Carol Burke, author of the new book “Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High and Tight: Gender, Folklore and Changing Military Culture,” wasn’t at all surprised to learn that soldiers ritualistically tortured Iraqi prisoners and documented their deeds. Her research, done long before the Abu Ghraib news broke, shows that these types of practices are widespread in military cultures around the globe. Initiation rites often involve elaborate, carnivalesque ceremonies, which can include dressing up, physical pain, and personal and sexual humiliation. And the soldiers nearly always leave behind a trail of photographs and videotapes.

Burke’s analysis of militaries as specific cultures, and very nearly cults, provides another way to understand what happened at Abu Ghraib. Her ideas also make the problem much more complicated. Ultimately, according to Burke, to truly eradicate such practices, the military would have to reform not only the fraternity-like initiation at service academies, but also the traditions long used to transform soldiers from civilians into soldiers.

Burke, a professor of English at the University of California at Irvine, spoke to Salon about the military’s shocking marching chants, some disturbing examples of military initiation rituals, and why it’s not surprising that women committed torture at Abu Ghraib.

How did you become interested in military culture?

In the late ’80s and early ’90s I was a civilian professor at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. While I was there I was working on a book on women in prison. I found a number of similarities between prisons and the institution I was going back and forth to every day. One experience I had during the first semester I was there was a formative one. I came in really early one morning and this small group of would-be Marines [the Naval Academy recruits Marines too] were doing a running march together. Like a lot of groups in the military they were chanting and as they came by me, I heard: “Rape, maim, kill babies, hooah. Rape, maim, kill babies, hooah,” over and over.

Later that day I met my class and I said to my students, “I just heard the most bizarre thing,” and told them. My class looked at me and said, “Oh, ma’am, after a couple of weeks, you don’t really hear the words that they’re saying anymore.” And I said to them, “What you just said to me is far more frightening than what I heard this morning.”

Chants are used for various reasons — to keep time while marching, to let off steam. But some are pretty ugly.

A kind of sinister cast came over a lot of marching chants during the Vietnam era and post-Vietnam. Probably the most famous Vietnam chant that has a chorus of “Napalm sticks to kids, napalm sticks to ribs.” It’s a macabre chant about the sadistic American killing everything in its way, including civilians and particularly children. The way I read that is as a kind of response to protesters stateside who were chanting at their rallies, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today,” and calling the soldiers baby killers. The soldiers are saying back, Oh you want us to be baby killers, we’ll be baby killers. One doesn’t perform these on the battlefield. They’re performed in training rituals in this transition from civilian to soldier in order to desensitize civilians — who’ve been raised not to kill anyone — to be able to kill on demand in the name of the state.

And a lot of these chants alienate women.

That’s really important. When you have an institution that exists in part to inscribe manhood on its members, you have this very intricate process of doing that by separating men from the civilian world, which includes [separating them from] mothers, sisters, girlfriends. When you take that rich tradition of separating men from the women back home, and then introduce women into the military, you’re saying to the female soldiers, “You’re not quite a part of this elite membership.”

The military before racial integration had a history of staging things like minstrel shows. Those completely went by the wayside because you can’t try to form this group cohesion and do it in ways that clearly alienate and scapegoat one portion of your group. Unfortunately, the misogynist practices have been much slower to be relinquished.

How much pressure are women under to fit in then?

An extraordinary amount of pressure. When new members enter the military, if you’re successful, the last thing in the world you want to do is to draw any attention to yourself as different or unique in any way. And already if they’re females, they’re different. There’s incredible pressure to suppress femininity and be one of the guys. When I asked women who’ve been in the military about the sexist jokes, many of them will say, Well, although I don’t like them, I’m just not going to put myself out and say I don’t like them because that will look like I’m not one of the group. And so they go along. Slowly, this is changing.

You found in your research that male initiation rituals still go on in the military.

Yes, it’s something that’s in the shadows. Typically, military rituals — like fraternity rituals — take the initiate into this dark underworld where they’re deprived of sleep, infantilized and feminized. Often there’s a good deal of homoeroticism. Simulated sex is not unusual. The problem is, what we’re talking about are secret practices in a very closed institution and there’s typically not a lot of scrutiny.

I write about one special forces unit in the Canadian military that staged an initiation practice in which the one African-American initiate was pulled around by a leash and a dog collar. Similarly, Lynndie England in Abu Ghraib was holding a leash attached to a crawling Iraqi prisoner. These practices, though horrifying, are unfortunately not that uncommon.

Some apologists for the administration have argued these [actions] are like the hazing that goes on in fraternities. The difference is that although the same thing might be enacted in a frat initiation, eventually and finally, the frat member is free to get in his car and go home if things get too tough. When an individual isn’t free, that very act becomes torture.

I saw “Control Room” recently, the documentary about Al Jazeera. The director shows interviews with a few young American soldiers in which they’re asked why they came to Iraq. Every soldier says, “I follow orders.” How programmed are soldiers? How free are they to have their own mind?

While the institution of the military certainly says you are free to disobey an unlawful order, the lower down you go on the hierarchy the more premium is placed on absolute obedience as opposed to independent question of orders. The place I found it most troubling is when you look at the [advancement] of officers. One would think that if there’s any place you would want to encourage questioning it would be at the officer level. Now, I’m not sure if it’s still performed today, but just a couple of years ago, midshipmen (students training to be Naval officers) at the Naval Academy, as part of their summer basic training, were led into a prison interrogation system. The upperclassmen played the interrogators and dramatized a mock interrogation to frighten the neophytes. The plebes were psychologically abused and interrogated. It inscribes this idea that to be a good leader you must be a good follower. If you’re going to get ahead you need to not get out of place in the chain of command.

The sexual undercurrent at Abu Ghraib and in these initiation rituals — where does that come from?

The military is a kind of brotherhood. I would call aspects of these initiation rituals “cultic.” Within that brotherhood, there’s male love. It’s not surprising that an erotic element is involved. But in this enactment of eroticism, there is also punishment.

I did quite a bit of work in Australia at the defense force academy. There, pranks went like this: A freshman would be charged with something bogus. It might be something as simple as, “The person you went out with this weekend was a dog. She didn’t meet standards of acceptable beauty.” There would be a fake trial. The end of the trial was always conviction. All of this existed for ritual punishment and it took various homoerotic forms. For example, they sprayed whip cream on a freshman’s genitals and another freshman would have to lick the cream off him.

In Colorado Springs, at the Air Force Academy — and this did reach the light of day and it was discontinued — one guy would tightly hold an apple in his rear end and another guy had to eat the apple out of his rear end.

In the book, you also mention some bizarre rituals involved in the Navy’s “crossing the line” ceremonies, performed onboard ships since the 1600s.

Yes, these kinds of things are not that atypical in some of the Navy’s crossing-the-line ceremonies. When a ship crosses the equator, King Neptune comes up from the sea. It’s a carnivalesque thing. An enlisted guy takes charge of the ship as King Neptune and all the people who haven’t crossed the equator are initiated. What they typically do is go through this gantlet and its wet and slippery. The other people who’ve crossed the equator already have their wet towels and they’re slapping the initiates. Then they have to go through this tube that’s filled with all kinds of garbage. It’s called the whale’s asshole. The initiates are reborn at the end.

Some of the ceremonies in the past have gotten out of hand. In one example, the King Neptune, accompanied by his son, the Royal Baby, who’s usually the fattest sailor onboard dressed in a diaper, has this hose that’s attached to his groin. The initiate would have to come and bow down and suck this hose.

Now this doesn’t happen in all crossing-the-line ceremonies; it doesn’t even happen in most. But certainly the whole gantlet part of it is there. We saw it in the Tailhook scandal. These naval aviators in the Las Vegas Hilton formed this gantlet, and women trying to get down the hallway were being treated the way an initiate would be treated in a crossing-the-line ceremony. But in this special sexist version the women were groped and mauled. This was a form of torture.

And there are no rules in the military warning about this stuff?

Yes, there are rules against a lot of this stuff. For example, the “Hell Night” initiation of American Marine Corps’ elite “Silent Drill Team” in Yuma, Ariz., came to the public’s attention in 1993 when ABC’s “Prime Time” broadcast a video showing the new members of the drill team, naked, having their genitals covered with “edge dressing,” the highly caustic polish used to provide a polished edge to the soldier’s black dress shoes. They were also sprayed with urine. That certainly was never officially condoned. But it went on until a tape of this reached the public. On lower levels there are officers who look the other way. Of course, there are lots of commands in which this never happens.

