
that was fascinating to see a frankly, very unflattering portrait of the dude - i as a rule don't trust CIA spooks but hearing it from a first hand account of this dude versus the '~alphabet networks have a hate boner for GWB~' thing is. illuminating. It's pretty impressive when this guy's measured impression of Hussein is almost more favorable than GWB. He even compares the two at the end, and there's a heck of a lot more comparisons than contrasts.
Anyway - this isn't a must read book, but for people laser-focused on this as a favorite topic, it's definitely readable. I zoomed through this one during the car trips, and I'll be keeping this one for reference.
