The book has an extraordinary amount of information in it, some of it expected, some not. The author claims he wanted to document all the events during the time period without making judgments, but this is not really possible unless he had recordings or written/approved “minutes” of meetings. So he could not and did not succeed in really doing that. In not all situations did he simply present the facts – sometimes there were added comments beyond the facts. As soon as he chose to accept hearsay about what someone said during a meeting, interrogation, conversation, etc., his presenting solely “the facts” became impossible. That is not to criticize what is in the book - but how he portrayed at the beginning what he was attempting to do. Even if he could corroborate what was said with two people, the exact wording or tone of the conversation is still not possible to present. That, of course, is what happens with writing about past history – so don’t try to just “present the facts”. ( )

Much like Bob Woodward's accounts of the post-9/11 period, Eichenwald's book explores the actions taken by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the attacks, concentrating on the internal debates over interrogation techniques, extraordinary rendition, and detainee rights generally. It makes for riveting reading, and Eichenwald has worked hard to get a range of different perspectives into the text. That said, I caught enough small errors here to make me wonder what I didn't catch (Don Nickles represented Oklahoma in the Senate, not Nevada; Tom Daschle was not the Speaker of the House, &c.). Small things like that bug me and lead me to question the rest of the narrative. But overall a truly frightening account of what was being done in America's name as the "War on Terror" got underway. ( )