Shami Chakrabarti describes herself as a “professional teenager”. She certainly has a knack of stripping away layers of pretence and getting to the heart of some very difficult questions. As a young barrister, she worked for the Home Office – deep within what she now calls The Dark Tower. Her brief was to develop and defend government policy. On 10 September 2001, she changed sides. She went to work at the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), a small charity with a proud record, founded in 1934 to defend hunger marchers from police harassment. The next day, 9/11, everything changed. Chakrabarti watched in horror as the planes ploughed into the twin towers, then later as the “War on Terror” unfolded, and then as the evidence of human rights abuses in A