Honestly, we haven't read the book, but Tom Engelhardt of Tom Dispatch, an unassailable source, is raving about it (and it's headed for bestseller status, by the way).

In a July 24th column, Engelhardt writes:

"The secret prison was set up on a secure U.S. Naval base outside the U.S. and so beyond the slightest recourse to legal oversight. It was there that the CIA clandestinely brought its "suspects" to be interrogated, abused, and tortured.

That description might indeed sound like Guantanamo 2002, but think again. According to New York Times reporter Tim Weiner's new history of the Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes -- a remarkable treasure trove of grim and startling information you hadn't known before -- this actually happened first in the Panama Canal Zone in the early 1950s. It was there, as well as at two secret prisons located in Germany and Japan, the defeated Axis powers (and not, in those days, in Thailand or Rumania), that the CIA brought questionable double agents for "secret experiments" in harsh interrogation, "using techniques on the edge of torture, drug-induced mind control, and brainwashing." This was but a small part of "Project Artichoke," a 15-year, multi-billion dollar "search by the CIA for ways to control the human mind."

No book in recent memory has done such a superb job of illuminating the roiling, disastrous, thoroughly destructive path through history of America's top covert-operations agency over the last six decades, what Chalmers Johnson has often called "the president's private army." Johnson himself was an outside consultant for the CIA from 1967 to 1973 until, as he writes in his latest book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy), "this consulting function was abolished by [National Security Advisor Henry] Kissinger and [CIA Director James] Schlesinger during [President Richard] Nixon's second term precisely because they did not want outsiders interfering with their ability to tell the president what to think." On first arrival at the Agency's "campus" in Langley, Virginia, Johnson reminds us, Schlesinger, in the typically highhanded fashion of CIA heads, immediately announced, "I am here to see that you guys don't screw Richard Nixon." Think of CIA Directors George Tenet or Porter Goss and George Bush and you're back in our present age."

Heck, at 720 pages, you can puddle jump through the twisted legacy of the CIA until you have time to read the whole thing!

It might be hard to handle all the gruesome doings of our "intelligence agency" in one sitting anyway.

“This is a fascinating, deeply scary book. With prodigious reporting and on-the-record sources, Tim Weiner shows why the CIA has done so poorly in traditional intelligence. It’s a riveting tale and also a warning. America must develop the ability—and the will—to know and face the facts about the world.”

-—Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and Einstein: His Life and Universe