Inside Out (37 page)

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Authors: Barry Eisler

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Yeah, he could see that now. He couldn’t just walk away. He was too deep inside. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t find a way out.

But should he? There was a lot of damage you could do from the inside, if that’s what you wanted.

He smiled grimly. Yeah, if damage was the objective, inside could be awfully goddamned good.

Author’s Note

Location photos of some of the places in this book can be found on my website at
http://www.barryeisler.com/photo.php
.

During the year in which I wrote this book, various people privy to its plot were concerned the CIA interrogation tapes would surface and overtake the story. I told them not to worry: those tapes would never see the light of day. They haven’t. And they never will.

Acknowledgments

I couldn’t have written
Inside Out
without the books and other sources I mention after these acknowledgments, and I couldn’t have written it without the generous help of my agent, editor, friends, and family, either. My thanks to:

My agent, Dan Conaway of Writers House, and editor Mark Tavani of Ballantine Books, for getting what I was trying to do with this story from the beginning, enriching it considerably with their input, and for reading and rereading the sex scene beyond what editorial requirements could ordinarily explain.

A whole bunch of superb bloggers and other journalists, for the reporting and commentary out of which this story grew. To name just a few: Juan Cole, Informed Comment; Digby, Hullabaloo; Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!; Glenn Greenwald, Unclaimed Territory; Hilzoy, Obsidian Wings (Hilzoy, come back!); Scott
Horton, No Comment; Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo; Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish; Marcy Wheeler, Firedoglake. Some others I admire have characters named after them in this book and in my other books, too—see if you can spot them. And you can find even more on the blogroll of Heart of the Matter at
www.barryeisler.com/blog.html
. If you like your journalism independent rather than corporate-owned and corporate-addled, I recommend reading these people every day.

The
Washington Post’s
Barton Gellman, author of the superb
Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency
, for coining the term “information laundering” that appears in the prologue.

John Alkire, Tom Bourke, Jason Evans, Scott Gentry, and Ken Rosenberg, for their expertise on international banking, and for steering me toward uncut diamonds as an appropriate means of anonymous exchange.

Ron Winston, for sharing his peerless expertise on diamonds and the diamond industry.

Tom Hayse, for everything I needed to know about satellite phone security.

Peyton Quinn, for familiarizing Ben with the notion of the pre-violence “interview” that appears in chapter one—and more of which can be found at
www.rmcat.com
.

Jane Litte of
dearauthor.com
and Sarah Wendell of
smartbitchestrashybooks.com
—smart, insightful, hilarious critics—for terrific feedback on the sex scene. If there’s something you don’t like about the scene in question, I hope it goes without saying that Jane and Sarah are entirely to blame.

The extraordinarily eclectic group of “foodies with a violence problem” who hang out at Marc “Animal” MacYoung’s and Dianna Gordon’s
nononsenseselfdefense.com
, for good humor, good fellowship, and a ton of insights, particularly regarding the real costs of violence.

Alan Eisler, Judith Eisler, Tom Hayes, novelist J. A. Konrath, Naomi Andrews and Dan Levin, Owen Rennert, Ted Schlein, and
Hank Shiffman, for helpful comments on the manuscript and many valuable suggestions and insights along the way.

Most of all, my wife Laura, for never being too busy to help me figure out a story point or to indulge my political rants. Thanks, babe, for everything.

Sources

When this book was in manuscript form, it contained over eighty footnotes. I was tempted to keep them in the text, but in the end I judged them too distracting from the story. As a compromise, I moved the references here. You can also find them on my website.

First
New York Times
report of torture tapes destruction
.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/washington/06cnd-intel.html?bl&ex=1197090000&en=3a8e1ed53c7d157e&ei=5087%0A

Second
New York Times
report—not two tapes, but ninety-two
.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/washington/03web-intel.html

Torture tape time line
.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/004872.php

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/004887.php

http://www.slate.com/id/2179607/sidebar/2179658/

CIA urges suppression of documents related to the torture tapes
.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/08/AR2009060804117.html?hpid=topnews

Mainstream media’s euphemistic contortions regarding U.S. torture
.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/05/08/torture/

Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry into the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody
.

“The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.”

http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/
supporting/2008/Detainees.121108.pdf

What the Gang of Eight knew about the torture program
.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/09/democrats/

ACLU Freedom of Information Act requests for information on treatment of terrorist suspects
.

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/news2007/1212–04.htm

How the CIA dodged court orders covering terror prisoners
.

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1200594608313

The CIA destroyed records documenting torture
.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/case-missing-torture-documents

Dick Cheney admits to waterboarding
.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/staff/jonathan_landay/story/14893.html

Records of what was on the interrogation videos
.

