Mayer's deeply researched document specifies who was responsible for the Bush era failed war on terror and torture house of horrors, and you'll be shocked to know, many of them are still around in power. John Yoo is professor of law at UC Berkeley, and David Addington is an exec at the heritage foundation. The specific boorish, ignorant, arrogant way they and others committed documented, prosecutable war crimes are astounding.Cheney especially appears as heinous as I remember and imagined him. Even a conservative SCOTUS couldn't conscience it, especially in Hamdan vs Rumsfeld.When Trump says torture is okay, he is so flaunting the many laws he should be enforcing, and he is also deeply unAmerican. Read this, and feel outraged and embarrassed for what was done in your name.

I guess I'm getting to be squarely middle-aged; I find these days I'm tearing through non-fiction of a political nature -- books that help me secure my place in these insane times. Mayer's book is dense, detailed, and disturbing. I can't figure out whether this kind of writing is politically partisan ... or if it's just a case of the scary f***king truth being succinctly reported. It was helpful for a scatter-brained reader like myself to hop around a bit from section to section, then circle back for any detail that I thought might be entertaining, but I got through the whole enchilada in record time. The chapter that lays out the history, philosophy, and examples of "extraordinary rendition" is more thrilling than any movie or fiction piece I've taken in lately -- the truth can chill you to the core.Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that this book confirms Dick Cheney really IS a bad, bad guy. To characterize him as a "sinister" figure would be a gross understatement. It'll make you shake your head.

After the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks, the United States declared a War on Terror. A bunch of right-wing lawyers working in the Bush administration decided that, unlike in America's other wars such as World War II and Vietnam, the people fighting for the other side have no rights. This included soldiers of the Taliban, the de facto government of almost all of Afghanistan. Several hundred people were seized, held without due process, mistreated and often tortured in the legal offshore zone of Guantanamo, in Afghanistan, in Egypt and Syria, where there were delivered by the Americans, and in secret prisons in undetermined locations in Eastern Europe. A few of them were genuine terrorists, such as Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, the mastermind of the 9/11/2001 attacks. The overwhelming majority were random Arabs and Muslims, such as a wealthy Kuwaiti businessman who did charitable work in a different Muslim country each year, and just happened to be in Afghanistan in 2001; he was held in Guantanamo for 7 1/2 years; when released, he pledged never to buy another Cadillac. Now, the Israelis have long known that the best way to get a terrorist to talk is to offer him "kesef, kavod ve-kusit" (money, respect and a woman); torture does not help because a tortured man will confess to anything to stop the torture, whether true or false. The Americans ignored this experience, and proceeded to torture detainees, with the approval from the highest levels of government. Some of the torture procedures came from the Army manual for prospective POWs about resisting torture; some came from the training manuals for Cold War-era Central American death squads; also, in a surprising case of life-imitates-art, some American officials at Guantanamo turned for ideas to "24", a fantasy TV show about a secret agent fighting terrorists that was written by a Hollywood screenwriter with no military or intelligence experience. A lot of the mental torture, which this book describes in disgusting detail, had to do with nakedness or sodomy: sedating a hogtied man with anal suppositories, administering enemas by force, holding a detainee naked for long periods of time; whoever came up with this stuff must have had some psychosexual problems of his own.After Barack Obama became U.S. President, one of the first thing he did was to shut down the secret prisons in Eastern Europe, to nullify the legal memoranda authorizing torture, and to give the International Red Cross access to all detainees. He also promised to shut down Guantanamo; however, the U.S. Congress declined to give the funding for this, since no American politician wants to appear soft on terrorism. While some soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal were punished (Specialist Lynndie England, who walked around with an Iraqi on a leash, got 3 years in prison), no one from the CIA or from Guantanamo was, presumably because under the interpretation of law done by the Bush administration's legal advisers, what they did was legal.

