Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (Hardcover)

Hersh gives a blow by blow account of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's impatience with military protocol and details his public disdain for the internationally accepted rules of the Geneva Convention. He also reports that the Secretary of Defense wanted the civilian leadership of the Pentagon...not the CIA to lead the fight on terrorism. Consequently, Hersh expertly exposes how the subsequent "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses," at Abu Ghraib prison took place. It also documents the wrongdoing in the main interrogation center in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The heavy-handed approach in Guantanamo which was based on coercion instead of persuasion was considered evil and stupid by senior Pentagon terror experts. Human Rights Watch reported that President Bush was, "dead wrong in proclaiming that international law did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo." Additionally, senior JAG lawyers in the Judge-Advocat General's Corps protested the "extraordinary means" used on prisoners. This book paves the way to understanding how the White House created conditions that allowed transgressions to take place all over the world. Recommended.

Bert Ruiz

Torture, which is invariably counterproductive, is of course illegal, under the Geneva Convention, US federal anti-torture statutes and the UN Convention Against Torture, ratified by the USA in 1994. Yet in 2001 President Bush secretly ruled, "I ... determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world."

This contempt for law resulted directly in systematic abuse, torture and murders in US prisons. Abu Ghraib was unusual only because it became notorious. The US state organises torture tourism: it kidnaps suspects then takes them to Egypt for intensive torture, or to the many secret CIA prisons in Pakistan, Thailand, Singapore, etc.

In November 2001, Bush approved a Pakistani airlift out of northern Afghanistan. 5000 people escaped, Pakistani army officers and intelligence agents, and an unknown number of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.

Since 1997, the Labour government has consistently spread false information about Iraq. A member of the UN inspection team passed dozens of unverified intelligence 'reports' to MI6, who passed these dodgy tips discreetly to the press.

Ehud Barak, an ex-Prime Minister of Israel, told Vice-President Dick Cheney late last year that the USA had lost in Iraq. He said that Israel 'had learned that there's no way to win an occupation'. The only issue now was 'choosing the size of your humiliation'.

The Israeli government has also concluded that the occupation cannot bring stability or democracy to Iraq. As a former Israeli military intelligence officer said, "it doesn't add up. It's over. Not militarily ... but politically." So Israel is not depending on the USA. It is further destabilising the Middle East by training Kurdish commando units in northern Iraq and running covert operations in Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. This has provoked a new alliance against Israel, of Iran, Syria and Turkey.