I read a Barbara Ehrenreich article in the Los Angeles Times in which she said, “a certain feminism died in Abu Ghraib.” She had more faith that women would never do these kinds of things. Does military training serve to strip women of their gender?

It does — and it encourages its suppression. Now I haven’t seen a lot of the photos and videotapes from Abu Ghraib — a lot of them aren’t available yet — but if you look at the one that’s been the most scandalous, the one of England with the leash, what you see is the use of a woman to pose as a dominatrix. The other soldiers are staging England. You certainly have some dereliction in duty on the part of some of the people in charge, but I’ve seen no indication that women are orchestrating this whole practice. The women are certainly willing participants, but I think what they’re doing is performing in a male ritual.

But the person who was running the prison was a woman, Gen. Janis Karpinski.

There have been accounts that she did know that some abuses were going on but these were in areas of the prison that had been put under other command. I’m not sure and I think that story still needs to be revealed.

Given all your research were you surprised that this story broke or did it make some sort of morbid sense to you given all you’ve learned?

I’ve done a book on American prisons, too. Prisons are places where absolute power can be brought to bear on those under your control. Therefore, if there is not absolutely tight regulation on individuals who have that power, and if they don’t know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing, abuses can happen really easily. So you have that prison situation. Then, even prior to this you have the current administration deciding that we’re not necessarily bound by the rules that we have defined for ourselves as a civilized democratic society, the rules that we’ve agreed to based on the Geneva Convention. That lays the groundwork for things to get out of hand. To find out there was abuse in Iraqi prisons, considering that we’d abdicated our responsibility to the Geneva Convention, doesn’t necessarily surprise me. The fact that this kind of abuse took place in a ritualized form that I’ve seen in military culture doesn’t surprise me. That doesn’t mean that I’m not terribly shocked. It’s horrifying.

Did it surprise you that the abuses were so well documented by the soldiers?

No, that really doesn’t surprise me. These kinds of practices, certainly in initiation rituals, are always photographed or videotaped. And the reason they are, in the context of initiating one of your own, is to preserve the pollution and shame that the whole process represents. So if somebody gets out of line in the future, you produce the photographs and say, “See what happened to you? You’re dressed in women’s clothing. You’re abject.” There’s always a trail.

Do you think the abuses at Abu Ghraib will have any effect on how far these initiation rituals are taken in the future?

Most people are not seeing Abu Ghraib in any way in relationship to military culture — certainly the administration doesn’t want to see this as an indictment of any aspects of military culture. They want to see it as an aberrant act of a few. And I would argue that unless you look at this in the context of all these other abuses, you’re not going to do anything other than deal with the symptoms. You’re not really going to transform the culture.

So it makes sense that author Rachel Cohen, in her book “A Chance Meeting” — in which she chronicles encounters and friendships between American artists from the Civil War to the civil rights era — makes the risky decision to imagine, here and there, what her subjects were thinking or how their relationships might have affected them. Although Cohen read more than 400 books for her project and most of “A Chance Meeting” is well documented, each chapter also includes a fictionalized paragraph or two. Sometimes Cohen suggests the impact another artist had on one’s work; in other cases, she hints at romance or deep personal disappointment. Her writing is comfortably intimate and heartfelt, her respect and passion for each of her subjects almost quiet and assuring in its ease.

She writes not as a fan or critic, but almost as a kind of peer. Reading the book, one feels as though Cohen has managed to land a place in the carriage between W.E.B. DuBois and William James, or snagged a corner in Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, where she sipped a cocktail and eavesdropped on Hart Crane or Edward Steichen. When she writes about Katherine Anne Porter lying out in the Mexican sun, you almost believe Cohen had the spot right next to her.

Salon spoke to Cohen from her home in Brooklyn about Mark Twain’s relationship with Ulysses S. Grant, James Baldwin’s lifelong friendship with Richard Avedon (they worked on their high school literary magazine together), and how Norman Mailer reacted when she called.

You wrote this book over the course of 10 years. Where did the idea come from?

I was driving around the country and I was trying to figure something out about America and American writers and about myself as a writer, and I wasn’t having very much luck. It was a lot harder than I thought; I had a kind of 20-year-old optimism about “Travels With Charley,” not realizing that Steinbeck was not 20 when he wrote that book. I was reading a lot and I was trying to make up for various lacks in my education, which everybody feels when they graduate from college. I went to a lot of monuments around the U.S. — I went to Vicksburg [Miss.] and a lot of other Civil War battlefields. I went to civil rights monuments and Willa Cather’s house.

When I was at Vicksburg, I bought Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs and was literally standing in the gift shop and paging through and saw that they’d been published by Mark Twain. I was so surprised. It was such a shock — I don’t know why — that those two enormous figures, who were so mythic, were friends and had this complex, competitive, generous relationship. It was incredibly engaging for me. It actually took me about three years to write a piece about their relationship.

Really? Why?

It was hard. I was learning a lot of things about writing all at once.

And Civil War history is daunting.

It is. There’s a lot to read, and it’s hard to sift through it. A lot of it is beautifully written, so you get caught up in the details of the battles.

Twain fought on the Confederate side, right?

Yes, briefly, for two or three weeks or whatever it was. He was in Missouri and a lot of people were for secession. He joined up with a ragtag bunch of people who thought the whole thing was a lark. As young men do when war starts, they thought, “Oh, hooray, let’s go, it will be over next week!” And he almost immediately realized it was a terrible mistake for him, deserted, and escaped to Nevada and didn’t come back until the war was over.

Did he and Grant talk about that much?

I don’t know how much that’s on record. Twain thought about that a lot when he was with Grant and then when he was writing about their relationship and when he wrote that essay, “A Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” It was something that he was always trying to come to terms with.

And Grant ended up in poverty, right?

Yes, a weird kind of poverty because lots of things were given to him and taken care of for him by people who admired what he had done and felt patriotically about him. But at the same time there were no jobs for him to have. No one did anything constructive so that he could live a life that he enjoyed. He ended up a little trapped by his own fame. It’s hard to figure out how to follow being general of all the armies and president. He also had a bad head for business and chose corrupt associates.

At what point did he write those memoirs?

At the very end. He died two weeks after he finished them. He lived to finish them.

Did Twain edit them or just publish them?

He edited them a little bit and gave encouragement. But as far as I know — and I haven’t made a close textual study of it — it wasn’t a close edit.

So you read 400 books or so for this book. Were they mostly secondary sources? What did you read?

I read at least one serious biography for each of the figures, but usually two or three. There were lots I didn’t read — there are probably 400 Mark Twain biographies, for example. I read a lot of letters and journals and memoirs, but all published material, not archival material. I read the works of the people, which was a lot because many of these people wrote 30 or 40 books.

Were you reading up until you finished the book?

It was a continual process. There’s always another novel by Henry James. Zora Neale Hurston’s letters were published fairly late in my project. But I tried to read a critical mass of material before I started writing, enough that I had a clear sense of the person, that I felt I understood the details that should be prominent, and that I felt I had the story I wanted to tell. But not so much that I felt obliged to every detail. There’s a point at which you’re oversaturated. I tried not to get to that point before I started writing.

As I got deeper into your book I discovered all of these small and large connections you were making between these artists. Were there any last-minute surprise connections that you made when you were far into the writing process?

The set of people I was working with was pretty solid for the last year or so of the project. But before that there were certainly lots of changes. I remember discovering fairly late that Elizabeth Bishop had considered editing an edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s stories and then decided that Willa Cather’s edition was better and she didn’t need to do it. That was sort of magical, because I had been associating Bishop with Jewett and Cather — thinking that they all had a sense of landscape that was related — so to discover that Bishop really cared about Jewett’s work and knew of Cather’s edition was a nice line to be able to draw.

There were even smaller ones: In an early chapter, a 24-year-old W.E.B. DuBois and his then professor, William James, visit Helen Keller. Then, in one of the later chapters, involving a visit between Charlie Chaplin and DuBois, Keller sends DuBois a 90th birthday greeting, remembering their visit from long ago. Did I get that right?

