The techniques of modern counter-terrorists revealed in The Terror Factory

From The Week of July 1st, 2013

Though technology will eventually liberate human civilization from all forms of political control, government is, for the moment, a necessary evil for the continuance of our march towards a brighter future. For until we can delegate the functions of the societal machine to impartial and intelligent algorithms, organized around the public good while being immune from public pressure, this messy assemblage of technocrats and politicians is the best and only way to regulate commerce, normalize international relations and lend aid to the less fortunate. In order for them to perform these duties, however, governments must be given considerable power over our individual and collective affairs, a reality which eventually, and inevitably, tempts them to seize yet more power in the aim of doing more good. Rarely has this truism been better exemplified than in Trevor Aaronson's shattering examination of the counter-terrorism policies of the FBI.

Despite numerous presidential statements calling for American citizens to exonerate mainstream Islam for Al-Qaeda's nihilistic attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, the United States' intelligence agencies have spent the years since 9/11 alienating the Muslim community. Employing a series of strongarm tactics, they have aggressively recruited both willing and unwilling informants within targeted communities and unleashed them upon people of interest, individuals who have, through anger or foolishness, braggadocio or malice, harbored some intent to harm the United States. Prior to 9/11, this would not have been possible. For not only did the FBI not possess the financial resources to execute such missions, they lacked the networks of human spies necessary to carry them out.

Since 9/11, however, these chains, which once prevented the FBI and its sister agencies from digging into every dark corner of American life, have been lifted, an evolution that has allowed these agencies to infiltrate religious institutions and everyday businesses, all in the aim of preventing the next attack. But though this is a commendable goal, one that a majority of the populous would undoubtedly support, their tactics have been as crude as the informants they've paid to execute them. And though the these agencies claim numerous successes in this dirty war against extremist elements, their methods have been so manipulative, so self-serving, that they've sparked some to wonder just how legitimate the attacks they've prevented actually were.

Enter The Terror Factory, a devastating catalogue of government misdeeds. Mr. Aaronson, an American journalist, investigates the high-profile prosecutions of terrorists since 9/11 in a manner so systematic, so unrelenting, that he leaves the reader gasping in horror at the sheer audacity of government agencies who, in acting in the name of society's protection, are willing to bend-unto-breaking every law cherished by the citizens they are charged to protect. Informant by informant, victim by victim, the author explores the anatomy of this system of government-sanctioned entrapment of immigrants made vulnerable by Byzantine laws that leave them open to the threat of deportation if they fail to become double agents for counter-terrorist agents who are, in turn, in no way disincentivized to act reasonably, cautiously, or with much respect for the broken lives they leave behind. No price is too high when the stakes are the protection of the homeland.

This is far from a neutral account of this shadow world of informants and their sting operations. In particular, Mr. Aaronson devotes little time to trying to assess the guilt of the individuals caught up in the FBI's various nets. In fact, some of these individuals appear, superficially, to be quite willing to carry out attacks on the scale of 9/11. However, for all his reluctance to speak to the ugliness of some of these characters, the author's point supersedes such concerns. After all, whether or not one harbors the desire to commit a terrorist attack is entirely apart from whether or not one is willing to actually plan it, collect the means to do it and then to execute it. That the FBI eagerly enables these individuals to take all three of these fateful steps merely to arrest them and parade them for the world to see, is abhorrent. That they do so seemingly indifferent to the fact that they have recruited thousands of morally dubious, and sometimes outright criminal, spies in order to complete this self-beneficial mission is tragic.

The Terror Factory is a mesmerizing read that makes it abundantly clear that the United States will stop at nothing to prevent another large-scale terrorist attack on its soil. That it does so at the expense of all its hard-won principles is nothing short of frightening, not only for its citizens but for the rest of the world as well. (4/5 Stars)

The Battle of Tora Bora vividly catalogued in Kill Bin Laden

From The Week of July 1st, 2013

Humanity puts great stock in symbols, images and individuals who can either inspire us to achieve our wildest dreams or remind us of the darkness that lies within us all. They can drive civilization forward on the back of all they've sacrificed to give us peace and stability, or seize us in selfish hatreds that harden our hearts and narrow our minds. But for all their historical and rhetorical power, symbols are only what we invest in them. After all, our symbols would be meaningless to someone who lived a thousand years ago, much less a thousand years from now. And yet, in the heat of moments of pain and confusion, this lesson is forgotten, neglected for the pleasures of exorcising them, a lesson taught quite well in Dalton Fury's adrenaline-fuelled memoir.

Though the September 11 Attacks sent powerful shockwaves of emotions through much of the world, they, in their audacity and their horror, also formally introduced the general public to Usama Bin Laden, the Saudi-born jihadist who had spent most of the previous 20 years funding and engineering acts of rebellion and terrorism. His crimes, even prior to 9/11, were legendary within international circles, but after this bold and heinous strike at monuments of American economic power, he became legendary, a creature of near-mythical powers who could direct devastating assaults against the world's most powerful nation, all from the relative comfort of the remote, tribal Hindu Kush.

This mountainous, central Asian region shared by Afghanistan and Pakistan had already proven, in the 1980s, to be a successful base of operations from which Afghan guerillas, supported by Arabian jihadists, attacked and disrupted the Soviet occupation of their country, eventually leading to the USSR's withdrawal from the unruly nation. Now it would perform a similar function for Usama Bin Laden who hoped to use his attacks against America to provoke his enemy into a ruinous war in the mountains he knew so well. Here, on familiar ground, he could watch America's might break against his winter stronghold and, in doing so, reveal to the world the extent of American weakness.

