Monstering; Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War

New York, N.Y.: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007. First Carroll & Graf Edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xii, [2], 291, [15] pages. DJ has small scratch at back. Includes Preface, Epilogue, Further Readings, Acknowledgments, Bibliography, Notes, and Index. Part 1 covers The Path to Abu Ghraib; Part 2 covers War Crimes; Part 3 covers Investigation; and Part 1V covers Judgment. Tara Shannon McKelvey is an American journalist who is a White House reporter for the BBC and a former correspondent for Newsweek/The Daily Beast. She has reported on topics which include national-security issues from the Middle East, South Asia and Russia. McKelvey began her journalism career as a clerk at The New York Times, following her graduation from Georgetown University. She is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The American Prospect and a former contributing editor of Marie Claire. McKelvey also, at one point, taught a course on National Security and the Media at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. McKelvey is now a White House reporter for the BBC. In 2011, McKelvey was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction. McKelvey also won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship in 2010 to research and write about the military's black operations. For her investigative work on national security, McKelvey was supported by not only the Alicia Patterson Foundation but also Northwestern University's Carnegie National Security Journalism Initiative. McKelvey, a fellow at Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, wrote on the relationship between the media and US covert operations. In April 2004, the Abu Graib photographs set off an international scandal. Yet until now, the full story has never been told. Tara McKelvey--the first U.S. journalist to speak with female prisoners from Abu Ghraib--traveled to the Middle East and across the United States to seek out victims and perpetrators. McKelvey tells how soldiers, acting in an atmosphere that encouraged abuse and sadism, were unleashed on a prison population of which the vast majority, according to army documents, were innocent civilians. During her investigations, she gained unprecedented access to soldiers, officers, administration officials and suspected terrorists, including a "ghost detainee" held by the CIA and a thirty-two-year-old woman described as Saddam Hussein's mistress. Derived from a Kirkus review: Were the abuses at Abu Ghraib, revealed three years ago, isolated aberrations? The government says so. American Prospect senior editor McKelvey persuasively argues to the contrary. Only a dozen military investigations have been held on detainee abuse, and only nine soldiers have been sentenced for crimes against prisoners; up the chain of command, no senior officer has yet been punished, even though officers are supposed to know what's going on in their commands-and can hardly do otherwise and serve effectively. Says one sniper, ordered to get his sideburns trimmed, "If they're so worried about little shit like that, they're going to notice if an Iraqi is getting shit smeared on him or electrocuted or walked down the hall with a leash around his neck." A programmatic cover-up has since shielded the brass-and, even more to the point, the OGA (other government agency) that really ran the infamous jail, namely the CIA, since, as a former guard remarks, "The army as it is traditionally understood did not exist in that prison." The CIA interrogators found willing accomplices in young men and women such as former prison guard Charles Graner and his girlfriend Lynndie England, already well trained in striking obedient poses for the camera. Combine this drug-addled low-hanging fruit (who proclaimed, "We are above even President Bush. No one has power over us") and non-Arabic speaking CIA interrogators with a staff of translators who were bringing Iraq's civil war inside the walls to settle old tribal scores, and it is small wonder that horrifying abuses took place. What remains to be discovered, as McKelvey urges, is how far up the line those abuses originated; though Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the highest-ranking officer in Iraq at the time, approved of the interrogators' methods, he has yet to answer for them. The same goes for Donald Rumsfeld. An eye-opening, depressing look at events that, more than any other single episode, turned the war in Iraq against the U.S.