That I knew about early and that was always my intention. But in an earlier version, those greetings came early in the book, and then as that developed it became clear that it made more sense to have it later. So Keller could return. I was always interested in the pleasures of return. It was nice for me to see people come back again and again.

Why did you zero in on this group of people in particular? Were they just artists whose work interested you?

I really wanted a variety of relationships, so I was interested in people who knew and edited each other for 40 years and people who only met once. I was interested in relationships that were nurturing and supportive and ones that broke down. Then I made a time division — I wanted to start around the time of the Civil War and go through to the 1960s, the country’s second schism and moment of turmoil. There were people who didn’t fit within that framework. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville — they really were earlier. Then there were people who seemed to me not right to approach in this manner, like someone like Emily Dickinson, whose work I love, but I wasn’t interested in getting at her as a person. She wasn’t running around and writing lots of letters and making herself available in that way, so it felt inappropriate to pull her into this.

And some of the others you left out — Fitzgerald and Hemingway, for example?

It was partly just that a lot had already been said about their personal relationships. I didn’t feel that I had anything new or exciting to bring to that. Also they didn’t really fit with the lines that I was interested in — like the influence of Mark Twain or Henry James or Walt Whitman or Sarah Orne Jewett, and what they generated.

One of the questions that seems to come up a lot is that these artists were actively defining themselves as American artists and asking what that meant. It seems as though that was something you were after.

There were a lot of different approaches. For Walt Whitman there was something about capaciousness and encompassing — his sense of America as a place that was endlessly open and accepting. There were people who had a feeling that there was a rebelliousness to American art. Certainly Mark Twain had that thing of thumbing his nose at European convention, which was something that John Cage had, and Marcel Duchamp loved and gravitated to when he came here. And then there are certain feelings about American landscapes and how to talk about the actual country itself — those you find in Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Cather and Elizabeth Bishop.

I noticed that you seemed to be particularly interested in photographers and their connections with people through these images. Why?

I was interested in making portraits and how you do that, so portrait photographers were a way for me to think about that. Also, in meetings between photographers and their subjects, there is an artifact. There’s a photograph, so there’s something that allows you to see what the photographer saw of that person. That was helpful to me in reconstructing these situations. A final important reason was that a lot of these portrait photographers were collectors. They were establishing collections of those that they felt to be illustrious Americans. Mathew Brady, Edward Steichen, Carl Van Vechten, Richard Avedon — collecting was a serious motivation for them.

I noticed in your notes in the back of the book that you spoke to Richard Avedon. Was there anyone else you spoke to?

I talked to Norman Mailer and Avedon, the only two central figures who are still living. Mailer I talked to on the phone and he kindly read the chapters I had written about him and gave me his responses. Some of those I incorporated and some of those I didn’t. He was able to correct some minor factual points and give me a sense of his perspective.

Was he nice?

Yes, he was incredibly pleasant and helpful. And Avedon was even more participatory. He was very excited about the project and read the whole book right away and then allowed me to use a lot of the photographs and was part of the endeavor of choosing the photographs. He also offered a lot more material — stories he thought would be valuable.

I was fascinated by his relationship with James Baldwin. They went to high school together and worked on the school literary magazine and stayed friends. But in the ’60s, there was tension between them. Was it because it was such a traumatic and volatile moment in time, or were there problems between them as individuals?

Probably both. It was a really traumatic time and Baldwin was experiencing it all in his body, which makes sense. The violence being done to African-Americans was incredibly physical. It was a dangerous feeling just to be walking around on the streets. People he knew were being assassinated. I think he was quivering with that all the time, and a lot of people who were dealing with him at that time felt that he was really quick to anger and easily upset. That seems a condition of that time; to be a sensitive person in that moment would almost necessitate that kind of response. Then, also, there were all the things that happen between friends when you’re young and optimistic together and then grow and make different decisions and start to feel that you’re not the people you were. You get irritable with each other.

Did Norman Mailer talk to you about your chapter in which you explore his envy of Robert Lowell?

He didn’t talk about that with me, but he talks about it a lot in “Armies of the Night.” So that stuff comes straight out of there, which is a nice thing about Mailer’s journalism. He’s so personally available and so conscious of using himself as a character in his own work.

Why was he envious of Lowell?

Mailer was, as he said, a Jew from Brooklyn, and he was trying to make it in a literary world that he felt was dominated by people who were not Jews from Brooklyn. People who were Boston Brahmins, or Protestants, at least. So he started with a rebellious feeling about people he felt had been given honorable positions in society without having done anything. He felt that Robert Lowell was from this very respectable family, many generations at Harvard, whereas Mailer had been the first in his family to go to Harvard, and struggled up in his own. He envied Lowell his “great Puritan slouch,” his ease and authority.

It’s lovely how that comes full circle. That’s the last chapter of your book, and the book begins with a young William Dean Howells, in 1860, trying to fit into the famous Boston literary crowd.

Absolutely. Lowell was a descendant of the people who were initially the people William Dean Howells was worried about, the people who passed judgment on Mark Twain. That Boston sense of itself continued. On the other hand, it really broke down. By the time Lowell and Mailer are marching on Washington, the center of culture is not Boston anymore. And although the judgments of a Robert Lowell are important, they’re not as important.

Another prominent place in the book is Harlem. There was an interesting schism between Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois.

It was an intermingling of the political and the artistic. DuBois felt that art should be respectable, or that the art of African-Americans should be respectable, because he was hoping to expand the presence of African-Americans in the middle class. At least that was one of his initial political impulses — he became more Marxist in his thinking later. He wasn’t really interested in the kind of art that had a lot of sex in it, or that was folk art. He wanted to prove that African-Americans could create a kind of higher art. On the other hand, he was one of the very first people to recognize that spirituals were an important art form, and he quoted a lot of spirituals in “The Souls of Black Folk” — he wasn’t immune to the artistic accomplishments of working and enslaved black people.

But Langston Hughes was really interested in folk art and the voice of the people and so the magazine he created with Zora Neale Hurston and other people — Fire! — was really all about the edge and the new and the down and dirty.

You have a great chapter about Hurston and Hughes. Was she in love with him?

I don’t know. I think she loved him, and that she probably wondered about it herself, how she felt about him.

And he was incredibly private about his sex life.

He was very private. It seems now that he was mostly interested in men, but at the time people really felt that they didn’t know. Carl Van Vechten, who slept with whoever he felt like and made no judgments about sexuality and was certainly someone you’d feel comfortable confiding in, felt that Langston Hughes had no sexuality. It was hard to tell.

Carl Van Vechten appears in this book quite a bit. He was like William Dean Howells, in the sense that he functioned as a supporter of and connector between people who are more famous to us today.

That’s always the case in history — the supporting figures are not the ones that go down. I absolutely thought there was a similarity there, and although his name did go down and he was a great artist in his own right, I think Alfred Stieglitz is another person like that, who really inspired a lot of people, and made a space where people could go and study and learn and grow.

In each chapter you imagine your subjects’ thoughts and sometimes even their actions. Did you wrestle with that? How much anxiety did you feel about fictionalizing some of these people’s lives?

I thought about it a lot. I redid a lot of details in the more imagined sentences because I felt I hadn’t gotten it quite right. Or I read another book and realized that a nuance was too far in one direction, or felt I left out something crucial. And I was trying to remain true to what I thought was the integrity of the different people I was writing about. It seemed like a big responsibility.

Alexandra Robbins, author of “Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities,” can’t express the same enthusiasm for most real-life sororities. While Robbins insists the book isn’t “anti-sorority,” after practically living with sisters for an academic year, she told Salon she wouldn’t want “a future daughter” to join one of these groups.

Robbins doesn’t rail against sororities in this undercover account of the lives of four sorority sisters at an unnamed (and well-disguised) university. In fact, when she easily might have ridiculed or chastised the girls for their childish, catty or dangerous behavior, Robbins bites her tongue. Still, most people will come away from “Pledged” feeling the same way Robbins does: Who would want their daughter to be constantly reminded she has to be skinny, rich and man-crazy? Without even going into the hazing stories, sororities seem like any mother’s worst nightmare.

