The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
by Jane Mayer
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jane MayerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2008-07-15
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Book Reviews of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
Book Review: A Judicious and Compelling Polemic
Summary: 5 Stars
While Mayer has a definite and critical opinion of the Bush Administration's treatment of terrorist suspects, she does an excellent and judicious job of weighing the evidence to support her opinion. She is convincing in showing that there is very little empirical support for the claim that extreme measures produced any new reliable information that would not have been better produced by conventional methods. Indeed, the historical purpose of these methods is to produce false confessions at show trials. The high profile cases that have been routinely cited by Bush supporters to justify the methods all tend to support the opposite conclusion: that the reliable information was obtained by the FBI or others using conventional methods before the CIA "hard ball" interrogators showed up.
Mayer is also excellent in analyzing the legal arguments provided by Bush's lawyers to support the new methods. In truth and fact, ever since Washington, the American way of war has been to treat prisoners humanely, not out of lack of any lack of zeal but in recognition of the enlightened self interst served by demonstrating the benefits of the American way. The Bush lawyers rendered extraordinary secret opinions that granted amnesty to interrogators in advance of any misconduct. The opinions are unsupported by any fair reading of the limits of Presidential powers and make no sense from the perspective of the Geneva Convention. The essential premise is that the terrorist detainees were nonpersons wholly uncovered by either the Geneva Convention or domestic law. This is nonsense. Even spies and saboteurs are covered by international law.
As Mayer points out, lawyers need to be able to tell clients what they don't want to hear. In this sense, Bush was ill-served by the likes of Addington and Yoo and Gonzalez. Indeed, Mayer demonstrates that the lawyers simply came up with, and then implemented, the most aggressive interpretation possible for the expanse of Presidential power. There was no serious policy discussion of whether the President -- as a matter of good policy -- should exercise all of that power. Mayer does concede that the Administration may have been understandably concerned with an imminent second wave of attacks and was acting from the exigencies of the moment. But Mayer proves that for that last few years of the life of the Administration, this extreme circumstance was removed, and the Administration was doing little more than engaging in a great cover up.
Ultimately, Cheney's power is what explains the misguided course taken after 9/11. In ordinary times, nerds like Yoo and Addington would have been short circuited by review and input from senior lawyers at State, Defense, and Justice. But Cheney was pushing for these extraordinary powers and the nerds were able to cite his directives to prevent any questioning from elsewhere in the Administration. Bush's failings as a leader can be seen in his inability to appreciate the radical break from precedent and his inability to foresee that in the long run, beating false confessions out of detainees was not going to sell well.
What is insufficiently explored by Mayer is the mechanisms at work that allowed Bush to get away with it for his entire Presidency and that now impede Obama from resolving the detainee problem. For me, the true dark side is that of the American people. While we have on the whole promoted humane treatment of citizens and foreign nationals, we have also always struggled to control our violent nature and weakness for racism. We don't want to admit that we torture, but we sure wanted to get tough in the rageful times after 2001. The way to have your cake and eat it too is simply to deny that we are "torturing" and then allow "torture" to be defined not by the effect on the detainee but on the interrogators' motives. There is no question that a CIA interrogator has far better motives and justification for "harsh" methods than did Joseph Mengele at Auschwitz. And of course, with a few very disturbing exceptions, we did not beat detainees to death. But just because we are not as bad as the Nazis doesn't mean what we did was right. It just means it was less wrong than what the Nazis did.
Thus, if we deny we are torturing, if the detainees are all part of an unpopular racial/ethnic group, if we use euphemisms, and if we repeat with false certainty that we actually got useful information out of the new methods, Americans are more than willing to accept it. We want to be deluded, at least in the short run. Ultimately, Bush's greatest mistake was to fail to moderate the rage and panic that came after 9/11 and to appeal to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.
It's unfortunate that the CIA destroyed all of the interrogation videotapes. A few minutes of watching waterboarding, sexual humiliation, hanging by the arms, and heads being knocked into walls would be enough to shock all of us out of our complacency.
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Summary of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
A dramatic and damning narrative account of how America has fought the"War on Terror"
In the days immediately following September 11th, the most powerful people in the country were panic-stricken. The radical decisions about how to combat terrorists and strengthen national security were made in a state of utter chaos and fear, but the key players, Vice President Dick Cheney and his powerful, secretive adviser David Addington, used the crisis to further a long held agenda to enhance Presidential powers to a degree never known in U.S. history, and obliterate Constitutional protections that define the very essence of the American experiment.
THE DARK SIDE is a dramatic, riveting, and definitive narrative account of how the United States made terrible decisions in the pursuit of terrorists around the world-- decisions that not only violated the Constitution to which White House officials took an oath to uphold, but also hampered the pursuit of Al Qaeda. In gripping detail, acclaimed New Yorker writer and bestselling author, Jane Mayer, relates the impact of these decisions?U.S.-held prisoners, some of them completely innocent, were subjected to treatment more reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition than the twenty-first century.
THE DARK SIDE will chronicle real, specific cases, shown in real time against the larger tableau of what was happening in Washington, looking at the intelligence gained?or not?and the price paid. In some instances, torture worked. In many more, it led to false information, sometimes with devastating results. For instance, there is the stunning admission of one of the detainees, Sheikh Ibn al-Libi, that the confession he gave under duress?which provided a key piece of evidence buttressing congressional support of going to war against Iraq--was in fact fabricated, to make the torture stop.
In all cases, whatever the short term gains, there were incalculable losses in terms of moral standing, and our country's place in the world, and its sense of itself. THE DARK SIDE chronicles one of the most disturbing chapters in American history, one that will serve as the lasting legacy of the George W. Bush presidency.
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