Finally the president thanked us and we were dismissed. As I was leaving, he smiled and said to me, „You sure Saddam didn’t say anything about where he put those vials of anthrax?“ and everyone laughed. I responded that he didn’t and, if he had, the president would have been the first to know. It was a lame response, but I thought his crack was inappropriate considering that the United States had already lost more than four thousand men and women, with tens of thousands injured.
—John Nixon, Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016), 168.