Or not. Throughout the South, Robbins explains, moms still push their girls hard to get into the right sororities. They even shell out the dough for “rush consultants,” something akin to pageant consultants, who guide the girls through the rush process, telling them what to wear and how to behave. As Robbins points out, in the South, what sorority you belong to has lasting implications for not only your social life, but for your professional life as well. In states like Alabama and Texas, Robbins said, “Your sorority affiliation is more important than your major.”

We’ve all heard the sordid tales coming out of the Greek scene — the heavy drinking, the startlingly old-fashioned values, the exclusivity and racism, the date rapes, the hazing deaths. Robbins folds all of these weightier issues into her narrative, while also offering an often humorous snapshot of today’s college youth, from their highly personal and expressive Instant Messaging “away messages” (“When’s it my turn to be the priority? Could ya throw me a frickin’ bone please?”) to their alcohol-fueled attempts at seductive, girl-on-girl dancing (the “booty train” comes to mind). “Pledged” is also a look at that moment in young people’s lives when they’re deciding what sort of person they want to be, away from home and on their own. College, after all, should be about a new kind of freedom. Do sororities quash these girls’ identities before they get a chance to explore them?

Robbins — a graduate of Yale who did not join a sorority — is also the author of “Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power,” “Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties” and the forthcoming “Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis: Advice From Twentysomethings Who Have Been There and Survived,” out in October. She spoke to Salon over coffee in New York.

How did you get inside the sororities? How did you go undercover?

I have to be careful. I can’t really talk much about what I had to do to get the material for this book because I can’t risk identifying the four main girls I followed. They’ll get kicked out of the sorority.

Why did they agree to do it?

While I interviewed hundreds of sorority sisters across the country, these four girls’ stories would be most representative of sorority life. It was kind of an honor for them. They’re good girls and they enjoyed sorority life and they wanted to share that.

One thing that surprised me was that sororities have stricter rules against the media than they do against hazing. I was kicked out of the first sorority house I tried to be involved with. I was blacklisted from an entire campus. When I started writing this book, the 26 national historically white sororities had just instituted a media blackout because they’re upset about the MTV show “Sorority Life.” They forced me to go undercover.

What are they upset about on the MTV show? What do they think the public doesn’t know and is going to find out?

That was a question I came away with, because knowing what I know now, I have to wonder whether sororities are afraid that the media will portray sororities untruthfully or that they’ll expose too much of the truth.

I would imagine that most of these girls are aware of the stereotypes of sorority girls and frat boys — maybe not so much in the South, where it’s so ingrained — but most of them must know about the negative images. What do they say about that?

In many cases these are sororities of superlatives — the prettiest, the coolest. But Sabrina, one of my four main subjects, said to me, “I know the stereotypes have to come from somewhere and I’m starting to see where.” She saw that in her own sorority.

What was she talking about?

She was talking about the wealth and the looks and the standards they have. She was an impoverished African-American girl trying to make her way in a predominantly white wealthy sorority. She felt isolated a lot of the time.

Were you surprised by the money — how much disposable income some of these girls have?

There was a group that at the end of the year as a gift to the seniors give them each something from Tiffany. And that was a group that doesn’t do much community service.

Did they wonder about how much time they were wasting on this stuff? Meetings are more important than midterms in some sororities.

It makes no sense. Yes, sororities require a minimum GPA. Fine, that’s great. But they’re so sorority-centric that the time that could be concentrated on academics is spent doing things like making posters and writing funny songs.

Why did Sabrina, who was so hardworking and concerned about grades, want to join?

As an impoverished black woman she saw a wealthy white sorority as a steppingstone. Whether it’s going to provide the kind of network she envisioned, I doubt it, because white sororities don’t have the same network that black sororities do. One African-American official said their network is stronger than the black churches.

So let’s get into that. What are the differences between black and white sororities?

First of all, I think it’s funny that both of them are called sororities because they’re entirely different things. In the black sororities they celebrate achievement academically and they really do work toward community service. As much as the white sororities claim that’s the case in their groups, it’s not really so. White sororities focus on relationships. They have ceremonies and songs and rituals celebrating relationship milestones, whereas the reward for getting the highest GPA in one house was a bag of potato chips.

That’s a completely different atmosphere than the black sororities. They wiped out the pledge period in the 1990s, though there is still some hazing. But they don’t let you rush when you’re a first-semester freshman just getting to school and they don’t rush you until after you learn about the history and get to know the girls. And it’s not even a rush process. It’s an application.

Do sororities significantly reshape these girls’ identities? Do you think that people come out of them different from how they went in? Or did they all start out similar and that’s why they joined the same club?

Sororities are sort of input-output machines where you go in one way and there is definitely an aura of conformity in there, and it spits you out of the machine another way. Instead of enhancing a girl’s individuality, there’s a tendency to swallow a girl’s identity whole. That’s why I’ve heard countless stories of girls going into a sorority looking one way and after a year they look like everyone else. Or you hear girls say “that’s the blonde sorority” or “that’s the brunette sorority,” and they’ll identify people that way. “That’s the slightly pudgy sorority.”

Does it go beyond looks, though? Do they want the same things from life? Do they have the same attitudes about social issues

Oh yeah, you will find conformity in a lot of areas, attitudes toward … well, in the sororities I was in there weren’t a lot of deep conversations, so it’s hard to address that.

What about professional aspirations?

I rarely heard them talk about professional aspirations. But you will see sororities where everybody’s a dance major or an elementary education major because they gravitate to each other.

You were in the meeting when they chose the pledges after rush. What sort of things are they talking about?

Kate Spade. Gucci.

Right, they’re looking at hundreds of girls and they remember them by their purses.

To be fair, that’s why they focus so much on designers — it’s a memory tool. In some sororities they blow up pictures of the rushes and the sisters have to memorize them all. Oh — homecoming queen! Cheerleader!

I was surprised because after getting to know the four girls you profiled, I could not imagine any of them really being that shallow.

That was so important to me — I’m glad you said that. That’s why I chose these four. These are bighearted girls. They’re sweet, they’re smart and they’re friendly.

So do some of them seem passive about their decision to join? Sometimes it seems like they don’t think about it much, like it’s just a thing to do.

It depends on where you are in the country. In the South, some people take their affiliation so seriously that if they think they won’t get into a particular sorority at a particular school, they’ll matriculate at a school to get into that sorority and then switch to their [first-choice] school after initiation where they have to be taken as a sister. For some people this decision drives their entire college career.

What about the hazing stories? You give many examples. There’s the “circling the fat” stories where sisters or frat brothers mark up the cellulite on girls’ bodies. At Northeastern University, girls had to prove they hadn’t showered for a week and stay up all night “separating candy with their noses.” At DePauw University, girls were branded with lit cigarettes. Women have been left in the snow and gotten frostbite. They’ve drowned in the ocean. What else?

There are so many body-conscious activities — “boob ranking” comes to mind. They had a certain amount of time to take off their shirts and bras and go around and examine each other’s chests and by the time the clock was up they had to line up according to size. The sisters did that to humiliate them.

Just last week there was a sorority at Loyola University in New Orleans that was accused of making its members drink and then eat their own vomit. It’s still going on.

Obviously, lots of kids drink a ton in college. Did you have statistics that prove that binge drinking is worse in the Greek system?

I wouldn’t want to rail against sororities for alcohol abuse because I think that’s a college thing. I was a college student. I know what it’s like.

Eating disorders, though, I would guess — just in my opinion — are more prevalent in sororities simply because of the emphasis placed on body image and on thinness. You’re not going to see a lot of obese girls in these sororities. They look for thinness. There was a girl in Vicki’s sorority who found an article of clothing and said, “Laura Ann, is this yours?” And Laura Ann, who was probably the heaviest girl in the sorority, said no. The other replied, “But it’s a medium!”

Another issue that figured into “Pledged” was date rape — two of the four girls you followed had been date-raped.

I didn’t know when I chose them that that was the case. Both of those rapes happened after Greek functions. I’m not going to say that rape is more prevalent in sororities, though studies have been done making that accusation. When you have an organization that so hinges on relationships with men and alcohol, you’re sort of setting the stage.

The fraternity of the guy who date-raped Caitlin basically took the accusation as if it was by her whole sorority — so it turned into this huge thing. In terms of attitudes about rape, Caitlin’s sorority supported her. The guy had to transfer.

