This is an excellent review of a book that most other reviewers also consider excellent. Mayer herself has apparently filled in chapter and verse to the sordid history of torture and the violation of civil liberties perpetrated by the Bush administration. Over time, it has become clear that Dick Cheney is the real "decider" when it comes to detainees and forcible interrogation, with David Addington as his chief henchman. It was Cheney who termed the Guantanamo detainees "the worst of the worst." Yet two thirds of those detainees have been released, the victims of a bounty system the U.S. deployed in Afghanistan that resulted in numerous innocent people being turned in for the money. As Colin Powell once noted, the oldest detainee in Gitmo was in his 90s and the youngest was 13. Terrorists all? Recent estimates suggest that only about 10% of the original 750 (or so) detainees were al Qaeda or Taliban members.