Instead of committing to such a war, the United States sent special operatives to Afghanistan, teams of Rangers, Deltas, SBS operatives and CIA agents armed for battle and packing the millions of dollars necessary to purchase the loyalty of local warlords who would execute the American-backed assaults against both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. This campaign would culminate in the Battle of Tora Bora, a series of skirmishes that would eventually smash Al-Qaeda, sending its key men into hiding and largely ending it as an organized force.

The commander's eye view of this most consequential battle, Kill Bin Laden is an arresting narrative of a hunt that narrowly missed capturing the world's most famous terrorist. Dalton Fury, the pseudonym for the Delta commander in charge of this mission, draws from his journal of those difficult few months to paint a thorough, if nationalistic, view of the battle, its protagonists, antagonists and the circumstances that lead to them clashing in this most remote mountain range. Supplementing his account with colorful anecdotes of life as a special operative, and detailing the absolute extremity of the training these soldiers endure to join such elite companies, Fury succeeds in conveying a sense of what it's like to be a member of the world's supreme fighting force, both its rewards and its disappointments. In this, he leaves little doubt of just how far these men have deviated from the normal life and the price they pay for living so far outside this most customary box.

However much Kill Bin Laden educates us about the lives and the demands of special forces, it stumbles when attempting to carry out its primary mission, to provide an unbiased account of the Battle of Tora Bora. Fury certainly reconstructs the combat, and the chain of events that lead to it, but these details are drowned out by his incessant need to denigrate the Afghans with whom he operated. In light of the fact that these warlords and their armies required American cash as motivation to fight, it seems reasonable to conclude that Fury is right to criticize their reluctance to fully engage with a fundamentalist enemy ravaging their homeland. But his tone so often devolves into outright scorn that his contempt for these men and their ways creates a great deal of room for doubt as to whether or not he's given them a fair hearing here.

That said, one gets the sense from these pages that Fury is not a man interested in outside criticisms, that he'd no more be interested in disguising or shading truths than he would be in retreating from a battle. And so, though we may harbor some doubts as to his fairness, the author has absolutely succeeded in his attempt to communicate his own personality and the ethos of the Deltas, facts which, alone, make this a worthwhile read.

History shifts on pivotal moments like these. Had Bin laden died at Tora Bora, it seems likely that the pretext for the War in Iraq would have been too weak for it to eventuate. The history of the 21st century's first decade would have unfolded far differently in the wake of such a monumental change. To see such a moment play out is a gripping experience no matter how prejudicial the execution. (3/5 Stars)

Amy Waldman takes the temperature of American tolerance in The Submission

From The Week of December 3, 2012
Of the many cancers that can ruin lives and relationships, suspicion is the most devastating. For within those afflicted by its necrotic caress -- the wife cheated on, the employee lied to, the sibling betrayed --, distrust finds fertile ground in which to breed, ruining for good any chance of repairing what has been so thoroughly broken. But as much as suspicion damages the individual, it has an equally deleterious impact on societies, devouring the people's faith in their government, in their institutions, even in their fellow man. When this faith is broken, when the people no longer believe that they will be served and protected by the shieldwalls they pay taxes to keep in place, then discord and discourtesy rule the day, forces that possess more than enough power to devour belief and hope and replace them with conspiracism and anger. This is an enduring truth cleverly captured in Ms. Waldman's fascinating if problematic novel.
The year is 2003 and the United States is in the process of coping with the many traumas resulting from the terrible attacks on September 11th, 2001. While the military, economic and legislative fallouts from the destruction of the Twin Towers unfold around them, a group of eleven jurers have been tasked with the sensitive mission of choosing a memorial for the victims that will be created at Ground 0. This assemblage of artists and intellectuals, including at least one 9/11 widow, know nothing of the architects behind the various submissions up for consideration. They see only the designs which are contentiously whittled down to a single victor, a garden composed to represent death and rebirth, destruction and healing. There's just one problem. The architect of the winning submission is a Muslim.

The son of Indian immigrants, Mohammed Khan is an American through and through. He's worked hard for his achievements, harder perhaps than most. For with a name like Mohammed Kahn, he has had to overcome subtle forms of discrimination inherent in any significantly religious society. But now his day has come. His design has been chosen to be brought into being, immortalized as a symbol of strength and dignity to those who sought to destroy his country. And yet, the moment the public learns that the architect of the memorial to the victims of a crime perpetrated by Muslims is himself a Muslim, his dream is jeopardized and his motivations questioned. His very identity is under attack as elements of his own society savage him. Should he withdraw out of sensitivity to the families of the victims? What were his motivations for submitting his design in the first place? And is it a paradise for martyrs? He is in the midst of a public inferno that he's far from certain he can survive.

At times captivating and intense, The Submission is an eminently readable examination of the state of American tolerance. No other country of consequence has been founded on such highminded principles of freedom and justice. And yet, it is also a nation that appears to blithely ignore these foundational virtues when convenient, substituting them with the same skeins of suspicion and distrust that plague every corrupt human society. Ms. Waldman vividly captures this very paradox with deftness and skill, all while animating her various actors with a keen eye for detail, nuanced emotion and personal complexity. In this, she has brought to life a New York, with its power and its diversity, its classes and its crimes, that anyone can recognize.

For all its virtues, though, The Submission is troubled by a fluidity of character and plot that burdens the narrative. By the conclusion of Ms. Waldman's work, most of her primary characters have transitioned to the opposite position from the one they held at the beginning of the novel. While this is not impossible for any human to accomplish, it is certainly rare for anyone to completely reorder their lives and their worldview because of a single issue, albeit the defining issue of their lives. It is far more common for people to dig in their heels and hold to their existing positions until it becomes disadvantageous for them to do so, at which point they will find a way to justify the degrees to which they've switched sides. But this is not how Ms. Waldman's world functions. Here, good people and good intentions are relentlessly chipped away at by agendas and suspicion until the latter have succeeded in reducing the former to ash.

