An eye-opening, depressing look at events that, more than any other single episode, turned the war in Iraq against the U.S.
Were the abuses at Abu Ghraib, revealed three years ago, isolated aberrations? The government says so. American Prospect senior editor McKelvey persuasively argues to the contrary.
Only a dozen military investigations have been held on detainee abuse, and only nine soldiers have been sentenced for crimes against prisoners; up the chain of command, no senior officer has yet been punished, even though officers are supposed to know what’s going on in their commands—and can hardly do otherwise and serve effectively. Says one sniper, ordered to get his sideburns trimmed, “If they’re so worried about little shit like that, they’re going to notice if an Iraqi is getting shit smeared on him or electrocuted or walked down the hall with a leash around his neck.” A programmatic cover-up has since shielded the brass—and, even more to the point, the OGA (other government agency) that really ran the infamous jail, namely the CIA, since, as a former guard remarks, “The army as it is traditionally understood did not exist in that prison.” The CIA interrogators found willing accomplices in young men and women such as former prison guard Charles Graner and his girlfriend Lynndie England, already well trained in striking obedient poses for the camera. Combine this drug-addled low-hanging fruit (who proclaimed, “We are above even President Bush. No one has power over us”) and non-Arabic speaking CIA interrogators with a staff of translators who were bringing Iraq’s civil war inside the walls to settle old tribal scores, and it is small wonder that horrifying abuses took place. What remains to be discovered, as McKelvey urges, is how far up the line those abuses originated; though Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the highest-ranking officer in Iraq at the time, approved of the interrogators’ methods, he has yet to answer for them. The same goes for Donald Rumsfeld.
An eye-opening, depressing look at events that, more than any other single episode, turned the war in Iraq against the U.S.Pub Date: June 12, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-78671-776-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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 Yorker staff 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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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