![]() ![]() Mazzetti quotes a former counterterrorism chief telling the 9/11 Commission that, before the Twin Towers’ fall, he would have refused a direct order to take out Al Qaeda’s leader. A few months earlier, there wouldn’t have been so much as a debate. Here he traces the bitter fights between Langley’s old guard and Young Turks over whether the agency should use the new armed Predator drones to hunt and kill even Osama bin Laden. Mazzetti - a New York Times reporter who was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team - has done much to document the C.I.A.’s use and abuse of its new powers. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 propelled this shift, but even then, the resistance from within was fierce. How the agency transformed itself into “a killing machine, an organization consumed with manhunting,” is the subject of Mark Mazzetti’s fascinating, trenchant, sometimes tragicomic account, “The Way of the Knife.” It’s hard to remember, but for the last quarter of the 20th century, the C.I.A. ![]()
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