Above, outside the law

The consequences of all this have been documented in an array of newspaper and magazine reports, particularly in Dana Priest's Pulitzer Prize-winning reportage for the Washington Post. Still, Mayer does invaluable work locking these reports into a coherent narrative framework and sketching in vital connective details and insights. One of the things most striking in her account is the number of intelligence and law enforcement officials, particularly from the FBI, who opposed the adoption of torture as a matter of state policy, warning that what the White House was demanding violated both U.S. and international law: They simply refused to go along. For example, in her extremely well-reconstructed account of the handling of Abu Zubaydah, the first major al Qaeda figure to fall into U.S. hands, Mayer demonstrates how FBI interrogators initially secured his cooperation through conventional techniques, and then were forced to abandon the process to CIA questioners bent on using torture. The torment of Abu Zubaydah not only yielded no further useful information, but subsequently has been secretly deemed a war crime by the International Red Cross. In the case of another so-called "high-value detainee" -- Sheikh ibn al-Libi -- torture produced a torrent of false information used to buttress the case the White House made to Congress to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Meanwhile, that same secret Red Cross report concluded that the interrogation methods used on al Qaeda prisoners across the board by the CIA constituted war crimes that are prosecutable under a variety of international treaties and conventions. This came, according to Mayer, as a CIA analyst concluded that at least a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay -- many of whom have been tortured -- are innocent of any involvement in terrorism. Military authorities now believe that more than half of the men imprisoned in the Cuban outpost of what now constitutes an American gulag never committed a hostile act against the United States.

Mayer makes this point in one meticulously documented individual case after another -- a process that renders her eyebrow-raising subtitle, if anything, an exercise in understatement.