Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, then-Commander of the ground forces in Iraq, recalled, on July 22, 2003: “Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed in a gun battle at their hideout in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. In a very efficient operation, U.S. Special Forces and the 101st Airborne, upon receiving solid intelligence, surrounded the house and employed armored firepower to quickly end the fight. …Next, we needed to decide on the best way to make the news public and convince the Iraqi people that these bodies were, in fact, who we said they were. Because the Geneva Conventions did not allow us to broadcast pictures of the corpses, we had to take the issue all the way to Washington. After some discussion, the [Bush] administration made the decision to override the Conventions. So the day after the killings, we went public with the news and released photos of Uday and Qusay laid out in plastic body bags.”
– Ricardo S. Sanchez with Donald T. Phillips, Wiser in Battle, Page 241