However, you have cases like the one of that girl in the South who was raped and left unconscious. Her sorority sisters found her and left her on the stoop of another sorority’s house, rang the bell, and ran away. When she got out of the hospital and told the president, she was told not to tell a single person because they don’t want nationals to find out.

You don’t name that school. But I will say that Southern Methodist University seemed like one of the worst schools for sorority life and backward values. Why?

It’s Texas, it’s wealthy, it’s tradition. That’s why I wanted to mention it because of “Pigs’ Run” [where the girls run through the streets squealing to their new sorority while frat brothers drench the girls, wearing mandatory white T-shirts, with hoses]. That’s also where you had Ponytail-gate in the 1980s where the sorority sisters were chosen to prostitute themselves to help get athletic recruits to come do the school.

You found the girls in white sororities to be pretty man-centric.

So man-centric that one of the girls I followed felt so pressured to find a date for the event that she slept with the guy who date-raped her. She was so pressured to find a boyfriend and to find dates. Every other week there was a mixer where she needed a date.

So are there efforts to reform these organizations?

A former sorority president and a vice president of a university told me that the women in the national office struggle with change. They want sororities to be throwbacks where girls were prim and proper and wore their pearls. They’re just so out of touch with sorority life and the girls as individuals. The changes I suggest are to wipe out pledging, overhaul the rush process, wrest control from the national offices and institute regional control.

One of the most shocking scenes in the book takes place at a Northeast Greek Leadership Association Conference called “The Greek P.R. War Room” where you are undercover. The presenter was so angry about the media.

There I was, an undercover reporter, in a middle of lecture where the guy is railing against undercover reporters. He also said: “One death takes ten thousand hours of community service to make up for the P.R. aspect.”

Flanders spoke to Salon from San Francisco about the media’s failure to expose these women’s true backgrounds, Condoleezza Rice’s relationship with Chevron, and how Karen Hughes figured out that looking at the world in simple good vs. evil terms was crucial to President Bush’s success.

Your general point in the book is that the Bush administration has used women to put a sweeter face on some upsetting policies. How do they do this exactly? And is there any proof that Americans fall for it?

What first initiated my interest in this subject was watching what happened in January 2001, when the Bush administration came into office with the minority of the popular vote and the slimmest proportion of African-American support of any president in half a century. Their job was to articulate that the Republican Party was going to reunify the country, bring everyone together, and really represent the nation. The president’s naming of the Cabinet secretaries was a big part of sending that message — five women, two African-Americans, one Hispanic, one Asian-American, one Arab-American, a Democrat. This got applause in the media. The New York Times talked about George Bush putting forth a governing team every bit as ethnically and racially diverse as President Clinton’s. “A rainbow” was the description a guest used on CNN. So it worked, with respect to the media.

Did it work among the population? Well, it’s hard to tell. But I do think the compassionate conservative facade worked, in that it took several months to see statistics showing real dissatisfaction among women voters. By August of 2001, Bush’s support among women and moderate voters was way down in the doldrums, some of the lowest statistics in a decade. But in the first days, I think it did help, yes.

And now, after Sept. 11 and two wars, does Bush have more women supporters?

The polls that I’ve looked at show John Kerry leading by a predictable 10 or 11 percent among women. There is a gender gap and it’s been there since 1980 — women have preferred Democrats for president. The point is that in this election coming up, every swing voter will count. There is no constituency more unspoken for than moderate women, particularly married suburban women. Increasingly we’re hearing about unmarried single women being a critical voting block.

Just this last weekend we had the Bush campaign sending out press releases about what the victories — the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq — have brought for women and how women should be grateful for what Bush has done for women in those countries. I think there is a conscious effort out there to make that pitch because this is a huge group — women vote more than men.

Which is obviously why you’ve decided to zero in on the women in his administration, assuming that American women are responding to them. This is a problem the Republicans have worried about for a long time, right?

Oh, yes. They’ve been concerned about it since the 1980 election when they thought that pandering to male fears of female equality and civil rights wouldn’t do them much harm, and that women would vote like their husbands. It didn’t happen. You saw this large “gender canyon” — as the Emily’s List people call it — with women abandoning the Republican Party in droves. You’ve seen a change in that, in the last decade or so, white women have actually voted majority Republican. It’s women of color, particularly African-American women, who give Democratic candidates the edge.

This is contested territory, and it’s territory that the Democrats used to have sewn up because they were the party of reproductive rights, of the Equal Rights Amendment, they supported the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But they backed away from that. They dropped the ERA off the platform in the late ’80s. I think that the Democratic Party has some work to do to really win women solidly to their side, just as the Republicans have a lot of work to do. But I’d say that the Republicans have been doing a good amount of work.

You have some research in the book that showed that one of the solutions the Republicans came up with was just that they should hire more women.

In August of 2001, when those nasty statistics I was talking about came out, the White House invited magazine editors and publishers to meet the officeholders. They announced they were going to spend millions of dollars on a new campaign called “Winning Women” that was going to profile Hughes, Whitman, Rice, etc. The woman who’s the co-chair of the RNC, Ann Wagner, a 38-year-old suburban mom — her description exactly fits the demographic they’re aiming for. In summer of 2003, the GOP effort in California to unseat Gov. Gray Davis also featured a lot of women on the campaign trail. We found some memos [suggesting] that was a key part of their strategy. It was important for them to use the opportunity to present an image of diverse Republican women. They’re no fools. They know they’re not going to win the presidency if their constituency continues to be men, and white male Southerners at that.

Let’s go back to the question of the media. You say that in the profiles of these “Bushwomen,” journalists tend to write about their makeup and clothing and less about their background. But then again, you also cite media articles that go into the women’s background, so the information must be out there.

Of course; there’s been some excellent stuff done, but the rest of the stuff has been so startling. After Condoleezza Rice is appointed national security advisor, she’s coming to office having directed an oil company and managed a multimillion-dollar university and served as a Sovietologist in the White House at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. She’s taking on the top national security post in the Cabinet, and what did the New York Times talk about? It talked about her hair, her hemline and her place of birth. The fact of her policy positions or attitudes toward security didn’t come up until the 27th paragraph of this long, soft feature. You just wouldn’t see the same treatment given Dick Cheney.

Is this true of profiles of women in general, not just women politicians?

I think there’s a pattern. We do tend to see softer features on women in public office than we would see of men. It’s not always true — the treatment that Hillary Clinton received was very rough, the treatment of [1984 Democratic vice presidential nominee] Geraldine Ferraro was very tough. But for a crew that have between them half a century of expertise in critical areas of U.S. policy, this group of women have received remarkably scant attention.

Instead, we’re getting stereotypes, the type of stories that the White House plays to. For example, [Secretary of Labor] Elaine Chao, who says, “I’ve come to this country as an immigrant from China.” She doesn’t exactly mislead the public, but when she says, “I came to this country not speaking a word of English,” it sets off a preexisting narrative in the public’s mind that summons to mind images of sweatshops and Chinese takeout — which is just not her personal experience! She grew up in a well-to-do shipping magnate’s family, her father benefited from opening trade with China, she went to Mount Holyoke and took a golf class. Fair enough, that was her experience, but let’s get the details so we’re not off thinking that she has credentials to bring to her job that she doesn’t in fact have.

Also, there seems to be this assumption that because they’re women they’re going to be looking out for women. You point out that’s not necessarily the case.

No, this whole con job, this presenting of a multiculti facade, works in our media to suggest that something is enlightened about this administration’s social and economic policy. In fact, integration in the halls of power, in the beginning of the 21st century, doesn’t indicate anything beyond just that. Unless you see serious attention going to the reality behind the facade, you just see the identity-politics puppets, and you don’t see that they are actually hardcore policymakers in their own right.

Condoleezza Rice had a really troubled time when she was provost of Stanford, didn’t she? [Rice held the post from 1993 to 1999.]

She sure did. It’s arguable that she was brought in to be the face on a very tough anti-affirmative action, pro-budget cutting regime that was trying to dig Stanford out of a financial hole, and did it mostly by cutting back on staff and funding for multicultural programs. It seemed to some people there at the time that she was getting away with things that a white man never could. She wasn’t an expert, it seemed to them, in how federal affirmative action mandates actually worked. She would say things like, “We believe in affirmative action in hiring but not promotion” — well, federal affirmative action mandates require both. That’s the law.

