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 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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
