500 Days is a thoroughly researched historical (can we call 9/11 history now? Please?) narrative on the approximately 500 days (554 to be exact) between the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the beginning of the war in Iraq in March of 2003. I honestly have no idea how Eichenwald gathered all this information that precisely dictates, to the word, conversations between George W. Bush and his officials along with other conversations he had with other world leaders like Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin. I imagine it came from toiling through many FOI act documents and countless hours of interview footage to gather this information and formulate it into such a precise chronicle. The book clocks in at oer 500 pages but to me it reads like a wonky british spy novel. The story jumps around from Washington to Britain to Syria to Ottawa to Indonesia like a Bourne film. The problem is that its very very real. Some of it shocking to the point where it made me uncomfortable. Reading in detail about some of the things that were done to innocent men and their families in the name of post 9/11 "National Security" makes me nauseous. If you ever wondered if torture works to gather reliable intelligence, then you should read this book. I would say Eichenwald shut downs the argument that we needed to torture to find out where the "ticking time bomb" is to protect the country. Not only did we get unreliable intelligence to prevent further torture, we created more "terrorists" in the process. Still to this day approximately 166 men are languishing at Guantanamo Bay with 103 of those on a hunger strike. Out of the 103 on hunger strike 41 are being force fed with unsterile feeding tubes that are multiple gauges larger than their air ways should tolerate. This book caught my attention when I heard an interview with Kurt Eichenwald on Democracy Now! (see below). Those of you who know me know that I read books about war all of the time, especially books about this recent war. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are longer and like no other war we have ever had. I truly believe there is no turning back this time around. I have read this story over and over in different forms but there are a few revelations in this book that make it exceptional. For example The U.S. used the wrong Al Queda training manual to hunt Al Queda. This manual that was supposedly written by Al Queda was used to justify "some of the most sweeping and controversial decisions" of the Bush administration. But actually it was an unsophisticated document written by a group of jihadists that Bin Laden hated and had no affiliation with. I knew there were multiple failures in intelligence sharing during this time period but I didn't understand how many. From the weeks before 9/11 all the way until after the beginning of the Iraq war reliable intelligence was waved off while government hired psychologists and CIA special operatives were gathering the intelligence they wanted to hear through the means of beating, extreme temperature exposures, sleep deprivation, mock executions, sensory overload, and infamously waterboarding. This book will definitely be an important analysis in this brief period of history that pretty much altered the American empire's course. Kurt Eichenwald did a great job of reporting objectively and leaving his opinions out of it. With that being said considering the circumstances of that time its hard to not consider those 500 Days as a stain on the legacy of United States.
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