Then of course the contradiction is that she likes to portray her experience as never having needed assistance in any way, when she obviously did. She says her family were lifelong Republicans, when actually her father had a much more complicated history. Has she ever talked about what her father was really like?

She’s made an allusion to him as a Republican voter, which he was. He registered in the 1950s in Birmingham, Ala. The story that was dug up by a Washington Post reporter about why that happened wasn’t exactly that the Republican Party was out there registering black people. [Neither party registered black voters in Alabama at the time. One individual worker in the county registrar's office agreed to register black voters, in secret, if they registered Republican.]

She told the Republican convention in 2000, “My father was a Republican,” and not much more than that, but, again, it summoned a picture. I dug around and found that this was a guy who supported Dr. King and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s civil rights movement in the 1960s in Birmingham. He was the first administrator of Head Start in that town, a program that this administration is basically trying to roll back. He was at the University of Denver in the 1970s as the assistant dean of arts and sciences, where he initiated a seminar series on the “Black Experience in America” that brought speakers to campus to talk about white supremacy as a structural problem in the U.S. and its continuing legacy. The speakers he brought included South African exiled poet Dennis Brutus, Fannie Lou Hamer, Andrew Young of the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] and Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam.

All I’m saying is that her family is a bit more complicated than she would have you believe. Her family narrative is that they’ve always been Republican, they never needed government assistance, she should have gotten to where she’s gotten, she didn’t need anyone’s help. Well, yes, she should have gotten to where she’s gotten. She’s supersmart. The problem is there were generations that should have gotten where she’s gotten, but institutional discrimination held them back.

She also said that George W. Bush would have liked her Granddaddy Rice.

To which I say, he wouldn’t have loved him if he was trying to vote Democratic in Florida.

The more disturbing part of her history for me was her relationship with Chevron and Nigeria.

I’m glad you bring that up, because I think that she has drawn on her experience in segregated Alabama to suggest something about her credentials in the area of civil rights. And I say that while that is her experience, her expertise as a professional has been different. Her expertise has been in the expansion of U.S. corporate reach, especially as the director of the Chevron Corp. throughout the 1990s. I approached the women of the Niger Delta and found that this was a period of tremendous struggle where the women of the Niger Delta, and the men too, were protesting to get jobs and clean water and access to healthcare from the corporation that was drilling this liquid gold from beneath their soil. They were shot down in the streets.

Chevron stands responsible for the deaths of local activists in the 1990s. Throughout that period, shareholders were actually bringing initiatives before the board, saying, “We need to review our relationship with this brutal dictatorship in Nigeria.” Rice was on the social policy committee of the Chevron board that reviewed those resolutions, and in every case rejected sending them on to the full board for consideration. Those are her politics? I just say she should be held to account for them. Where have the reporters been in this enormous chapter in her history?

There haven’t been any stories about this?

I’ve not seen one. I was the first person, I think, to look at those shareholder initiatives. And if there had been the odd article, it is nothing like what we know about Dick Cheney. Sexism is a problem of fairness, but in news reporting it’s also denying the public the information we need to understand our situation. Dick Cheney can’t go anywhere without people protesting. You see his face and you almost see the Iraqi oil contracts sprouting out of his head. But Condoleezza Rice doesn’t read that way. She can say, as she did to the National Association of Black Journalists, that the invasion of Iraq is about bringing democracy and civil rights to the people of Baghdad, and compare it to bringing civil rights to the people of her hometown, Birmingham. And it has the resonance that I think needs to be looked at in the context of her actual professional past.

Did you see the same sort of thing happening with Christine Todd Whitman?

The definition of political liberalism or conservatism is all done in social terms. We define someone as a liberal because they have liberal social views, so Whitman was described as a liberal ubiquitously —

Because she was pro-choice?

Yes. But her actual economic record was very different. She came to the governorship of New Jersey promising to cut taxes by 30 percent in three years, and she did it, and that made her the darling of tax cutters everywhere. She was the belle of the Republican ball at the convention of 1996. Not because of her position on choice, but because of her fiscal views. It’s the same with the environment. She’s given a lot of credit for protecting open space, but talk to inner-city environmentalists and they say, sure, she helped set aside some land for hiking and canoeing, but when it comes to urban pollution and the degradation of inner-city environments because of local corporations, her record in New Jersey stinks to high heaven.

She shut down the local ombudsman’s office, she created an ombudsman for business to help them navigate the state’s environmental laws — like Dick Cheney, frankly — and yet she came to the EPA with this reputation as a liberal and left with it too. She doesn’t have a bad thing to say about Bush policy, except for “the way” it was carried out.

Of course, you talk about how right after Sept. 11 she allowed everyone [in lower Manhattan] to go back to their homes, and she bears responsibility for that mistake.

Well, she played a critical role in that moment. And I’m hoping that down the road we may see some serious self-criticism from Whitman. I’m not holding my breath, but the burden on her is very great. She was the Cabinet secretary who came to New York and told us — I live very close to the World Trade Center — that the air was safe to breathe and the water was safe to drink. Even within her own EPA, they were saying, “We can’t possibly know that. How could we know that? We’ve never seen a situation like this before; our protocol would be to say to evacuate the area until we can be sure.”

And yet it was critically important to send the message that it was safe. Who was it important for? For the people of New York? For Wall Street, which needed to reopen as soon as possible? I would suggest that the more responsible message would have been we don’t know, we’re testing, we’re going to keep working on this, here are your options. But that wasn’t the message, because that wouldn’t have satisfied Wall Street.

It’s impossible to look at that situation and separate it from the fact that she and her husband had personal financial investments in the Travelers insurance corporation, which stood to lose millions in the Trade Center disaster. Really, she should have recused herself from the entire situation. She was also invested in the Port Authority of New York.

And Elaine Chao is the other one who has some pretty egregious conflicts of interest, right?

I don’t know what you even call them when the woman who’s the head of the Labor Department, which is the head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, is married to the top senator from Kentucky who has in his stable of supporters some of the top mining interests in the country. Conflict of interest hardly comes close to defining what we’re talking about here.

I wanted to get to Karen Hughes, because she seemed an exception here — she didn’t pretend to be anything else but a bulldog.

I have to say I have a lot of respect for Karen Hughes. She does an incredible job, she’s supersmart, and out of all of them she was the only one with the courtesy to tell me she wouldn’t sit down for an interview.

Hughes, though, is the one who’s responsible for this notoriously private White House, isn’t she?

Yes. I kick myself for not paying more attention to the 1994 governor’s race in Texas. A lot of the routines we saw brought to Washington were given a trial run then. As an attack dog for the Republican Party in Texas, Hughes was able to attack Gov. Ann Richards in a way that the good ol’ boys in Texas probably couldn’t have done. By the time George Bush came to run for office he didn’t need to engage in personal attacks on this beloved grandmother governor, because she had already been weakened by years of criticism and relentless attack by the Hughes-Rove spin machine.

And is she the one who started this good vs. evil paradigm Bush is so fond of?

I think so. She is somebody who has seen that if you can define the lines very simply, and eliminate the critical thinking and gray areas, then you present the public with harsh, sharp options that make it difficult to have the informed, complex debates that we need to have. That was genius for her candidate, and tragedy for democracy.

And you say she’s really not gone?

She never left. She’s a campaigner. She likes war. This is a woman who said she would have liked to work for Exxon after the Exxon-Valdez oil spill. She likes a fight.

One last thing: Was it Laura Bush who sold us the idea that the war in Afghanistan was about women’s liberation?

I’m not sure she thought up the idea, but she was the perfect mouthpiece for it. At the height of the bombing in 2001, when the U.S. was dropping the biggest bombs ever dropped on any country — those enormous 15,000-pound bombs, so large they have to be dropped out of a cargo plane — the first lady came out on the radio to say that this war wasn’t about revenge but that this was a war against a powerful force, the Taliban, who sought to dominate and repress the women of the world. That was a critical message to send when many people were saying the most powerful country in the world is dropping the most powerful, devastating bombs that kill everything in a 900-foot radius on one of the least developed countries on the planet. She put a feminist glow on some of the most brutal bombing of the war.

And the Bush administration’s failure to follow through on their promises to Afghan women is one of the great shames of this administration. Today, actually, a coalition of women’s groups gave Bush, in respect to what he’s done for women in Afghanistan, an A for rhetoric and a D for reality.

