The date is July, 2006. A Pakistani is jogging to his job at a Washington consulting firm close to the American Treasury. Suddenly he is set upon by dark-suited men, bundled into a black SUV and driven to a secret bunker below the White House. There he is aggressively interrogated for the rest of the day as a suspect terrorist. The reason is that Usman Khosa has a brown face and an iPod in his ear. He finally makes contact with enough high-powered contacts to secure his release, but hundreds like him have vanished into the Orwellian limbo of America's war on terror. There they endure torture, indefinite detention and no trial or proper legal representation. This is the America brought into being since 2001 by one man, Osama Bin Laden. It is the America of which an increasing number of its citizens feel ashamed, even frightened.

That shame is the subject of Ron Suskind's lively portrait of a group of people touched by that war, either as actors or victims. They include President George Bush, Benazir Bhutto, a Guantanamo Bay lawyer, an Afghan exchange student and a CIA agent obsessed with nuclear dissemination. Each, says Suskind, “is walking the fine line between faith and reason”. Each is at the mercy of a lie.

The lie is the book's dominant scoop, known before but not in such detail. Prior to the Iraq war, both American and British intelligence were privately (but separately) informed that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. They had been destroyed after 1991. The Americans were told this by the frantic Iraq foreign minister, Naji Sabri, but he was dismissed by Bush and the vice-president, Dick Cheney, “when they heard what he was saying”. They were, says Suskind, “on a runaway train” to war and wanted no intelligence that might stop it.

At the same time, Tahir Habbush, Iraq's head of intelligence, was in contact with a British agent, Michael Shipster, in Jordan. His message was the same. The material was sent to the White House in a desperate bid by the British to stop the war at the last minute, itself an intriguing sidelight.

Not only was the material again dismissed by the White House, but the British were not told that Habbush was corroborating their own information. A CIA source admitted to Suskind: “We conned the British, our closest ally, about Sabri so they couldn't place in proper context the incredibly valuable channel they'd set up with Habbush.” Shipster apparently later told the CIA that, had London known this, “We would never have gone to war.” Bush and Tony Blair knew they were telling lies.

Nor is this all. Rob Richer, the American agent, is ordered by the White House to fake a letter purporting to come from Habbush stating that Saddam was implicated in 9/11. He is shocked at an order flagrantly against CIA rules. Yet he passes it down the line and sees it planted on the ever-gullible London Sunday Telegraph. He tells Suskind simply, “It is called lying.”

Such mendacity emanating from the very top spreads like poison through the body politic. In Guantanamo Bay, Candace Gorman, a lawyer, is told to defend a simple Libyan baker from Kabul, who had been sold by Afghan bounty hunters to the CIA as a terror suspect, along with 20 hapless Chinese Uighurs whose reward for fleeing China to liberated Afghanistan is to find themselves in Guantanamo as “enemy combatants”. Gorman's client is plainly innocent and dying of TB. His documents have been doctored and his identity confused. He is there merely so Bush can claim to have captured hundreds of terrorists. Gorman's faith in American justice is shattered.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, Ibrahim Frotan, an Afghan student, is lodging with a liberal family who seem to think they can achieve the same global revolution at home that their armies are seeking on the battlefield. The boy cannot handle what becomes a miniature clash of civilisations. He is drawn into the love-hate relationship with “the land of miracles” that is so prevalent in the Muslim world yet so incomprehensible to Americans.

At the same time, in Lahore, Bhutto seeks to return democracy to Pakistan, yet round every corner finds American agents loyal to her foe, President Pervez Musharraf. Suskind is appalled by the duplicity into which the great lie of Iraq has sucked his government. It has “undermined America's moral standing on a mission it now so desperately needs to lead”.

Most alarming is the experience of Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former spy convinced of the threat of nuclear dissemination. His “Armageddon test” involves trying to buy enriched plutonium and see how easily it can be smuggled into America. Nobody will take him or his threat seriously because it offers “no quick wins”. Democracy, once drenched in the politics of fear, demands quick wins.

Suskind is never unsympathetic to his characters, who he appears to have debriefed intensively. He is a romantic, a writer who clearly believes that his country has betrayed its past, its values and its moral compass by failing to tell the truth about the war. My reservation lies in his “new realism” style of reporting. These are real people. The unsourced details - Musharraf's “harsh, almost mocking” tone, on a private phone to Bhutto, or what a boy says to a girl on a sofa in Colorado - do not add authenticity but somehow subtract it. How does Suskind know that a CIA agent's coffee is “now lukewarm”? Does it matter if he fabricates colour? No, but then what else does he fabricate?

Nor does Suskind question the main premise he shares with his White House culprits, that America is right in its grand mission to export its culture to the world. He never asks whether it is this, rather than the mendacity of the Iraq war, that has turned America from the land of miracles to that of hubris.

These complaints do not diminish what is a vivid snapshot of a year, 2006-2007, in the life of a nation whose leaders have betrayed its high moral purpose. One of Suskind's Washington players cries into the darkness, “Can the great beast self-correct?” Can America, Suskind asks, recover its missionary rectitude? He clearly thinks it can. We are waiting.

The Way of the World Ron Suskind
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