They used to call them torture taxis that carried their high-value human cargo on a mission of extraordinary rendition for enhanced interrogation techniques at places outside the country.

This was shorthand for kidnapping terror suspects from one country to locate them at black sites in countries that were friendly — usually run by autocrats not known for observing the niceties of human rights. The US did not want to be accused of violating the Geneva Convention on human rights but wanted terror-related intelligence even though it was known that interrogation is not the best way to elicit accurate or reliable intelligence. Even so, terror suspects were subjected to the most horrendous forms of torture to get information for America’s counterterror experts fighting their country’s Global War on Terror. An unconventional war was being fought with equally unconventional methods, no holds barred. The US had established its own Gulags.
Recall the notorious Abu Ghraib prison photographs of torture of naked Iraqi soldiers that were posted online by Lynddie England and her boyfriend and caused a furore because of the methods and techniques that had been adopted by US forces. Both served jail terms but this and other similar acts left scars in the region. Tragically, the discourse at that time in the US was not just torture but more torture as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney pushed their agenda in Iraq.
Jeremy Scahill, in his book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, recounts those days in the court of George W. Bush where there was intrigue, subterfuge, conspiracies and rivalries as ambitions and egos clashed. It was the Pentagon versus the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) versus the CIA and the state department versus the Pentagon and, outside the US, the CIA versus the Inter-Services Intelligence. Scahill’s book is more than just about intrigues. It is a detailed tour of terror lands across the globe — Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and Iraq. This war on terror was fought from cloistered rooms in the White House, Langley and the Pentagon from where Rumsfeld had declared his own war against the CIA. It is the story of US might represented by the US Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA in their charge against terror.
Secrecy and secret operations are seductive. Within weeks of taking over, US President Barack Obama declared his intentions to continue with his predecessor’s counterterrorism policies. These included targeted killings, warrantless wiretaps, secret prisons, rendition programmes and deployment of mercenaries along with covert CIA operatives as the US went in hot pursuit of Osama bin Laden and the Yemeni-American Anwar al-Awlaki who was finally killed in a drone attack in Yemen and so was his 16-year-old son a month later. By January 2011, when the Raymond Davis incident occurred in Lahore, there were 851 Americans with diplomatic immunity in Pakistan of which 297 were not working “in a diplomatic capacity”.
The chapter on the storming of the Fortress at Abbottabad on May 2, 2011, has the details but seems too laid back. The extreme tension and nervousness that must have prevailed is missing. Maybe it was intended so, to convey the strong steely temperament of the Navy Seals even with one Blackhawk down. Nevertheless, here was a hands-on President sitting on a folding chair in the Situation Room watching the event unfold in real time. Obviously, this was something President Obama wanted done, to explain that with the killing of the prime target, the global war on terror which his predecessor had started 10 years ago was
coming to an end, and it was time to bring the boys back home.
Dirty Wars is not a book one can read lying in bed. It is too thick any way with its 500-odd pages with another hundred pages of citations. It is serious stuff and frightening too. It shows the character of a nation determined to succeed at any cost. It is about those who ran the government and the tasks they set for themselves. It is about people who, in their hubris of power, ended with the nemesis of rising Islamic radicalism from the Indus to the Nile and threatening to go beyond. Tragically, and maybe inevitably, we see them today anxious to talk to the scourge they set out to remove and failed.
Americans tend to overplay both friendship and enmity, dangers and capabilities. Other countries, less well-endowed, cannot emulate them but there are certain essentials necessary if the war on terror has to be
won. One of the more important lessons is that counterterror is a long war; it is apolitical and needs tenacity of purpose.
Scahill’s detailed accounts of the American counter-terror effort should be read by those who make policy
and have to fight terror wars. As the author himself says, the book is a story of the expansion of covert US wars,
the abuse of executive privilege and state secrets, the embrace of unaccountable elite military units that answer only to the White House. More important, the book reveals “the continuity of a mindset that ‘the world is a battlefield’ from Republican to Democratic administrations”.

Vikram Sood is a former head of the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external intelligence agency