The Prisoner in His Palace

April 3, 2017
Bardenwerper, a U.S. Army veteran, eschews the usual war reportage fare of violence and valor as he profiles the “Super Twelve,” the unit of the 101st Airborne whose Iraq experience consisted largely of drinking tea and playing chess with a kindly old man who took an interest in their families and offered financial assistance for college. That man was Saddam Hussein, whom they were assigned to guard for the duration of his trial. The soldiers gradually warmed to their prisoner, who spoke good English, had a quick sense of humor, and enjoyed smoking Cohiba cigars. After a day of denouncing the American oppressors in court, “his demeanor would change the instant he joined his guards in the elevator.” His guards, meanwhile, escaped the physical dangers of the front lines, yet most still developed PTSD and similar afflictions. An alarming number wound up unemployed, homeless, or incarcerated. “Everything changed” for one soldier “when he led the old man he’d grown to know to his execution and was forced to stand by as his body was desecrated.” Bardenwerper’s engrossing history reveals that everybody has the capacity for good, and, more disturbingly, that every good person has the capacity for great evil. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Zoë Pagnamenta Agency.

April 15, 2017
An insider account of the last days guarding, and bonding with, the former president of Iraq.A group of 12 American military policemen, deployed to Iraq in August 2006, made up the rotating squad that guarded Saddam Hussein over the course of five months in Baghdad while he was tried, convicted, and executed by hanging on Dec. 30. In this alternating account that moves among time periods delineating Hussein's bloody history as Iraqi leader, as well as the back stories of many of the officers of the U.S. squad and prosecution team, journalist Bardenwerper, a former infantry officer in Iraq and Pentagon fellow, manages to portray a surprisingly sympathetic character in the former dictator. The Iraqi High Tribunal, housed in a former Baath Party headquarters building in Baghdad, had been established by the American victors and "modeled on UN war crimes tribunals." Presided over by five Iraqi judges (the leading judge was a prominent Kurd) and stocked by many Shia who had been persecuted by Hussein over the years, the court chose to condemn him for crimes against humanity in the specific 1982 incident of a murderous crackdown of 148 Shiite residents in Dujail rather than for the more notorious chemical gas attacks against Iraqi Kurds during the Iran-Iraq War. At the time of the trial, the air of sectarian violence was rife in Iraq, and Hussein and his defense team--including American lawyer Ramsey Clark and Hussein's daughter Raghad--were convinced it was a sham trial; Hussein vociferously protested the proceedings in court. Nonetheless, through the eyes of the young soldiers guarding him, the dictator presented as a bland, thoughtful old man who was fastidious in his habits, simple in his pleasures, fond of smoking his cigars in the sun, and discussing his memories with his captors. In skin-crawling detail, the author effectively captures a unique time and place in an engrossing history. A singular study exhibiting both military duty and human compassion.

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January 1, 2017
From a decorated Airborne Ranger-qualified infantry officer in Iraq: the morally complex story of 12 American soldiers assigned to guard Saddam Hussein in the months before his execution.

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