But as Coll dramatically draws out, two years later, by the summer of 2001, the Manson family enjoyed many more sympathizers within the CIA Counterterrorist Center. By then, “they worked long hours, exchanging Arabic translations across the office partitions, frequently ‘with a panic-stricken look’ in their eyes.” One officer in “Ghost Wars” remembers them telling one another, “We’re going to miss stuff. We are missing stuff. We can’t keep up.”

It’s these kinds of details that make “Ghost Wars” such a terrifying, and substantive, book. Beginning in 1979 and ending just days before Sept. 11, “Ghost Wars” follows various stories — the CIA’s relationship with the Afghans during the Cold War, the slow development of its understanding of bin Laden and al-Qaida, and the U.S. relationship with Ahmed Massoud, the Afghan resistance leader. In the end, Coll offers a surprisingly cohesive narrative of the makings of Sept. 11, 2001. Considering the United States’ long and tangled history with Afghanistan, and more generally, Islamic terrorism, he has no easy answers to the question that still rankles the world: How could Sept. 11 possibly have happened?

Coll, who is now the managing editor of the Washington Post, spoke to Salon by phone from his office in Washington.

Your book details the CIA’s relationship with Afghanistan throughout the 1980s, when the United States was arming the mujahedin against the Soviets. Since Sept. 11, we’ve heard a lot about how our abandonment of Afghanistan led to the rise of the Taliban and the empowerment of Osama bin Laden. What was the U.S. attitude toward Afghanistan during this crucial period in the early 1990s?

It began as a fairly sharp debate between the CIA and the State Department over whether it was worthwhile to hang in there. It sort of ended with a whimper. Initially, it was all very complicated because after the Soviets left they continued to support a communist Afghan government led by President Najibullah. Cold War hard-liners in Washington suspected that the Soviets didn’t really intend to withdraw from Afghanistan, and that they were going to use this government as a proxy.

So in Washington people couldn’t make up their minds about whether it was time to turn to politics or whether to continue to prosecute the war. The Afghan factions that we supported felt strongly that Najibullah had to go. The United Nations, meanwhile, was trying to negotiate a peaceful transition, and the State Department was interested in participating. The CIA thought it was a doomed project — they didn’t see any American interests worth the risks involved in getting involved in Afghan politics.

This begins in 1989 and ends around 1992. Think back to that time. It’s this very fast-moving and epochal moment in American history. The Berlin Wall falls in November of 1989, the coup against Gorbachev occurs in August of 1990, and the Soviet Union collapses altogether in December of 1991. So the reason I say it goes out with a whimper is because, in the end, the events in Europe and the Soviet Union were so momentous and so overwhelming for Washington that there was just no room for an issue like Afghanistan. The whole future of the global balance of power was in motion and Europe was being remade and the nuclear standoff was being torn down and everything was new. The complicated and seemingly intractable violence of Afghanistan’s civil war just fell off everyone’s list.

Right, and was this the same within the CIA. Or was anyone in the agency upset about this?

Most people in the CIA had the view that our work was done in Afghanistan. We went in there to drive the Soviets out, and we succeeded gloriously. We not only drove them out but we contributed to the collapse of Soviet communism, and we should not delude ourselves into thinking that we could do anything more in that part of that world. The State Department tended to argue passionately that we did have interests, even in a post-Soviet Afghanistan, that we had interests beyond humanitarian ones, that we needed to manage the political situation there so that it didn’t turn against us. And they basically lost the argument over the years.

At that point there was no American ambassador or CIA chief in Afghanistan, correct? And that was true until …

Until after the fall of the Taliban in November or December of 2001.

That long. And meanwhile — and this is one of the most important parts of your book — we had encouraged the relationship between the Afghans and the Saudis, and the Afghans and the Pakistanis. Were they still supporting different factions within Afghanistan throughout the 1990s?

They were. For Saudi Arabia and Pakistan the conflict continued to be important, even in the years it wasn’t for us. For them it was a regional conflict involving sectarian struggles between orthodox Sunni Islamists in Saudi Arabia and the Shiite government in Iran, between struggles to influence the new Central Asia that had opened up with the collapse of Soviet communism. If you lived in the neighborhood and you looked at Afghanistan, you saw a lot at stake. The Saudis and Pakistanis, and to some extent the Iranians, continued to pour money and weaponry into their favorite factions and that caused the war to intensify and continue.

So at the time Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Afghanistan was a mess.

It was a real crisis. The war was violent and seemingly intractable, the humanitarian situation was terrible, and efforts to intervene through diplomatic negotiations were languishing.

And Clinton did not have great affection for the CIA, right?

He certainly got off to a rough start. What he had in his head when he got into office I wouldn’t presume to say, but, first of all, he had no roots at the agency. He seems to have looked at the place with some suspicion, or at least distance. And then, worst of all, the first director he selected, James Woolsey, was someone Clinton didn’t have a relationship with, and who in turn did not have a relationship with the agency. Woolsey got off to a bad start.

At that point, how did the CIA view Osama bin Laden and the terrorist threat?

They were slow to see what it was made of. They were operating from old ideas and paradigms — that terrorism was linked to state agendas and sponsored by radical governments. To them, terrorists were typically secular nationalists or leftists looking to call attention to some cause rather than, for instance, inflict mass civilian casualties. The whole structure that we now see in the Sunni radical world — stateless networks rooted in theological groups like the Muslim Brotherhood aspiring to wreak havoc on large sections of nonbelieving populations — all that was a completely new idea. It took the CIA three or four years even to articulate a view of it, never mind come to grips with it.

The people who had a sense of what was going on were the governments in North Africa — Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt — that were under assault by some of these groups. But these were undemocratic, despotic, corrupt governments. They would complain, and specifically complain about bin Laden, but the Americans dismissed these complaints as these bad governments crying wolf about their domestic opposition.

Right, but wasn’t that one of the problems with the fight against terrorism — that we didn’t have good relationships or good intelligence in a lot of these key countries?

Yes, we didn’t have an independent agenda. We were dependent on other governments and our intelligence liaisons with them, so our intelligence was shaped by their view of the world. In a case like Pakistan, that turned out to be a pretty unreliable agenda, since Pakistan was busy creating a lot of these Islamist groups for its own purposes. And in the case of Saudi Arabia, it was also unreliable.

To put it in another layer of context, what was happening in the CIA during these years was that the place was shrinking, just like every other place that was part of the Cold War bureaucracy. Budgets were shrinking. People were retiring earlier. There was no new hiring. Someone told me that in 1995, I think, the incoming class of new officers at the CIA was nine people. So they were under intense budgetary pressure and they didn’t know what the new world was going to be about. Terrorism was on the list, but there wasn’t a focus in resources to get after it in the right way.

It seems as though the Clinton administration started paying attention to terrorism, not after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, but in 1995, after the Oklahoma City bombing and the Tokyo subway attack.

That’s a correct reading of it. There was a response to the WTC bombing but it was such an obscure case and it happened within six weeks of the [Clinton] inauguration and it never really galvanized the new administration. But Oklahoma City — that was the one that shook them.

At what point did they make the connection between Osama bin Laden and the 1993 World Trade Center attack?

The problem was that the FBI was in charge of the WTC case. They accumulated a lot of evidence about how the attackers had been supported and who they were connected to — the first outlines of bin Laden’s international organization and ambitions. But they didn’t share this with anybody because the law prohibited them from doing so, but also because their own culture was hermetically sealed.

You had this dysfunctional period lasting right through 1997 and 1998, in which the FBI and the White House were at odds with each other over all kinds of political investigations. Each side looked at each other with intense suspicion. You had the FBI and CIA competing for budgetary resources. There was a rivalry there. You also had the State Department counterterrorism office in total disarray — five leaders in six years or something. Essentially, you had a counterterrorism bureaucracy falling apart and not communicating.

And even when the CIA became aware of Osama and the fact that he was financing terrorists, he didn’t make the list of people to go after. He didn’t make it for quite some time. What made them think he wasn’t so dangerous?