For its challenges, Ms. Waldman has succeeded in a very difficult task. By carrying off the central conceit of her novel, that a muslim might win a contest to build the memorial for 9/11, she has allowed her readers to contemplate, through her lens, their own tolerances and prejudices. It's unclear if this novel was inspired by the recent controversy over the Ground Zero Mosque. If not, it is serendipitous. For that controversy activated many of the same emotions and ethical knots as the issues tackled herein. If, however, it was inspired by this controversy, then it is a solid re-imagination of America's original sin, chiefly, that it is not in actuality the country it purports to be in principle. Its people, their cultures and their values, have failed to live up to the highmindedness of their nation's founders, a reality which creates constant friction between a people as they are and as they should be.

Fascinating work burdened by its own contortions... (3/5 Stars)

Mastermind by Richard Miniter

From The Week of April 02, 2012

As much as history has been shaped by pivotal moments in time, nexuses of people and events that have together written the future, individual humans have also had the power to reorder our world. Through will and happenstance, power and timing, men and women, properly positioned, have redefined the destinies of nation: Henry VIII with England, Napoleon with France, Hitler with Germany. Even a moment's thought causes a dozen examples to tumble out of the past. But what of the present? Has the world grown too large, too diverse, for individuals to set the policies of nations, or can even the wisest heads be lost over the provocations of the few? In this troubling and troubled biography of a terrorist mastermind, Mr. Miniter argues that, far from dead, the Great Man theory of history is alive and well in the 21st century. Only, in this case, the subject has more in common with darkness than he does with greatness.

From the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center to 9/11, from the reprehensible East African Embassy bombings to the grotesque execution of Daniel Pearl, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been the author of a dozen murderous plots against the United States which, together, have taken the lives of thousands. Initially operating on his own, as much for glory as for ideology, KSM, as he is known in the intelligence community, graduated in the late 1990s to the top ranks of Al-Qaeda where, for the next six years, he directed that organizations most effective operations against the West. Since his capture in 2003, Al-Qaeda has been more bark than bite, leading Mr. Miniter, along with many other intelligence agencies, to conclude that KSM's intelligence and cunning fuelled Al-Qaeda, a reconfiguration that shifts Osama Bin Laden from mastermind to figurehead and spiritual leader.

But who is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? What propelled him to take up such a destructive profession? How could a young man educated in Virginia grow to so despise the country that gave him safe harbor? Mr. Miniter explores these issues and more in this confrontational biography of the Al-Qaeda operative and key strategist. Drawing on interviews with some of KSM's teachers and interrogators, the author reconstructs Mohammed's life, from his impoverished childhood in the Middle East and Asia, through his adolescent years in the united States, to his adult life as a masterful weaver of schemes and plots which, the author argues, were motivated by the furtherance of KSM's own fame and glory more than any ideological purpose. He was a mass-murderer born into a most profitable time for his kind. Until his 2003 arrest in Pakistan, he was at the top of his field, much to the cost of his victims.

Mastermind is a fascinating read that struggles to overcome its flaws. Mr. Miniter has rendered a captivating portrait of one of the 21st century's most murderous non-state actors. His depiction of KSM as a seeker of glory over ideology appears to fit nicely with KSM's arrogant behavior during his detainment in Guantanamo Bay prison. More over, the author's investigative efforts, to uncover KSM's history, both in the United States and abroad, are commendably thorough, provoking as many thoughtful questions about KSM as the laws and the ethics of the country that, for a time, generously welcomed him onto its shores.

However, as much as Mr. Miniter succeeds in capturing his subject, both the author's politics and the extent to which he allows them to color this work condemn it. Mr. Miniter is not only an advocate for torture as a weapon in the arsenal of the United States against its enemies, he is an avid believer in seemingly all of KSM's many lies and taunts, threats and claims. This despite depicting the man as an avid schemer and self-aggrandiser... These, along with his criticism of the press' coverage of KSM's legal maneuverings, are suggestive of a deep cynicism on the part of the author that leaves the work feeling far more polemical than biographical. One gets the sense that the author is more interested in bearing his grudges than he is the truths his investigative efforts have uncovered.

A solid biography permanently damaged by the author's facile attacks on the positions of those who disagree with him. Mr. Miniter should have saved his criticisms, valid and otherwise, for another, more partisan forum than this, an important biography of a pivotal figure in our recent history. (2/5 Stars)

The Black Banners by Ali H. Soufan

From The Week of February 27, 2012

There can be little doubt that we are entering the age of extremism. For until now, there has never been a means by which to gather together the world's disenchanted, from the hateful to the hopeless, and have them be forged, by a single manipulative force, into weapons of ideological warfare. The Internet and the personal computer, notwithstanding the immense good they have wrought, have made this possible. For they have allowed the confused and the vulnerable to reach out from their loneliness to access propaganda they are ill-equipped to refute. Once converted, these malleable souls then become dangerous munitions, loaded guns that need only be pointed at the most convenient targets. Thus, there has never been a time in which the resources of the national security have had to be more thoroughly and wisely marshalled if our countries are to be protected from the misguided aims of nihilists. What is it like to be on the frontlines of this new war? Of this new and more ideological world? Mr. Soufan demonstrates in this history of his career at the FBI which is bound to leave its readers quietly terrified.

