Blog
Published on November 13, 2007
The New York Daily News reviews a book that details how Saddam Hussein was made to confess to his crimes — and brought to tears — without torture.
“When we were saying bye, [Saddam Hussein] started to tear up,” [FBI interrogator George] Piro recalled in the new book “The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack.”
The self-effacing G-man was hardly surprised – he had spent nearly a year carefully becoming Saddam’s best friend in a successful ploy to extract confessions from the notorious brute. Piro’s inside account of spending up to seven hours a day, every day, for eight months with Saddam is revealed in the new book by journalist Ronald Kessler.
Piro, then 36, began grilling Saddam in early 2004.
Instead of bright lights, loud music or waterboarding, the Beirut-born Arabic speaker – who immigrated to the U.S. as a teen – built a rapport with the dictator nabbed in a spider hole. He treated him with respect and took care of his every need.
. . .
They talked about sports and Saddam’s pulp novels, and soon the despot was
spilling his guts over thick cups of Folger’s.