You know, it’s really a mystery, looking back on it. It’s hard to understand, especially toward 1997 — he didn’t even make the State Department’s official list of foreign terrorist organizations. The explanation you get is that they saw him as a money man and not a killer. They had no evidence that he had ever participated directly in a deadly terrorist operation. One reason why they believed this was that in the years that he lived in Sudan — right through the spring of 1996 — he didn’t live the way a hardcore terrorist would. He lived openly. He commuted to work. He had an office with air conditioning. He had a farm, he had a house, he had a mosque. And he was a wealthy man, he was a sort of soft figure. They looked at this and concluded he wasn’t an operator. Surely, if he was an operator, he’d be hiding.

You say that the CIA could never penetrate al-Qaida, or recruit agents from within. Is that rare?

The CIA had an easier time with leftist terrorist groups like Abu Nidal, but they always had a harder time with religiously motivated groups. For example, they were never able to penetrate Hezbollah during the year that Hezbollah was taking American hostages and wreaking havoc. Al-Qaida is a relatively difficult group to penetrate to the inner circle.

Back to this parallel story of Afghanistan — why did we fail to recognize the Taliban’s threat? Did anyone sound the alarm? Everyone just seemed so relaxed about this bizarre government coming to power, even after they started imposing their oppressive rules.

That’s another one that’s hard to understand. Probably the biggest single factor was indifference. A sense that there was nothing at stake in Afghanistan, a collective unspoken wish for this whole place to go away and not be a problem. The Taliban brought a brutal kind of order to the country and created a totalitarian kind of stability. There were plenty of people whispering into the ears of American officials, assuring them that the Taliban were tolerable. The Pakistanis, who had created them, wanted us to accept them. The Saudis also wanted us to accept them. The Saudis argued again and again, “Look, we started out this way. We had a particularly evangelical, puritanical view of Islam, and look at us, we’ve moderated, we’ve accommodated the world.”

Wow.

Yes, the Saudis said, “If you’re just patient with these guys, they will moderate too.” I don’t know how many Americans believed that, but there was no plausible alternative that anyone could think about. Even those who disdained the Taliban and wanted to do anything possible to promote its decline were not prepared to supply more weapons for the civil war, or claim more innocent Afghan deaths. For what?

How distracted were we by the corporate oil opportunities there? There’s a whole narrative thread about [the U.S.-based oil company] Unocal going through your book. It seems like a sizable part of the story.

I think substantially distracted, especially in the period, crucially, that the Taliban finally took Kabul in the fall of 1996. That was the time when they really established themselves as a national force in Afghanistan and that was also the time when they started to impose their strictures and bizarre rules on large populations in Afghanistan that wanted nothing to do with them. Especially in Kabul, which really was not Taliban country. We stood by while this happened in part because there was a lobbying effort arguing persistently that the stability that the Taliban provided might present an opportunity to complete this oil pipeline. The Pakistanis wanted this to happen too. Our foreign policy at that time, around the 1996 election, emphasized the promotion of American trading interests and corporate interests abroad.

Was there someone specifically interested in this within the Clinton administration?

The policy was left to the middle levels of the bureaucracy because nobody high up really cared enough to have an opinion. It fell to the State Department, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, who was in charge of Afghan policy. In the first term, it was Robin Raphel. She in particular was close to Benazir Bhutto [then the prime minister of Pakistan] and accepted Benazir’s argument about the Taliban — and also wanted to promote this pipeline. She genuinely believed that it could create jobs and make things better there. And she was prepared to work with the Taliban.

Was this also why we didn’t want to support Ahmed Massoud, the head of the Northern Alliance, who was fighting against the Taliban throughout this whole period?

It was a factor, but I think the disdain for Massoud was rooted in the failure of the pre-Taliban governments he’d participated in, and people’s frustration with that history. People just thought this guy was a figure who belonged in the past, who had not been able to deliver the political stability he promised.

Meanwhile, Massoud issued many scary warnings about the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

He did, and particularly after the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, and after bin Laden established himself, as the Taliban’s shock troops and al-Qaida forces were battling side by side against Massoud. Massoud, as anybody would who’s engaged in a day-to-day life struggle of this sort, had a pretty clear idea of what was going on with these guys. He watched them commit suicide before they would be taken as prisoners, he saw how they were being recruited out of Pakistani madrassas, he saw where the money was coming from. He was looking at it right across the street. He had a sense of the threat that no one else could have had.

Did CIA director George Tenet trust him? I was a little bit surprised by this, but Tenet seemed to have a pretty good grasp of the threat that bin Laden posed.

Yes, he did, but he was less confident on the issues involving Afghanistan itself. Two things constrained his willingness to act boldly in this area. One was that his own bureaucracy was conflicted about Massoud. The officers in his Near East division had a long history with Massoud — they admired him, but felt that he was so independent he wouldn’t be an active partner. And then he had a president who was not inclined to take risks. [Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright was openly opposed to working with Massoud. Tenet would have to have been very confident to grab Clinton by the lapels and say, “You have to do this.” He didn’t do that at all.

What was the turning point when Tenet decided they should go get Osama? And why did they want him alive?

It unfolds in stages. The first big turning point is with the African embassy bombings in August of 1998. They had some evidence before that that bin Laden was involved in active operations and was not just a money guy, but it was the embassy bombings that made it clear to everyone that he was both capable and actively intending to hit American targets around the world. The second really scary event that gets everyone’s attention — especially Tenet — was the millennium period. The winter of 2000. You remember, nothing happened. But the near misses, both the ones we knew about at the time and the ones we didn’t know about at the time, scared the hell out of people.

Why did they want to arrest him and not just go shoot him? Despite these alarms, there was still not a sense of urgency, certainly not the degree of urgency within the Cabinet that we’re used to today. People in the Cabinet really believed that law enforcement tools were the best way to attack terrorism. The Justice Department had successfully convicted Ramzi Yousef and a whole series of individuals who had carried out the African embassy bombings. They had confidence this approach could work and was consistent with American values and signaled to the world that we didn’t regard these terrorists as political actors but as common murderers. That was the argument for that approach.

And Clinton — the record shows — was of divided mind. Although he was prepared to shoot bin Laden dead — he proved that with the cruise missile attacks [in 1998].

What about this other attempt on Osama’s life you describe? We had him in our sights, we were going to bomb his camp, but we didn’t because of a certain plane we spotted.

Yes. This is in the first weeks of 1999, I think, and bin Laden is being watched by this group of paid agents. They follow him on this hunting trip into the southern Afghan desert and they start watching him from this overlook above this camp. And it’s a really luxurious camp in the manner of Persian Gulf traveling parties. There are big fancy tents with generators and refrigerators and they’re hunting with falcons for a bird called a bustard, which is apparently a big sport in that part of the world. So these agents report that they followed bin Laden to this camp and the CIA puts a satellite up and takes some pictures. Then they see a C-130 transport plane. They trace the plane to the United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich, very close ally to the United States. They’re important to the U.S., not just a moderate friend. This is a country that provides the only port calls for American aircraft carriers in the region, it pumps a lot of oil, it provides facilities for the U.S. Air Force and Navy, which at that time were trying to contain Iraq. So this was a very close friend. When that news came in that this was a UAE plane, the Clinton Cabinet must have blanched.

When you’re reading the chapters describing 2001, after George W. Bush has entered the White House, it seems as though the new administration had a lot of information. How would you characterize how much the CIA knew in 2001 about bin Laden and his intentions? And Bush’s attitude?

The Bush administration was pretty slow off the mark to recognize the threat, but they did recognize, by the summer of 2001, what they had on their hands. Some people have criticized them for wasting six months and I think that’s a legitimate criticism. They did have this threat explicitly called to their attention when they came into office.

By the summer, though, the threat warnings about bin Laden were so severe that everyone from the president on down understood that this was really serious business. The difficulty was, as in the Clinton administration, that you could have a strategic warning in the sense that there is an enemy out there that intends to attack you, but there was no technical warning. They could never be certain when and where. They didn’t have the sources or the informers or the access to al-Qaida to even make a well-educated guess. All they could do was press against every cell and militant that they could find and hope that by doing so they would disrupt some plot.

So you get this feeling going over the material, especially that summer, that they just know something’s coming. It’s not that they’re just hearing this, they’re hearing language and multiple, critical accounts saying, “Something spectacular is coming.” Yet they can’t get a grip on it. You hear the people who participated in this talk about it in very vivid language. Some of them describe the experience as fatalistic. They came to work every morning and thought, “Today something is going to really happen.” They knew.