From the East African embassy bombings to the crippling of the USS Cole, from the wilds of Yemen to the mountains of Afghanistan, Ali Soufan, a veteran of the FBI, describes, in riveting detail, his decade-long hunt for Al-Qaeda. From the interrogation of captured assets to the tracing of financial and political connections, this most staunch counterterrorist illuminates how Osama Bin Laden came to the attention of the West in the 1990s, how he channeled the disenfranchisement of Middle Eastern Arabs into an anti-American crusade, how the organization he created entered into a political marriage with the Afghani Taliban, how he was able to plan attacks on American assets, and how he was able to dispatch his agents to the United States where they executed the most destructive terrorist attack in American history. What emerges is a vivid portrait of the day-to-day challenges of counterterrorism: the egos that must be managed, the laws that must be adhered to and the intelligence that must be properly applied if our world's most violent souls are to be subdued.

Though The Black Banners is something of a grind, the extent to which it illuminates the lives of Islamic terrorists and those who pursue them makes it an invaluable read. Mr. Soufan foregoes the extensive lessons on the roots of Islamic terror so wonderfully illuminated in The Looming Tower and, instead, chooses to fixate on the anatomy of the criminal investigation of terrorist attacks. Here, Mr. Soufan is at his best. For he grants us a front-row seat to the investigation into the bombing of the USS Cole. We watch as leads are pursued, bureaucracies overcome, money traced, and terrorists caught and interrogated until a broader picture of Al-Qaeda emerges, one in which Osama Bin Laden is seen to be desperately trying to provoke his ginned up enemy, the United States, into a rash attack that he can then use as fuel for Jihad. When the bombing of the USS Cole fails to yield the desired result, an even more audacious plan is hatched, one that will bring down the World Trade Center, ignite two wars in the Middle East and eventually lead to the death of Bin Laden and many of his fellows.

As much as Mr. Soufan can rightfully claim numerous, investigative successes, he devotes many more of these 600 pages to a spirited condemnation of the intra-agency conflicts that characterize the United States' national security establishment. Mr. Soufan sides with Mr. Weiner and the 9/11 Commission in laying at least partial responsibility for 9/11 at the feet of the CIA which could not bring itself to deviate from pigheaded doctrine to protect the country that spawned it. Perhaps this is why the CIA has responded by redacting so much of Mr. Soufan's work. The text here is shot through with so much black that numerous chapters are hard to follow. Consequently, The Black Banners fails to reach the brilliant heights of The Looming Tower.
This is an intensely personal memoir that paints a grim picture of our future, a future in which we must worry as much about those who purport to protect us as those who purport to hate us. For make no mistake, we in the West live in security states that eat away at our liberties in the name of keeping us free. This cannot be forgotten. To the extent that Mr. Soufan has shown us how this is done, he has done us all a service. To the extent that he and his efforts, both here and at the FBI, have protected his country and brought some measure of solace to the victims of the USS Cole, he should be commended. Difficult but engaging work. (3/5 Stars)

Mohamed's Ghosts by Stephan Salisbury

From The Week of October 17, 2011

We have known for some time now that liberty and security live in opposition to one another. Liberty requires that individuals be allowed to act and choose as they desire, unfettered by the restrictions of government. Security, meanwhile, requires that personal freedom be restricted so that deviant behavior can be seen and snuffed out. Giants of history like Benjamin Franklin, men who have created nations, have convinced us of this much. And so, when terrorism does hit home and governments respond by strengthening security to protect against future attacks, they must know that every choice they make in the pursuit of security weakens the very liberties they claim to cherish.

No matter how obvious a truth this is, governments will never admit it; to do so would be to invite unwelcome scrutiny into the ways in which governments have weakened the freedoms of the people they purport to serve. And so it falls to journalists and libertarians, advocates and whistleblowers, to alert us to the ways in which our governments have robbed us of our freedom for the sake of our security. In this, Mohamed's Ghosts is a revelatory and frightening tale.

Mr. Salisbury, a journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, describes here the manner in which the US government, in response to the September 11th Attacks, have used the insinuation of possible links between American imams and foreign terrorists to jeopardize and then shut down mosques across the United States. The author's case centers on a particularly egregious incident in which the mosque of Mohamed Ghorab, an Egyptian living in Philadelphia, was left to decay after immigration officials discovered that Ghorab was in the United States on an expired student visa. Launching an investigation, the authorities used rumor and innuendo, along with an old airplane seat in the basement of ghorab's mosque -- a one-time garage in one of Philadelphia's worst neighborhoods --, to justify his deportation back to Egypt, severing him from his American family and leaving his community work on Philadelphia's troubled streets to wither on the vine.

From this, Mr. Salisbury expands the scope of his investigation to document other cases in which the US government, paranoid of further attacks, overreacted to a swath of expired student visas by heartlessly uprooting the offenders from their lives and expelling them from the United States. The author concludes that this overzealousness may have lead to the expulsion of up to a thousand Islamic leaders from the country, mistreatment which would surely not have befallen Christians had Christians been responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Mohamed's Ghosts is a challenging read. Though Mr. Salisbury undoubtedly infers too much from a handful of gross injustices, the picture of a nation struggling to cope with the psychic wound of 9/11 is both vivid and convincing. While then president Bush was on television, asking Americans to be tolerant of Muslims, arguing that Islam was a peaceful faith, his government was scraping together rumor and shards of half-truths in order to banish innocent Muslim from its shores. It eagerly seized upon the expired visas as proof of ill intent while failing to acknowledge the widespread incompetence of the immigration service which allowed those visas to lapse and stay lapsed without sanction or comment. More over, the author documents the unwillingness of the US government to acknowledge, or vigorously prosecute, the numerous cases of anti-Arab crime which played out across the country in the days and weeks following the attacks. The case for the Bush administration's extraordinary duplicity is well-made.

