Chalmers Johnson writes:

We know many details about the business of ‘extraordinary rendition’ thanks to the work of journalists writing for mainstream media. One of these is Stephen Grey, a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, the Sunday Times and the New Statesman. His new book divides fairly neatly into an account of how he and his colleagues uncovered the CIA’s secret flights to torture centres and an assessment of the impact of the American president’s decision to authorise the CIA, his private army, to use ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on people captured or put in its custody. Ghost Plane is a pioneering study of what is by definition an almost impossible subject to research. Grey’s individual case studies – Maher Arar, Khaled el-Masri, two Egyptians formerly seeking asylum in Sweden, and Abu Omar, an Egyptian imam who was living in Milan as a protected political exile – are particularly good.

(LRB 8 February 2007)

C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd | Hardback 320 pp. |ISBN: 9781850658504