Read The Daily's review of Maddox's book: Searching for Saddam: An OU grad tells his story

On the night of Dec. 12, 2003, Mohammad Ibrahim Omar went to sleep the leader of the Iraqi insurgency in Tikrit.

At 2 a.m. the next day, he was in U.S. custody. By 6 a.m., an interrogator was trying to convince him to give up the name of the man he worked for.

That interrogator was Army Staff Sgt. Eric Maddox, an OU graduate who told his story to more than 100 OU students and faculty members at a panel discussion Thursday afternoon.

He went on to explain that on that day in 2003, Omar was in a bad situation. Forty of his family members were in prison and the Americans knew the location of 20 more. He couldn’t give in though.

“Even if I knew where [he] was and if I took you to him they would know it,” he said. “They would kill my family.”

Another officer came and tapped his watch at Maddox. Time was up.

“When you change your mind... I want you to bang on the door,” Maddox said. The military didn’t believe Omar really had the information they wanted. Maddox was sure he did, but unfortunately his tour was over and his flight was set to take off at 8 a.m.

But within an hour, Omar started banging on the door as if his life depended on it. Maddox walked into the cell. Minutes later, he emerged with a sketch of the exact hideout of Saddam Hussein.

This is the firsthand account more than 100 Sooners heard at the discussion on interrogation headlined by the Sooner who helped the American military capture Saddam Hussein.

Maddox returned to campus to promote his new book, “Mission: Black List #1,” his retelling of the search for Hussein.

Lack of leverage

The other panelists who participated in the discussion with Maddox included Chris Howard, OU’s vice president of leadership and strategic communications, Air Force Reserve Major and former intelligence officer; and David Edger, professor and former associate deputy director of the CIA.

The panelists attempted to explain the origin of the “enhanced” interrogation tactics, like waterboarding and stress positions that have been used in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.

“In a situation like Gitmo.” Maddox said, “Our collectors don’t know [exactly what data] they want and they don’t have anything to give this guy.”

They emphasized that any tactical advantage of using torture came at the expense of the strategic goals of the military. Using normal interrogation techniques allows interrogators to “turn” detainees and gives the mission a moral high ground, he said.

“Having beaten this guy up or tortured him or waterboarded him, and then going, ‘Well I need to talk to your brother, can you just show me where he lives because I’ll be nice,’ it just does not work,” Maddox said.

During the question and answer portion of the discussion, international and area studies senior Will Stackable asked Maddox how he approached interrogations detainees who were religious fanatics.

“Actually that happens quite often [with suicide bombers], because the bomb didn’t go off and they don’t know where to go and they’re just standing there,” Maddox said. “In that situation, what you have to do is... use that religion.”

Most Muslims believe strongly in fate, so when would-be suicide bombers’ missions went awry, Maddox said, he tried to convince them to take it as a sign of God’s will.

The road to Tikrit

Born in Enid and raised in Sapulpa, Maddox has been a Sooner his entire life.

“I’ve been an OU fan since I can ever remember, back into the Billy Simms days,” he said.

Maddox enrolled at OU in 1990. But he didn’t know what he wanted to do afterward, so he decided to follow in the footsteps of both his grandfathers and join the military.

“I looked up to those who served,” he said. “They’re the type of people I wanted to be like.”

He enlisted in the Army Rangers, but by 1997 he was ready to move on. He remembered the difficulty he had learning Spanish in school and wanted to see if the military could help him overcome this challenge.

“When I was in high school, I took Spanish. It was the only B I made, and when I was in college, I got a B in Spanish 2. That irritated me,” he said.

He decided to enroll in interrogation school, which required fluency training in another language. He chose Chinese.

“Chinese is one of the hardest languages to learn, so I thought ‘lets see if you can do it,’” he said. “It had nothing to do with being an interrogator.”

After a year and a half of training, he was fluent enough to be stationed at the U.S. embassy in Beijing in 2000. Within a year, he was transferred to the Defence Intelligence Agency as an intelligence collector.

“Then 9/11 hit,” he said. “And you know, the wars just started coming.”