But while Mr. Salisbury succeeds in demonstrating how the overreactions of governments ensnare and criminalize innocents, his longwinded digressions into his own past as an activist in the 1960s are unnecessary distractions from the work's primary thrust. In fact, given that the author fails to provide much in the way of proof that Mohamed Ghorab's treatment has been duplicated with a thousand other imams in the United States, his reflections on the 1960s, which are meant to exemplify the flaws of the security state, read like filler.

This is chilling work. Mr. Salisbury nails the duplicity, he nails Ghorab, he nails the culture that gives rise to the foolishness of the post 9/11 security state, but the weakness of the case for the broader picture is troubling. Nonetheless, a worthwhile read. (3/5 Stars)

The Interrogator by Glenn L. Carl

From The Week of September 26, 2011

There has been, and will continue to be, debate about torture. Its proponents argue that the greater good demands that no tool, no matter how unscrupulous, should be kept out of the hands of a nation's security guards. If the lives of many can be saved by the torment of the few, then the act must be righteous. Its opponents, meanwhile, eagerly point out the slippery slope inherent to such logic. If the torturer is willing to renounce his morality for the greater good, then all that is required to manipulate him into depravity is to take the greater good hostage. Principles should not be so swiftly and unequivocally sacrificed, not if one wishes to maintain some semblance of ethical behavior.

For the most part, this debate takes place on university campuses and in lecture halls, cocoons far from the bloody frontlines of counter-terrorism where the temptation to deploy torture is keenest. This real-world reality is what grants The Interrogator its power. For here, torture is no academic discussion. It is the stuff of life and death

In The Interrogator, Mr. Carl, a veteran of the CIA, describes, within the strictures of CIA censorship, an event which profoundly altered his life. After devoting some 20 years to the agency, believing in its mission to defend the United States from foreign threats by acquiring actionable intelligence regarding its enemies, he was asked, not long after the onset of the War on Terror, to interrogate a man known here as Captus. Like many of the men captured by the United States' spy agencies after 9/11, Captus was thought to be a member of Al-Qaeda, a man with some operational control over this terrorist organization which, since 1998, has killed thousands in its various attacks, the most spectacular of which coming on September 11th, 2001. Eager to serve his country, Mr. Carl interviews Captus, pressing him for information on Al-Qaeda and its plans. But after weeks of relentless quizzing, the author concludes that, far from a first-class, Al-Qaeda asset, Captus was a reluctant participant at the periphery of the organization and that he has told his captors all that he knows.

Dissatisfied with their officer's conclusions, Mr. Carl's superiors have Captus rendered to another black site where he can be properly interrogated with what the CIA has euphemistically called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques which include, but are not limited to, deafening white noise, blinding white light, desecration of religious objects, sensory deprivation and waterboarding. Powerless, Mr. Carl returns home, shaken by what he has seen at the bleeding edge of the War on Terror.

The Interrogator is a fascinating and frustrating work. While Mr. Carl has a great deal to say on the nature of torture, much of it is scissored out of his account by censorship from the CIA. The spy agency, here, has not only redacted the names of the work's major actors, they have spitefully washed out, with oceans of black ink, most of the interrogations of Captus arund which this work revolves. In this, they have done a splendid job of hobbling a revelatory piece of thoughtful journalism, blinding the reader to many of the worthwhile facts Mr. Carl intended to share with the world.

However, despite this overeager hatchet job, Mr. Carl salvages much of his account by consolidating his tattered narrative around a clear and powerful premise. Torture is not only morally wrong, it is foolish. If torture could grant the State valuable intelligence about so-called Ticking Timebomb scenarios, perhaps it could, under certain circumstances, be justified. But these scenarios are vastly outnumbered by the case described here, men kidnapped from the streets of their homelands, rendered to secret black sites, disassociated from everyone they know, denied any contact with the outside world, and deprived of any anchor by which to hold onto their sanity. They can be held for years. It's no wonder, then, that by the time they are plied with so-called Enhanced Interrogation, they are shattered men, willing to spill any truths their captors wish to know so long as it will improve their plight. In other words, torture does not just hinder the effort to extract actionable intelligence, it corrodes the morality of the interrogator and it thoroughly destroys the asset, ruining him for any future work. This is stupidity of the first order.

The Interrogator is a difficult book. The CIA censorship has cut out so much of the core story that the reader is left adrift in Mr. Carl's guilty introspections. Such ruminations left me somewhat repulsed by the author's navel-gazing. However, it is hard to see what else Mr. Carl could have done under the circumstances. For all its challenges, however, this is a must-read for any advocate of torture. For only the most calloused mind can read these pages and come away unmoved by the argument for ending state-sponsored torture and restoring not only our humanity but our honor. (3/5 Stars)

Among The Truthers by Jonathan Kay

From The Week of July 24, 2011

Though those of us who are rationalists wish it otherwise, our world is shaped by popular opinion. It does not matter if said opinion is based on logic or reason. What matters is the extent to which said opinion can issue forth from an individual and find traction in a broader world yearning for an easy explanation. When we garnered our news from journalistic sources, popular opinion was, to an extent, safely harbored from extremism because it was in the best interests of journalistic publications to get the story right. But as Mr. Kay argues in Among The Truthers, with the rise of the Internet, control over popular opinion has all-but-entirely slipped out of the hands of the moderating media and fallen into the newly empowered grasp of conspiracy theorists and grudge-mongers who use their expanded platforms to pedal their narrow ideologies. Exit Walter Cronkite; enter The Blaze, or any of a thousand sites of its conspiracist kind.

