Book reviews

OK, I admit that the heading is more accurate in relation to Tony Blair’s sniping at Gordon Brown in his recently released memoir than it is to the issues that really concern us here — Iraq, Guantánamo, and the “War on Terror” — but I couldn’t resist using it. So what are Blair’s revelations about [...]

Published on November 9 by NYU Press (and available from Amazon), The Guantánamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison, Outside the Law, is edited by Mark Denbeaux (Seton Hall Law School) and Jonathan Hafetz (ACLU) and “contains over one hundred personal narratives from attorneys who have represented detainees held at ‘GTMO’ as well as at other overseas [...]

In the summer of 2002, as Jane Mayer described it in her book The Dark Side, “The CIA, concerned by the paucity of valuable information emanating from [Guantánamo], dispatched a senior intelligence analyst, who was fluent in Arabic and expert on Islamic extremism, to find out what the problem was.” After interviewing a random sample [...]

Every war produces its own iconic protestors. Vietnam, for example, had Ron Kovic, disabled in combat, and part of the campaigning group Vietnam Veterans Against the War, whose memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, was eventually made into a movie by Oliver Stone. One day, if the United States ever gets to look back [...]

When Torture Taxi, by Trevor Paglen, “an expert on clandestine military installations,” and crime journalist A.C. Thompson was published in the United States in September 2006, it was the first book to focus on the CIA’s programme of “extraordinary rendition,” in which, as the authors describe it, terror suspects “were taken to countries where they [...]

For the background on Dick Cheney’s rise to power, I recommend John Nichols’ Dick: The Man Who Is President (New Press, 2004), published in paperback in 2005 as The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney. This is a review that I wrote for the website Nth Position: The man at the heart of investigative [...]

While I’m working on The Guantanamo Files, here’s something relevant to the whole topic: a review I did of Mark Danner’s excellent analysis of the Abu Ghraib scandal, Torture and Truth, which was featured on the Nth Position website: ‘Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror’ by Mark Danner (Granta, 2005) [...]