For those of us, who believe in the Constitutions sanctity and liberal American values and ideals, the past fifteen years have been one bad news after another. There were the lies which led to waging war on Iraq and the killing of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis. It was followed by officially sanctioned torture of prisoners, followed by pervasive electronic surveillance of all US citizens, all of which again denied blatantly by the government at first. We have had suspects, which included some US citizens, imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for years without any charges being laid. There was the ritual abuse, humiliation and denial of due process to the detainees. To cap it all, many detainees were handed over to brutal intelligence agencies in Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, Romania etc for torture. This book deals with how all these sordid affairs came about, in addition to the details of many unjust incarcerations in Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib. I have read a few books already on the happenings in Guantanamo and elsewhere. I was more interested in finding explanations as to why suddenly the US would acquiesce to the macabre idea of disobeying the Geneva Conventions in its pursuit of the Islamic extremists. After all, the US adhered strictly to the Geneva conventions in dealing with Viet Cong prisoners during the Vietnam war and later with the Iraqi prisoners in the first Gulf War of 1991, even though this commitment was sorely tested during the Vietnam war. Going even further back, the same was true during the Korean war as well as World War II. Those adversaries were formidable compared to the Al-Qaeda fighters who have no nation of their own, no sophisticated weapons, not much money and are just a few thousand in number, according the CIAs own estimates. On the face of it, there seems no logical reason to abandon our commitment to human rights in dealing with this adversary. This book provides some interesting historical background to how we got to where we are now.Author Jane Mayer weaves a picture involving three key actors - Dick Cheney, David Addington and John Yoo - in her investigation of how we came to choosing Guantanamo Bay as the destination of Al-Qaeda prisoners. Dick Cheney has had a long stint in politics. He was Secretary of Defense in the Bush Sr administration in an earlier avatar. He was also chief of staff in the Gerald Ford administration. He was scarred by what happened in the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra scandal. His experience had conditioned him to come to the conclusion that the office of the President is gradually being deprived of its rightful and legitimate power in doing its duty. When 9/11 happened, he naturally concluded that the President needed substantial powers, unhindered by the constitutional and legal restrictions because national security is paramount. David Addington was Dick Cheneys legal counsel and was like-minded. He provided whatever legal backing that would be needed to make Cheneys vision a reality. John Yoo was in the Justice Department and he undertook the job of providing the necessary interpretations of the law in circumventing the Constitution. The CIA also helped with its proposal and endorsement of enhanced interrogation and transferring suspects to third countries for torture as a necessary mechanism to extract confessions from detainees. There were dissenting voices from the FBI and many experts outside this inner group, but they were all overridden by President Bush. Once the President acquired extra-constitutional powers, it became necessary to use it to formulate a mechanism to deal with the enormous number of prisoners in the wake of 9/11. Guantanamo Bay had 775 detainees. The Pentagon admitted that they had 21000 prisoners in Iraq and the Red Cross recorded more than 10000 prisoners in Afghanistan. The author details the shady process of how we came to choosing Guantanamo as the location to keep detainees. When CIA captures a suspected Al-Qaeda terrorist, what can it do with him? He cant be killed because it is against international law to kill someone in custody. He cant be released because he may be too dangerous or a valuable source of information. European countries treated them as criminals and dealt with them through the regular courts. But the Bush administration believed that the civilian court system is too rule-bound to deal with them. One idea was to set up military commissions to try the suspects. By putting the Pentagon in charge, the fight against terrorism becomes War and not a law-enforcement matter. But it needed Congress approval, which was deemed undesirable. Nuremberg type trials also were contemplated, consisting of civilian and military experts, but was dismissed because of the civilian element. The CIA suggested plans of putting the detainees on a ship and keeping them perpetually sailing in international waters. That way, they never have to be put on trial. It was also eventually deemed impractical. An unspecified African country (believed to be Zambia) was asked to take the prisoners. The country initially agreed but later backed out when it figured out what sorts of prisoners were in question. Then, someone in the White House realized that Guantanamo Bay suited the purpose ideally. Guantanamo has unique legal status. Leased in perpetuity to the US by Cuba in 1903, it was arguably under US control but not under US law. So, the executive branch could hold and interrogate foreign prisoners there in any manner deemed necessary, beyond meddling from Congress and the courts. At least, this is what the Bush White House believed. So, a military commission was decided upon as the solution. This is how the US came to impose an alternative legal system, following the rules devised by the executive branch as the way to solve all the legal problems posed by the courts and the Constitution in processing the Al-Qaeda detainees. Ironically, it became the source of a whole set of new vexing legal problems. The US is not the only nation in this episode which exhibited conduct about which it would surely be embarrassed of in future. Poland, which was known for the peaceful Solidarity movement against the Communists in the 1980s, seems to have sunk low enough to host many detainees from the US and torture them, all in return for an US carrot of NATO membership. Similarly, Romania also accepted prisoners for torture in return for the promise of NATO membership. Pakistan is even worse, rounding up some high value terrorists as well as hundreds of innocent people and shipping them off to torture centers in Afghanistan, Egypt and Guantanamo, in return for millions of dollars of cash from the CIA. Almost all the cash was likely appropriated by the Pakistani Intelligence and its Army. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind 9/11, was worth $25 million while Abu Zubayda was handed over for $10 million, which was used by the Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) for a swanky new headquarters. It must be said, however, that the book documents Pakistan as having helped the US a lot in capturing and handing over many Al-Qaeda targets, albeit for money. What was the final outcome of the Guantanamo Bay incarceration? A review of 517 detainees showed that only 8% were alleged to have been associated with Al-Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee US bombs!!All but five percent of the detainees were captured by non-US players, many of whom were bounty hunters, which inevitably means that many of them would be innocent victims of greed. The author draws a parallel with the Phoenix program of the Vietnam war era, which was known among military historians as a state-sanctioned torture and murder program. The Pentagon found later that 97% of the Viet Cong it targeted then were of negligible importance. After reading this book and several other investigative and analytical reports in various newspapers and magazines, I get the feeling that the visual media, in spite of its round-the-clock news coverage, does not give much time for all this detail, either in analysis or in reporting. So, it is important to read books like this so that the falsifications are challenged and the record is set straight as much as possible. It is essential if we want to live in a democracy that is informed, humane and compassionate.

I heard and read about some of the main facts written in this book, but when Jane Mayer put the story altogether I became even more sickened by the administration's (Cheney and Addington's) authorization of the capture and torture of suspected terrorists, keeping them without charges of crimes in order to keep their illegal activities secret in Guantanamo and other hidden torture sites throughout the world. (When the stories leaked out, they then attempted to grant immunity to themselves and those who followed out their orders.) But the most frightening part of the book to me was to learn how the Vice President and his legal counsel, Addington, set themselves up above the law and Constitution. These tyrants specifically directed the Office of General Counsel to write a document saying what they did was lawful--and then kept it hidden from other OGC lawyers,under the guise of of "National Security." Cheney kept the flow of information away from the President and told him the Geneva Convention laws did not apply and the torture was legal He played on Bush's trigger points so the President would sign off on the illegal actions. George W. Bush should have been impeached, and then Cheney along with him. Now they should be prosecuted against for war crimes and crimes against the laws of the land. To do otherwise will destroy the best things the people of the United States have--their Constitution, their civil rights, their freedom, and their democracy.