So just who are these conspiracists? Who are the new shapers of popular opinion? And just how much do we believe them?

From the 9/11 Truthers to the Obama Birthers, from false flaggers to anti-Zionists, Mr. Kay, a decorated journalist for the National Post, throws himself headlong into the modern conspiracy movement. From its leaders to its adherents, he vividly describes their belief systems and their pathologies and, in doing so, quickly generates a fairly consistent portrait of a modern conspiracist. He is invariably male, dogged in the pursuit of truth, distrustful of authority, and perfectly willing to devote his life to his cause. In fact, the cause is what lends meaning to his damaged life. Though the personalities of the men Mr. Kay meets are markedly different, these commonalities connect them across the new conspiracy market which Kay describes as a series of islanded fringe thinkers who have been networked into a community by the interconnectivity of the Internet, a system which has both homogenized and supersized conspiracism.

In Among The Truthers, Mr. Kay mounts a two pronged effort to enlighten the reader about the major conspiracies floating through the Western world and to explain the pathologies of their adherents. Though he is pleasingly successful with the former, it's the later, the fascinating profile he generates of those who worship at conspiracism's altar, that elevates his work from engaging to outstanding. The damaged survivor, the fail historian, the endurer of the midlife crisis... Their backgrounds can be wildly divergent, but in these highly intelligent and endlessly opportunistic few, the outcome seems depressingly similar. The essential aspect of reasonableness that most humans enjoy collapses under the weight of their pain, plunging them into a distorted reality in which they have been victimized, their potential guttered by omnipotent forces beyond their control. It becomes their destiny to spread this revelation to the world and now, with the Internet to fuel them, they've never had a bigger pulpit.

This is easily in my top five reads this year. Engrossing and enlightening in equal measure. This is not a polemic against conspiracism; there is no rancor here. There is only a need to understand and to explain, a desire Mr. Kay ironically shares with his captivating subjects. (5/5 Stars)

Dining With Al Qaeda by Hugh Pope

From The Week of January 30, 2011

It is one of my eternal frustrations that much of what is reported from the Middle East comes to us through Western journalists who never settle long enough in the region to understand it, to internalize its character, its rhythms. Perhaps this is asking too much; after all, locals aren't immune from reading too much into symbolic events, much less being fooled by government untruths. Nonetheless, they have a knowledge that no parachuting journalist can have. It's a knowledge that allows them to contextualize events, to give them their proper weight. After all, as a Canadian, I wouldn't trust that a journalist from Zimbabwe could come to my country for a few weeks, talk to some government officials, tour some sites, and then declare that he's captured the spirit of my country. I'd put the odds of his account being accurate at a thousand to one. Mr. Pope may be British, but he's spent 30 years living, working and loving in a region that most of us in the West have never even visited. He's as close as I am going to get to the authenticity I crave. And being that I can veritably taste the Middle East in these pages, I consider myself satisfied.

From Iran to Saudi Arabia, from seductive Egyptian girls to deadly serious Islamic terrorists, Mr. Pope spills his three decades of reporting from the Middle East across this vivid account of life in a region so unlike the West which has sought, for so long, to control it. His description of what it was like to fly with the Iranians during their war with Iraq in the 1980s gives the reader a glimpse of a world so drenched in ideology, so locked into the necessities of the moment, that nothing short of victory can be tolerated. Contrast this hardcore determination with Saudi Arabian excesses and the reader will never again generalize about the "the Middle East." These nations are far too distinct to be merged. But this isn't just an account of events, of people, of moments in time; Mr. Pope communicates the sadness of the region, the inability on anyone's part to fix it, and the lack of will on anyone's part to speak up for a sense of unfiltered, unbiased justice. He's not a moralist; he merely has the knowledge that emanates from reading countless faces, absorbing the culture over hundreds of dinners. It's a knowing that seems to be in his blood and it wonderfully informs his work here.

Dining With Al Qaeda is an admirably sober image of a place no one understands. The narrative, though it jumps around as Mr. Pope moves from assignment to assignment, is fresh and devoid of fluff. Though the glimpses he gives us into the world of international journalism are interesting, the time he spends with the stateless Kurds in Kurdistan is most powerful and, alone, makes this a memorable read. Completely compelling. It lacks answers, but it does not lack for truths. (4/5 Stars)

Every Man In This Village Is A Liar by Megan Stack

From The Week of July 18, 2010

Megan Stack, a war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, may nod now and again in the direction of journalistic impartiality, but as she exposes in this, her memoir of her war-zone work since 2001, there are times when lies and corruption are too much for her to take. The alternating currents of burning passion and depressive cynicism which run through her work imbue it with raw and aching intensity, but at what cost to Ms. Stack's soul I wonder. For it's clear, in Every Man In This Village Is A Liar, that there are some sights and some lies that cut far too deep for anyone to handle.

Vacationing in Paris, Megan Stack woke up on the morning of September 11th, 2001, to the world-changing event which launched the War on Terror. A short time later, 25 years old, and with no formal training in such conflict, she was in Afghanistan, covering a war that wasn't really a war. Even so, it would last years, sending Ms. Stack from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It would send her into some of the most dangerous places on Earth, subject her to the most authoritarian regimes, obligate her to witness the most terrible things, all the while knowing that there were no, and would be no, clean skins in a war on nothing more substantial than an idea. And in this, Ms. Stack grasps the central lie of the War on Terror, that it will never end. Victory cannot be declared over terror! This is nothing less than a path towards the State of permanent war, divorcing it from righteousness and logic. With each depraved discovery, Ms. Stack seems to slip deeper and deeper into anger and despair, a witness to the unfolding of a thing too big for any normal person to halt. And it tears her up even as she tries to put a face on a part of the world that few of us understand.

