Book reveals secret Iraq mission and more

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She looks at him, befuddled. Soon she’ll be leaving; they’ve been talking for nearly three days. And nothing is adding up. Could he be a terrorist and not understand Ahab’s obsession with his target? Or a hard-bitten Taliban fighter who finds common cause with a rose? She snaps to and bites down hard on reasonable suspicion. But it’s all moot. Guilty or innocent, this man deserves the due process of law. Period. She tells him, matter-of-factly, that she plans on filing a variety of appeals to get at the evidence arrayed against him. Might take a month, maybe two. He watches her talk, his feet, filthy and blistered, shuffling in green foam flip-flops, like the ones kids wear at the beach. From the talk of plans and dates, he knows she’s leaving. “I really need medical help,” he says, softly. “This is what I need the most. I’m afraid. Please, I don’t want to die here.”

The world stops, for an instant, as a man, a Muslim who’s been swept around the world by history’s currents to a jail cell in Cuba, pleads for mercy to a woman from Chicago, a lawyer, a mom, and a Christian, who, suddenly off balance, tries to grab hold of principles formed across millennia — through Hammurabi and Blackstone and Learned Hand — to break her fall. It is faith in the law she turns to.

It’s all she can offer really, she thinks, as that Aristotle quote — a law school standard about how “the law is reason, free from passion” — pops into her head.

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This is not personal.

But, of course, it is — as is this intensely personal book. It’s about how people, in America and abroad, are trying to grab hold of what may be one of the most powerful forces on earth — moral energy — which flows, most often and most fully, from the varied and connected chambers of the human heart. Dig deeply enough and it becomes clear that the great public institutions, and the law itself, are actually built on the most intimate of human qualities, such as honesty or forgiveness. Each of the characters mentioned thus far is driven — sometimes unwittingly — by very basic human values. Rolf is stumbling forward, sleepless, looking for simple truths to help him burn off fear. Candace is trying to find a place within the law for a powerless Muslim man and to prove, at least to herself, that justice is maybe more about compassion than judgment. George Bush has an important role, too. As people lament America’s diminished moral authority and point to the president’s actions and image as the cause, they are using Bush as a fixed point — something to push against — in charting new paths. That would apply, for instance, to the intelligence official who carries an enormous lie in his churning gut. It is one of the great lies in modern American political history. He wants simply to say we’re sorry, and we’ll learn from our mistakes, as all truly great nations must.

It’s a sad turn at a time of crisis — as religious fanatics search tirelessly for history-ending weapons — that the conduct of nations and of leaders, both duly elected and self-appointed, is so unimaginative and self-defensive. And that America has lost so much of the moral power that the world now desperately needs it to possess. That dispiriting truth is something the characters in this book, like so many others across the planet, have begun, at long last, to see as a starting point. It’s a starting point for their journeys, each quite personal, to find a moral compass, and a way forward.

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Book reveals secret Iraq mission and more