Standing up to
Saddam and his son took courage
April 26 2005
Tamara Dietrich
When Air Force Col. David Eberly was shot down over Iraq in January
1991, he found himself in the clutches of a madman.
Qusai Hussein - in every worst
way his father's son - demanded that Eberly and the other captured
coalition pilots be classified as criminals of war and killed
outright.
Only one man stood in his
way.
Iraqi Gen. Georges Sada took
his life in his hands and for weeks lobbied with a lunatic to
save the pilots.
"To his personal credit,
he saved my life and the lives of the other Americans and the
Brits and the Kuwaiti," says Eberly, the highest-ranking
POW of Desert Storm, now r etired and living in Williamsburg.
Sada ended up thrown in prison
and "suffered greatly for his actions," Eberly says.
Sada dismisses any talk of
personal suffering. An earnest and devout Christian who wears
a hefty cross of nails around his neck, Sada arrived in town
last week to attend the 10th annual Vision Weekend conference
sponsored by Newport News-based Military Ministries, which reaches
out to military men and women around the world.
Asked how he found the guts
to contradict the murderous Husseins, Sada takes no credit.
"It was not the courage
from me," he told me, "but it was given to me by Jesus
Christ."
Born in 1940 to a "church
family," Sada is a member of the indigenous Assyrians, who
predate Arabs and Kurds. He grew up near a British air base and
learned to love flying.
Being a minority Christian
in a Muslim country has its obstacles, but not enough to keep
Sada from joining the military, training as a pilot and rising
to the rank of air vice marshal.
When he wouldn't join Saddam's
Baath Party in 1986, he was forced to retire. Four years later,
when Saddam invaded Kuwait, the first man he called back to service
was Sada. For Sada, it was a deal with the devil.
"If he loves you, it's
bad. If he hates you, it's bad," Sada says. The Iraqi despot
was "more than crazy. He was a very dangerous man. Only
God knows what he will do."
Saddam asked Sada the quickest
way to end the war. The quickest way, Sada answered, would be
to turn the Iraqi troops around and bring them home.
Saddam was not amused. "If
you say that again," he told Sada, "your head will
be separate from your body."
When Iraq began shooting down
coalition pilots, Saddam put Sada in charge of them. One by one,
they were blindfolded and brought to him for interrogation, intelligence
agents sitting in.
"I did my best to keep
the life of the pilots to best of my ability," Sada says.
"I used my rank. I don't let them (mistreat them) in front
of me, and Jesus knows I would be very angry about it."
That didn't stop horrendous
abuse by others when Sada wasn't around, some of which Eberly
recounts in his POW memoir, "Faith Beyond Belief."
He and other former POWs later sued Iraq over their mistreatment
and won a landmark judgment of nearly $1 billion. That judgment
was overturned at the urging of the Bush administration and the
former POWs appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On Monday, again
at the urging of the Bush administration, their appeal was denied.
Only recently did Sada and
Eberly meet to compare notes on when their paths actually crossed.
Eberly believes Sada was the humane captor who stood out amidst
the brutality.
"At the time we first
met, we were enemies. He was clearly the enemy," Eberly
told me. "He was the other side of the blindfold, like anyone
else who had put a gun to my head or spit on me or any other
level of mistreatment.
"And yet in his mind,
he personally viewed us differently. He viewed us as pilots who
had protection under the Geneva Convention. He is a big man in
the sense that he recognized what Iraq had signed up to, and
it nearly cost him his life in trying to uphold that signature."
On Jan. 24, Qusai first ordered
the POWs executed. When Sada balked, Qusai accused him of disobeying
the orders of the president.
Sada tried to reason with
Qusai, reminding him that even the prophet Muhammad once said
that if prisoners of war learned 10 verses of the Koran, they
could be set free. This only angered Qusai, who threatened to
put the POWs in areas being bombed by American forces. Sada urged
him not to use them as human shields. He kept turning to the
Geneva Convention, which made Qusai angrier still.
"This was the end,"
Sada thought. "And I knew something was going to happen
to me."
He was right. Qusai pitched
him into a cell in the same prison as the POWs, and Sada wondered
if his head would be separated from his body at last. But even
locked up, Sada still had his contacts check on the POW pilots,
making sure they were still alive.
After 12 days, Sada finally
found a way to reach Qusai: He made the war personal.
"If you kill the pilots,"
Sada told him, "you will have new war between America and
your family. They'll come and kill your father, your brother...."
He ticked off Hussein family members.
"After that," Sada
says, "he was changed. He thought twice."
Finally, Sada was released
from prison. A few weeks later, the war ended and Eberly and
the other POWs were released. Battered physically and mentally,
they returned home in early March.
Then last fall, Eberly got
a call from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office saying
there was an Iraqi genera l working with the State Department
who recalled Eberly from his POW stint and the impressive way
he'd conducted himself.
"He was very calm, very
confident, very brave and very clever," Sada says of Eberly
now, smiling over the "clever" part.
The two men spoke over the
phone, then met Feb. 28 for the first time since those interrogation
sessions, sharing war stories in Fredericksburg.
"It was a very rewarding
experience," Eberly says. "He's a terrific individual."
Today, Sada is spokesman and
adviser to the Iraqi prime minister, helping to shepherd his
country toward democracy. He shrugs off recent accounts of more
violence in Iraq and claims the insurgency is losing power. He's
proud of the January elections, when Iraqis chose 275 representatives
for their new National Assembly, 60 of them "ladies."
His former boss, interim Prime
Minister Ayad Allawi, just dodged another car bomb. I ask if
Sada is concerned for his own safety, and he shrugs that off,
too.
"There is always a battle
between the evil and the goodness," Sada says. "And
we will accept that battle, whatever will be the result. Iraq
is going to be a guiding candle in the dark Middle East.
"The good Iraqis and
the faithful Iraqis will never forget what the American nation
has done for us in liberating our country from evil dictatorship.
I bow before the American mothers and fathers for their sacrifices
- they lost their beloved ones, sons and daughters, in battle
of freedom of Iraq.
"Freedom is a very dear
thing," says the general who risked his freedom and more
for two dozen strangers. "You don't get it easy."
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