And with the recent action of a military jury in sentencing Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama Bin Laden's onetime driver, to 5 1/2 years - a surprisingly light sentence that calls into question the justification for the conducting a war "on the dark side" - it is an appropriate time for a comprehensive recounting.
Drawing on her own reporting for The New Yorker, and that of former Boston Globe and current New York Times reporter Charlie Savage, among others, Mayer details in chapter after chapter what went on in the shadows.
There were the "renditions" of men loosely defined as "illegal combatants" and the "enhanced interrogations" that those men endured when they were carried off to the "black sites" secretly established by the CIA in East Europe and the Middle East.
It comes as a note of welcome, almost comic, relief to read of the "reverse rendition" of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent who decided to take "a breather from family life" with a quick trip to Macedonia in December 2003.
When Masri was stopped at a border crossing, his brand-new German passport looked suspicious. Turned over to a CIA "takedown" team, he was flown to Afghanistan, where, despite growing concerns that he was just a small-time car dealer with family problems, he was held incommunicado for some 149 days.
Finally, an elaborate scheme was devised to fly Masri back to Europe. He was driven to a border crossing and told to start walking and not look back. "At the end of a path, three waiting men handed him a picnic lunch and drove him to the Tirana [Albania] Airport, from which he flew home" - only to find that his wife, believing he had deserted her, had gone to Lebanon with their three children.
As Mayer writes, "Without any procedure for independent judicial review, or any accountability for imprisoning an innocent victim, once a mistake was made there was little incentive to correct it."
