This is a very unusual book in what it achieves. First, what it is not. If you are interested in this topic and have read some of the prominent earlier books, you may find nothing new of significance (I didn't). And if you are looking for an introduction, there is probably too much that is silently skipped.
What it does very well is to create a strong gut feeling for the many failings of the US response, due to incompetence, arrogance, carelessness, ideology that rejected evidence,... The book is written in the style of a thriller, popping back and forth between story lines. I found it a very fast-paced read that constantly drew me forward. Even if you are familiar with the events, you are still likely to find the book very readable because of its organization and approach. However, the problem with this approach is seen in the description of the response to the anthrax attack: It is abbreviated far past the point of losing its essential character. Plus, it was so peripheral that I can't see how it belongs in this book.
A big limitation of the fast-paced style is that it precludes analysis and insights into why something happened. For example, an extended analysis of the misconceptions about the "Manchester Manual" is consigned to the "Notes and Sources" appendix (pp 545-552). Advice: Read it -- it is a critical part of the story. One of my biggest frustrations with the accounts -- this and others -- is that I haven't seen a remotely satisfying explanation of why the CIA didn't have qualified, experienced interrogators as part of its normal course-of-business. Or why the military did not use experienced interrogators from the Reserves -- predominantly from civilian law enforcement -- despite the Reserves being explicitly structured to preserve and provide that capability.
In the Epilogue I was taken aback to read passages that were in direct conflict with what was in the preceding chapters. For example, rather than "struggling to find a proper balance between national security and legal rights" (pg 508), the lawyers of the Bush Administration used the crisis to push an extreme interpretation of "The Unified Executive", and abrogated basic rights, such as warrants for searches even though they could provide no example or even a reasonable argument why the existing FISA procedures weren't adequate. And, as the book shows, after persistently failing to even try to sort out the innocent from the guilty, these lawyers put their efforts into blocking attempts to make them do so. My assumption is that the author was attempting to placate some of his sources by being able to point to these passages, deflecting them from what was written earlier. However, I couldn't help but wonder if he hadn't also shaded (softened) what was in the earlier chapters to manage his relationship with those sources.
I have serious problems with the sourcing of the claims that the waterboarding of KSM provided actionable intelligence: It is listed simply as a CIA report with no assessment of its credibility. The book had already mentioned that there were multiple instance of the CIA taking credit for information obtained by others (especially the FBI). The reality was that the CIA and the Bush Administration were repeatedly and consistently caught in deceptions and outright lies about what information had been produced by waterboarding. And about the efficacy of waterboarding: They initially claimed that a single session caused the subject to immediately reveal all. Then it was a few sessions. Then 40. Then 183. Then that although waterboarding didn't directly produce intelligence, it had made KSM more compliant to subsequent interrogation. With only a small part of this extensive history in the book, how is the reader to judge whether this CIA report is credible or just more self-serving lies? Granted there were too many major deceptions and lies during this period to expect the book to even touch on most of them, but this was a big enough part of events and of the book to expect a more critical presentation.
In summary, I have very divided feeling about this book. I love the way that it gives the reader a strong _impression_ of these events, but I dislike how its focus hides that these are but _representative_ stories and that there was a much bigger picture.