There's a tortured grace about Ms. Stack's work that calls to mind Roberto Saviano. There's a sense, throughout, that she will burn out, that she might have already, that she'd stop if she could, but that this story needs to be told. For every lash the reader receives in reading the account, Ms. Stack endured ten to tell it. The lyricism here firmly plants Ms. Stack in the camp of narrative journalism which will always encourage questions concerning how much a piece has been massaged to fit the story. But whatever it loses in absolute truth it more than makes up for in crackling emotion, the likes of which will not soon be forgotten. (4/5 Stars)

Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell

From The Week of April 25, 2010

Though there is, at the heart of Lone Survivor, a fascinating question about ethics in a time of war, and how single decisions can change the lives of ones friends, that lesson is all but choked out by Mr. Luttrell's repellent blend of Christian moralizing and red-blooded patriotism.

Marcus Luttrell, a decorated Navy SEAL, was part of a team tasked to find and eliminate Mohammad Ismail, a Taliban-in-Afghanistan commander. While trekking through the mountains in search of Ismail, Luttrell and his team stumbled across some Afghani goat herders who recognized the SEALS as Americans. Given that the goat herders, if left to go free, could, with their superior knowledge of the terrain, locate and inform the local Taliban of the American presence, letting them live posed a significant danger to both the mission and to the lives of the SEALS. The team elected to take a vote on what to do, let the goat herders go free and trust in their decency and in the American mission in Afghanistan, or kill the goat herders against the Rules of Engagement and continue on with the mission knowing that it had not been jeopardized? According to Mr. Luttrell, it was his vote that swung the decision in favor of releasing the goat herders, a decision which would result in dire consequences for Mr. Luttrell and his team.

What a remarkable dilemma... To cross half the world in service of ones country, to navigate through foreign territory on a covert mission to kill the enemy, to encounter innocents by accident and to know that, thanks to barriers in language and culture there'd be no way to communicate, to know that safety could be found in killing but that righteousness could be found in mercy... It is a problem worthy of ancient Greek philosophers.

What is the value of a human life? Does one value the life of a comrade over the life of a stranger? Can a mission ever matter more than the lives of innocents? These are valid questions Mr. Luttrell would have been well-advised to devote himself to. And yet these ethical nuances are subsumed by the understandable agonies Mr. Luttrell endured, knowing that his choice doomed his companions, and the American proselytizing he indulges in as he justifies the deaths of his friends in the broader context of the justness of the War on Terror. This choice, reflecting Mr. Luttrell's inability to escape the biases of his nationality and his training, dooms what could have been an exceptional novel and a modern parable. (2/5 Stars)

Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton

From The Week of April 25, 2010

For the most part, our world has little in common with the world of a hundred years ago. Planes, computers, cars, robots, vacuum cleaners, particle accelerators, space shuttles, submarines... The list of 20th century innovations is endless. And so it's easy to forget that some people still live in a world of horses and buggies, shamans and shepherds. When now collides with then, which wins out? In Horse Soldiers, a chronicle of the first American missions to oust the Afghani Taliban after the 9/11 attacks, now may win the battles, but then may well take the war.

It is impossible to imagine a starker clash of civilizations than that which came together in Afghanistan after 9/11. CIA operatives, trained for insurgency, supported by the best in American air power, kept communicable by satellite phones and tracked 24/7 by GPS satellites, joined forces with the Northern Alliance, a collection of horse-born tribesmen, to uproot the Taliban. Religious zealots birthed from fundamentalist, Islamist schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Taliban had risen to power in 1996, sweeping away what it saw as a corrupt state and replacing it with a regime which sought to re-create, in the 20th century, the 7th century world of the Prophet Mohammed. No technology, no idolatry, no electricity, no skyscrapers, no telephones... Perfect religious adherence in a world as it ought to be. Known to have given shelter to Osama Bin Laden, and the perpetrators of the senseless and incalculable destruction of the two, 1500-year-old Buddha statues, the Taliban in Afghanistan was the most logical country in which to respond to 9/11. And so these special operatives poured into a country in the process of being degraded into the Middle Ages and, with their guns and their bombs, they helped the Northern Alliance force the Taliban into numerous retreats designed to encourage the Afghanistan people to rise up against their zealous rulers.

Though Mr. Stanton spends considerable time depicting the incredulity of American soldiers calling in bomb strikes with satellite phones while on horseback, Horse Soldiers ultimately concerns the new face of war, insurgencies backed by small, supremely trained soldiers, armed with the latest technology. Far more flexible than mechanized armies, these infiltrators can be anywhere, can blend into any population, and, with a single command, call in a bomb strike on the enemy. Though the infiltrator is far more vulnerable to reprisal when caught -- after all, he doesn't have a thousand soldiers and a hundred tanks next to him --, the benefits of excellent intelligence and swift action surely outweigh the costs of transporting whole armies halfway across the world to fight in a country no modern army has ever conquered, against an enemy who can't be found by conventional weapons. Mr. Stanton points out that the program that authorized the CIA operatives to execute this plan in Afghanistan cost the American taxpayer but a tiny fraction of the overall war in Afghanistan. And who knows; had the program continued in lieu of a war which devastated that pitiable nation, perhaps local sentiment would be more concretely with the West.

