The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals |...

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals | Jane Mayer | Blood, and Fire, and Pillars of Smoke

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The Dark Side: The...

	The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals Jane Mayer Doubleday, 2008 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 107 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Important book: The Dark Side

Title The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
Author: Jane Mayer
Rating *****
Tags terrorism, torture, bush administration
I resisted reading this book for a while, but felt it was one of those books I HAD to read, as an American citizen, to know the worst about my government in order help to elect better ones. The book was hard to read, both for the occasional and in this case NOT gratuitous depictions of torture, and to see what fear did to this nation that has not ever before, as a policy, used coercive interrogations. Mayer makes that clear by giving a brief history. George Washington insisted on humane treatment of British prisoners of war, and that tradition continued with the U.S. in the forefront in creating treaties such as the Geneva Conventions.

All that was turned on its head after 9/11. After that, captured terrorists were subject to extraordinary rendition, in which some were taken to foreign countries to be tortured for information, while others were tortured in prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The story of how it happened is complex, and sickening... a combination of fear and incompetence. Policy on this, as on so many things, was mostly set by VP Dick Cheney and his legal adviser, David Addington. Both are authoritarian personality figures who do what they believe is right and don't listen to anyone advocating something different. Addington's response is usually to shout down the opposing opinion.

One interesting thing that Mayer points out is that it was a quite small circle of people setting torture policy and that only Addington was a lawyer. Of course John Yoo, who wrote the infamous torture memo while on staff in the Office of Legal Council (OLC), was a lawyer as well, but other lawyers have said that his work was badly done. Jack Goldsmith, who was head of OLC later, thought it was so deeply flawed that he withdrew it, and that was something that had not been done before (I also recommend Goldsmith's book, The Terror Presidency, on this subject). What OLC says is so important because they are the standard bearer for any administration on legal matters, and what they say goes.

The Dark Side is also frightening it its depiction of sheer incompetence. At the time of 9/11, the CIA had not done interrogations for years, and had few experts in it. At first, they used some of the FBI's interrogaters, who were experienced and did not use torture because they knew that information from torture was unreliable -it might be accurate, it might be lies, and you don't know which is which. They had interrogaters who were experts in Muslim culture and who were used at the beginning, but the powers that be thought that information wasn't coming fast enough and handed the interrogations over to the CIA who was told to use any means necessary to get information and get it quickly. The CIA retro-engineered the SERE program, which was used to teach soldiers and agents to withstand torture and began using those techniques to torture.

All of this was done with doubtful legal and moral justifications. Mayer uses that marvelous quote from Nietzsche "He who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process becomes a monster himself. And if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare right back at you." There seems to be some indications that many of those who tortured developed psychological problems themselves. There were also heroes in this battle, as Mayers is quick to acknowledge. See her summary in the afterward:

"In looking back,. one of the most remarkable features of this struggle is that almost from the start, and at almost every turn along the way, the Bush administration was warned that the short-term benefits of its extralegal approach to fighting terrorism would have tragically destructive long-term consequences both for the rule of law and America's interests in the world. Those warnings came not from just political opponents, but also from experienced allies, including the British Intelligence Service, the experts in the traditionally conservative military and the FBI, and, perhaps most surprisingly, from a series of loyal Republican lawyers inside the administration itself. The number of patriotic critics inside the administration and out who threw themselves into trying to head off what they saw as a terrible departure from America's ideals, often at an enormous price to their own careers, is both humbling and reassuring." (p. 327).

This book, along with others such as Barton Gellman's Angler, will be very important to historians trying to understand an administration that went so wrong in so many ways, and to those who, as citizens, want to understand so as to elect better governments. Besides, it is a story to stand up with any epic, a story of heroes and villains, as well as people simply trying to do their best for their country in a dangerous and uncertain world. Excellent and highly recommended read.

Publication Doubleday (2008), Hardcover, 400 pages
Publication date 2008
ISBN 0385526393 / 9780385526395

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Blood, and Fire, and Pillars of Smoke

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a
War on American Ideals
Reviewed by Harold Reynolds

