Chapter 1, Part 1 Summary

After the September 11^th attacks on the United States, the effort of gathering intelligence was considered critical to winning the newly declared 'war on terror.' Prisoners captured in Afghanistan were declared enemy combatants, as opposed to prisoners of war. This difference put them in legal limbo, where they could be detained indefinitely, without legal representation (according to the Bush Administration). The Geneva Convention was deemed not to apply. Many enemy combatants from Afghanistan were sent to the U.S. prison in Guantanamo, Cuba, for detention. Then a C.I.A. analyst came back from Guantanamo with disturbing findings that war crimes were being committed against the detainees. He stated that the prisoners had been selected haphazardly (Guantanamo was supposedly a 'high-target' prison), and that many of the detainees were just low-level fighters with no military intelligence value.

The administration conducted...