Horse Soldiers tells the story of these American infiltrators and their remarkable achievements, but it also speaks to the lessons we should learn about war. The two narratives come together to entertain and edify. (4/5 Stars)

Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez

From The Week of November 29, 2009

Primarily, Kabul Beauty School is one woman's recounting of her trials and tribulations as, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent American invasion of Afghanistan, she attempts to establish a beauty school for women in that war-torn country. Though her decision is initially framed as an outgrowth of her experiences working for an aid group in Afghanistan, it becomes clear that Ms. Rodriguez is searching for something real, something true, to embrace, to hold onto. She is escaping the problems of her life by flying halfway round the world to live, for months at a time, in one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

Who benefits from Ms. Rodriguez's odyssey? Many Afghan women who, as a result of the ultra-restrictive policies of the Taliban, are slowly emerging from a period in Afghanistan's history where women were little more than glorified slaves to men. Watching them flower through Ms. Rodriguez's eyes is both uplifting and sobering. This is the deeper message of Kabul Beauty School, a chronicle which captures the elation of their newfound freedom counterbalanced by the gloom of so much death and poverty.

During this rather remarkable journey, Ms. Rodriguez learns a few lessons about herself, mostly through trial and error, and seems to come out enlightened and emboldened. And it is with this timbre that her voice speaks, alternately dispassionate and heartbroken, of that tragic country. This memoir of Ms. Rodriguez years in Afghanistan is somehow both sappy and brutal managing to yoyo back and forth in a manner that entertains and informs far more than it annoys. (4/5 Stars)

The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

From The Week of November 08, 2009

The Looming Tower is the best book I've read to date on
Al Qaeda, its origins, its structure, and the execution of its purpose.
Mr. Wright traces radicalized Islam back to the 1940s when a
young Egyptian scholar visited the United States, staying long enough to take education in some of its schools before returning, disgusted by American sinfulness, to Egypt where he became active in the Muslim Brotherhood before being executed for attempting to overthrow the
Nasser Regime. His martyrdom and his writings went on to inspire the future leaders of terrorist organizations, Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, both familiar names to those who've followed the pushback against Islamic terror. Though the book spends most of its time on painting fulsome portraits of these men, it also covers the American officials who have, over the years, attempted to track and thwart Al Qaeda and groups like it, laying out in all the gritty detail the numerous occasions where American intelligence failed to put two and two together and get four.

There are those who always question the authenticity of the mainstream portrayal of great events. The bigger the event, the bigger the fringe agitating for their own conspiratorial truths in an attempt to explain what they cannot grasp. And though I am not one of these who believes in any 9/11 conspiracies, that the Pennsylvania plane was shot down, or that the towers were felled by controlled demolitions, The Looming Tower inadvertently offers the most realistic case for a conspiracy. Mr. Wright points out that American intelligence knew, for months, that members of Al Qaeda were operating inside the United States. Agents knew that they were training in airplanes. They knew that there had been meetings, plans. And yet still the attacks on 9/11 went ahead with no one the wiser. Surely that is sufficient grist for the conspiracy mill. How does intelligence fail that badly? And if intelligence can fail that badly, is it right to even call it intelligence?

This is a sobering read, one many people will find emotionally challenging, but its importance surpasses its challenge. This is the world we live in. To refuse to understand it, to refuse to understand the people who hate this much in the name of religion... The world is a difficult place; and we will get nowhere in it unless we understand its workings. (5/5 Stars)

Legacy Of Ashes by Tim Weiner

From The Week of November 08, 2009

A devastating dismantling of the
CIA and all its crimes,
Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes manages to confirm many existing fears about the meddlesome CIA while exposing it as an aimless and ineffective cabal of special interests and secret missions. How can an organization with a billion-plus dollar budget be both ineffective and worthy of fear? Because it never has to answer for its crimes; because its intelligence and its opinions often shape foreign policy for the United States; and because it has built up for itself enough of a profile, enough of a purpose, to convince its political masters that it should continue its work flailing about in the already troubled nations of the world. Mr. Weiner exhaustively recites the dozens of regimes the CIA has illegally overthrown, pointing out how little a difference was made in these countries even when the CIA got its way.

There are many outside the United States who speak uneasily of our world's most powerful nation. They generate conspiracy theories to explain why the United States is dominant in the world. Legacy of Ashes inflames those fears, throwing a forest's worth of fuel onto that already burning fire. But to blame this book would be only a distraction from the real problem, that the CIA, in the name of the necessity of intelligence, is able to exist and carry out its schemes in spite of its incalculable crimes. Mr. Weiner may have emphasized the bad and minimized the good in his history of the CIA, but I do not blame him. It is an agency whose sins should be brought into the light of truth and exposed for what they are, dirty deeds that cause real damage to real people, the blame for which never seems to fall on the ones who instigate. (4.4/5 Stars)

Touching History by Lynn Spencer

From The Week of October 04, 2009

What happened in the skies and in the airports of the United States on
September 11, 2001? Lynn Spencer, herself a commercial pilot, recounts, in minute-by-minute detail the orders, the planes, the pilots and the circumstances of that fateful morning. She chronicles the chaos and the calmness under fire, in New York City and across the country, all while bringing to light a host of brave Americans who held their nerve in the face of one of the nation's gravest days. Most grippingly, Ms. Spencer chillingly describes the chain of events which caused the
first fighter pilots in US history to be ordered "Weapons Free" over the nation's capital, an order that grants to the pilot permission to fire at any target at their own discretion.

This is one of the most gripping books I've ever picked up and it certainly enlightens us to events and perspectives that have been otherwise overshadowed by the sight of
those falling towers. (5/5 Stars)