Foreigners one day may visit this country to teach our children
how our democracy decayed, drop by drop. The text for the course will be Jane Mayer's The Dark Side. A classically great work of investigative journalism, it is an appalling, profoundly disturbing revelation of the Bush Administration's war on terrorism. It is a grim warning of the threat to us that exists in a President who sets himself against the Constitution in a parallel world that he secretly constructs in the name of security. When reading it, you may have the fleeting sense that you are in Berlin and the year is 1938.
The questions posed to our children will be whether President George W. Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, together with other high office holders and military commanders,should have been indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the violation of federal criminal statutes described in The Dark Side, and whether, failing in that, we endangered ourselves to greater subversions of liberty.
In September, 2001, when the dust of the Twin Towers had not yet settled, Cheney, mentor to Bush and long fixated on his felt need to increase the power of a presidency weakened by Vietnam and Watergate, took charge of national security issues. President Bush authorized CIA Director Tenet to use secret paramilitary death squads anywhere on earth to detain and interrogate suspected terrorists. When Congress, however, would not give him unlimited war powers, he secretly obtained from a cadre of lawyers in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel bizarre, some said insane, legal memoranda that in sum held that Congress could not limit Bush's conduct of warfare. This cadre informally called themselves the "War Council". They advised Bush that he could defend the nation as he saw fit and ride over laws specifically designed to curb him. They assured him that he could set aside statutes prohibiting torture and secret detentions. Terrorists, they said, were outside the body of law, beyond the protection of the Geneva Conventions. They could be tortured. They knew what Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld wanted and accordingly advised Bush that he had inherent authority to use military commissions empowered to sentence illegal combatants to death, all without review by Congress or the courts. These legal memos, hidden from all but a select White House circle, were five-and-dime store stunts manufactured to create a paper world of authority where none existed and upon which the principal actors, such was their contempt for the public, were ready to rely in justification of their abhorrent conduct. Indeed, these masters of self-deceit honed a memo stating that proof of torture required not only proof of the specific intent to inflict suffering but proof that the suffering was of "significant" duration. In short, the world might condemn an act out of hand as painful torture, but the torturer could raise in defense the claim that he intended an objective that involved a result other than that pain.
And so it was that the natural passion to defend this country and punish those who had slaughtered our people was tragically placed in the hands of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld whose joint cunning and stupidity has caused one of the greatest horrors in our national history.
The nightmare CIA secret "extraordinary rendition" program sent detainees to Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan for torture. Bush and CIA Director Tenet knew that those renditions were forbidden by the Convention against Torture. Suspects in our custody were held in CIA top-secret "black site" prisons. Thus, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, Mayer contends, are prosecutable for war crimes and crimes against humanity, to say nothing of their violations of our federal criminal law.
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld approved of "enhanced" interrogation techniques in violation of the Convention Against Torture. After all, an Office of Legal Counsel memo declared that Convention unconstitutional because Bush, they said, had the power to order any interrogation technique. Indeed, the Office of Legal Counsel declared waterboarding lawful. Sexual humiliation, hoodings, shackled 8-hour standing with arms extended overhead, slamming prisoners headfirst against walls, sleep deprivation, bright light bombardment , 24-hour a day ear-drum shattering noise for weeks, caging squatting men in dog crates, was the order of the day. One of the Office of Legal Counsel scholars hypothetically suggested as lawful the gouging out of a prisoner's eyes, "slitting an ear, nose, or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb". Among the barbaric cruelties was "Palestinian hanging" in which a man's hands are secured behind his back and he is suspended from behind like a carcass in a slaughter house. Examining such a corpse, Dr. Michael Baden, the noted forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, found that "asphyxia is what he died from - as in a crucifixion". Surely, to see a crucifixion where beatings, broken bones, and murder were commonplace might give pause even to a predatory animal passing through at night.
The International Committee for the Red Cross described the treatment of Abu Zubayda, an Al Qaeda logistics chief, as torture that constituted war crimes. The Los Angeles Times demanded a criminal investigation of Bush Administration for war crimes. So dismissive was
Bush of lawful restraints that he himself ordered the waterboarding of Zubayda. So in-your-face arrogant was the CIA that hundreds of hours of video tapes of the interrogation of Zubayda , including his extensive waterboarding, were withheld from the 9/11 Commission and, in defiance of a federal court, were actually destroyed by the CIA.
In 2002, one-third of Guantanamo's 600 prisoners had no connection with terrorism, thus implicating Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld in committing war crimes. Bush had thoughtfully determined that they were all "enemy combatants". Rumsfeld was directly involved in the straight out of hell, unutterably inhumane savaging of Mohammed al-Qahtani, the suspected "20th hijacker" who had set out but failed to join the 9/11 hijackers. His torture produced nothing of substance except the Pentagon's dismissal of the charges against him because his torture tainted his confession. Military interrogators opened themselves to prosecution for the brutal abuse of detainees. Frightened by the criminality of military torturers, the FBI denounced them for fear of being implicated. Alberto Mora, General Counsel of the Navy, warned that criminal charges from assault to war crimes were chargeable against Bush Administration officials. Incredibly, a March 2003 memo declared that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming, and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators in Guantanamo.
The scenario left by the Bush Administration is beyond ordinary imagining. When the next president is elected, a "transition team" will be designated by him to assist him in taking power. That team will be confronted with determining the location, inhabitants, and history of that parallel world of perhaps thousands of uncharged men and women cut off from access to their families, tortured, humiliated, beaten, kept off stage to this day by those fearful of prosecution.

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Exceptional and Horrific!

We have committed war crimes as a nation, and we should be held accountable. It's a desaster that needs an immediate recovery effort led by our new president-elect. Jane Mayer deserves the National Book Award.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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