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/39094prs20090320.html

Information laundering—how the government uses the media to turn talking points into news stories
.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/09/11/
petraeus_interview/

And another example of how the government and mainstream media cooperatively propagandize
.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1&hp

Manila city jail
.

http://www.hurights.or.jp/asia-pacific/039/05.htm

http://kuwentos.wordpress.com/2004/10/06/manila-city-jail/

Pinwale, the NSA’s illegal domestic surveillance program
.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/us/17nsa.html

Why bounty hunting isn’t a great way to catch terrorists
.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200610090029

The CIA’s terrorist interrogation “mosaic.”

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/03/
some_truths_abo/

CIA use of Boeing for rendition flights to black sites
.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/30/061030
ta_talk_mayer

Secretary of State Rice’s version of “If the president does it, it means it’s not illegal.”

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/30/condi_rice_defends_
torture_as_legal_and_right

The torture memos
.

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/conlaw/2009/04/the-torture-memos.html

The CIA as fall guy for Iraq
.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames/120112

Force drift
.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/02/27/060227fa_fact?currentPage=all

How to turn permission to torture into a limitation on torture (and blame field personnel for exceeding it)
.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/22/colbert/
index.html

http://www.nytimes/2007/10/04/washington/04interrogate.html?pagewanted=1

U.S. policy on sleep deprivation, hypothermia, stress positions, beatings
.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22614

The U.S. torture program led to no useful intelligence
.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/opinion/23soufan.html

How the Bush administration used torture to try to establish a Saddam Hussein/al Qaeda link
.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66622.html

Scapegoating of enlisted personnel for torture at Abu Ghraib
.

http://www.law.whittier.edu/pdfs/cstudents/wlr-v27n3-smith-abstract.pdf

Jonathan Turley’s article on Abu Ghraib scapegoating and the abdication of command responsibility
.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-06-06-turley-edit_x.htm

Dan Choi, Arab linguist, driven from the military for being gay
.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-belkin/obama-to-fire-his-first-g_b_199070.html

We can make a terrorist talk, but we can’t get him to talk in English
.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/15/dan-choi-daily-show_n_203830.html

Assassination ring operating out of the Office of the Vice President
.

http://www.minnpost.com/ericblackblog/2009/03/11/7310/
investigative_reporter_seymour_hersh_describes_
executive_assassination_ring

The vice president’s plan to override the Fourth Amendment and use active-duty military to arrest U.S. citizens on American soil
.

http://www.secgov.info/2009/07/classification-and-constitution.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/us/25detain.html

CIA briefs Congress on a CIA assassination program
.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/08/panetta-acknowledged-cia_n_228321.html

CIA lies to Congress
.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/07/lying-congress

Doctors assist in torture
.

http://harpers.org/archive/2009/04/hbc-90004704

Outsourcing assassination to Blackwater
.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/us/20intel.html?_r=1&hp

Contractors rape with impunity
.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9342

How to destroy a citizen through trial by media
.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/04/anthrax/

Over half of America supports torture
.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/03/poll-slight-majority-of-a_n_210700.html

Over sixty percent of Evangelicals support torture
.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/30/religion.torture/

CIA black sites
.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_
mayer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/27/AR2007022702214.html

CIA secret prison system
.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/world/13foggo.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all

CIA shuttled ghost detainees through Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantánamo, and other prisons so the Red Cross couldn’t verify their existence
.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25239–2005Mar10.html

Ghost detainees at black sites
.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10819080

How the CIA built the black site prisons
.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/world/13foggo.html

The Supreme Court rules terror suspects have the right to petition for habeas corpus
.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/06/12/boumediene/

Government releases terror suspects it can’t charge
.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/31/detention/
index.html

Waterboarding someone 183 times in a month
.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/04/18/khalid-sheikh-mohammed-was-waterboarded-183-times-in-one-month/

JSOC run from the Office of the Vice President
.

http://www.minnpost.com/ericblackblog/2009/04/01/7800/seymour_
hersh_cheney_left_allies_behind_in_national_security_posts_and_may_
still_influence_events

CIA inspector general’s report on torture
.

http://washingtonindependent.com/56175/the-2004-cia-inspector-generals-report-on-torture

Schlein Vineyard wines
.

http://www.schleinvineyard.com/

We didn’t know who we were imprisoning at Guantánamo
.

http://pubrecord.org/nation/4936/wilkerson-ive-conclusion-cheney/

Covering up that we didn’t know who we had imprisoned at Guantánamo
.

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