A forceful book that demands greater oversight of the nation’s intelligence services and justice for the wrongly imprisoned.
British journalists Scott-Clark and Levy team up again to take a hard look at the CIA’s program of rendition and torture after 9/11.
Six months after the twin towers fell, CIA and FBI agents captured a Saudi Arabian man named Abu Zubaydah, whom they believed to be third in command of al-Qaida. Rather than place him under military custody in accordance with international law, the CIA packed him off to secret “black sites” in Thailand, Poland, and elsewhere, where he underwent what is euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation”—i.e., torture. But as Scott-Clark and Levy write, the CIA never proved that Zubaydah was a terrorist leader, to say nothing of their attribution of his silence to advanced anti-torture training instead of the possibility that he didn’t know anything. As the authors observe, much of the work of torture was in the hands of people who continue their work today, most now working for private companies formed by CIA retirees with fat government contracts. Remarked one, “We had to pay our senior security guys the same as Blackwater—$250 an hour, or $2000 a day—that was common, they were in a combat zone, all jocked up.” Regardless of the inability to establish Zubaydah’s involvement beyond reasonable doubt, the CIA nonetheless secured authorization to imprison him “for the rest of his life, irrespective of his level of guilt,” considered an “unlawful enemy combatant” forevermore, or at least until the so-called war on terror is declared over. For that reason, after enduring waterboarding and other illegal methods of interrogation, Zubaydah was sent to Guantánamo, a place whose former commander called a warehouse for “Mickey Mouse detainees” of no real value to the government. There he remains even though a 2014 Senate investigation concluded that “the case against him had been largely fabricated.” Building on The Exile, the authors deliver an impressively researched investigation of government malfeasance and ineptitude.
A forceful book that demands greater oversight of the nation’s intelligence services and justice for the wrongly imprisoned.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5892-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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