We Are All Guilty
by GRAYDON CARTER December 2007
n Robert Harris’s crackerjack new political thriller, The Ghost, a former British prime minister has settled into a borrowed house on Martha’s Vineyard to work on his memoirs. The ex-P.M. happens to be very much like the one who just stepped down—indeed, he has a wife very much like the one the real one has, as well as a mistress very much like the one the real one is rumored to have had. This ex-P.M. is a glib, callow fellow, far more concerned with appearances than with substance. And, also like his real-life counterpart, this ex-P.M. envisions a comfortable life of big paydays as a newly minted member of the speaker/board-member fraternity. His grand plan begins to unravel when he is ordered by the International Criminal Court to stand before a war-crimes tribunal. It seems that the ex-politician’s recent past, in the form of extraordinary rendition and torture methods such as water-boarding, has followed him out of office.
Harris was a superb journalist prior to becoming the best-selling author of such works as Fatherland, Enigma, and Pompeii. When Tony Blair watched the 1997 election returns that gave him the keys to 10 Downing Street, Harris, then working for The Sunday Times, was right there with him—the only journalist in the room. Blair’s former top adviser, Peter Mandelson, is godfather to one of Harris’s children. He knows his stuff, in other words.
ll things being equal, such a legal fate may well await not only Tony Blair but our own President Bush, once his clenched-white fingers have been pried from the nuclear “football” for the last time, in January 2009. It is now evident that the United States, beginning at the very top levels of the administration, has been engaged in a coordinated and widespread campaign of extraordinary rendition and real torture—offenses that would have appalled most thinking Americans an administration ago. [more]