Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (P. S. Series) » (Reprint)

Seymour M. Hersh has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, four George Polk Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes, many of them for his work at the New York Times. In 2004, he won a National Magazine Award for public interest for his pieces on intelligence and the Iraq war. He lives in Washington, D.C. Chain of Command is his eighth book.

Veteran investigative journalist Hersh has frequently described his recent writings for the New Yorker as an "alternative history of the Iraq war." In his attempts to piece together actual lines of ideological and bureaucratic responsibility for the conduct of the Bush administration's "War on Terror," he certainly does provide an alternative to the shallow coverage of much of the American fourth estate. This text gathers most of the New Yorker investigations through 2004 and adds a significant amount of supplementary material, providing, among other things, reconstruction of how the interrogation techniques approved for Guantanamo Bay "enemy combatants" spread and morphed into the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, a description of military failures to capture Al Qaeda forces in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan in November 2001, and a profile of the neoconservative "cult" who managed to manufacture a case for war through the use of "faulty intelligence." Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The New York Times Sunday Book Review - Michael Ignatieff

Hersh has vacuumed up all their doubts and anger at the policy they were charged to execute. Put Woodward together with Hersh and an abyss opens up, dividing the decision elite's view of the road to war -- ideological, pristine, hard-edged and clear -- and the foot soldiers' view -- messy, incompetent, confused and sometimes downright immoral &8230; This book reminds us why tough, skeptical journalism matters so much: it helps to keep us free.