The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals

by Jane Mayer

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, War, Terrorism, American History, Middle East

392 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 2008

About the author

Jane Mayer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three bestselling and critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction books. She co-authored Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988, with Doyle McManus, and Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, with Jill Abramson, which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Her book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, was named one of The New York Times’s Top 10 Books of the Year and won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Goldsmith Book Prize, the Edward Weintal Prize, the Ridenhour Prize, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

For her reporting at The New Yorker, Mayer has been awarded the John Chancellor Award, the George Polk Award, the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, and the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence presented by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Mayer lives in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title comes from Dick Cheney’s vow to go to the “Dark Side” in the battle against terrorism. There is a wealth here of drill-down detail about the mechanisms by which America abandoned the constitution in favor of a unitary, imperial president (and really vice president) who believes that l’estat est moi.


Jane Mayer - image from Elle Magazine - shot by Heather Hazzan

I have read a fair number of books that delve into the Bush administration and nowhere have I seen the comprehensive depth Mayer has given to her examination of how America has traded its soul for a false sense of security.

Although she does not make any comparisons of this sort (I mean any time the word Nazi is mentioned, the notion that follows is automatically dismissed) one notion that popped into my head was that so many of the dark players here seemed to get off on the idea of torture, regardless of the extant analysis, even from their own people, that it is counterproductive. I was reminded of the embrace of cruelty that became the norm in that prototypical horror-state.

David Addington emerges as one of the real scary guys, Cheney’s attack dog. These people would have been right at home with the dark forces of yesteryear.

Great detail is offered re the impact of the Office of Legal Counsel and how the people there were at the center of the attack on long-standing American principles.

Mayer notes the place of the USA in the history of international rules concerning treatment of captured enemies, beginning with Washington’s humane treatment of Brit prisoners at a time when the Brits treated captured Yanks like animals. She points out the beneficent impact of such rules on our own people, noting how the Nazis treated captured Americans. And she cites the impact (positive) of the USA on the 1949 Geneva accords.

She offers portraits of those who tried to fight against the darkness within the government, and how they were ignored, attacked, crushed, driven out. This is a powerful, detailed depiction of the rotten core of a bad apple, and should be a must-read for every American.

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages

[brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

there’s something i call ‘generational narcissism’ which is the belief that one’s generation is special and different and unique for no reason other than that one is part of it. a few varieties:

1) new-age generational narcissism: the ‘universe’ has destined some serious astronomical, astrological, apocalyptical and/or spiritual kind of paradigm shift to occur RIGHT NOW! i.e. age of aquarius, end of days, revolution in global consciousness, nostradamus-type person's prediction, etc.

2) technological generational narcissim: because things are more advanced now than they ever were my generation is uniquely intelligent & aware & wise & clever & etc.

3) political generational narcissim: isn't it a uniquely historically terrible time to be alive? isn't this the worst year ever?! isn't our government the worst ever?! (usually focused on a specific politician being the absolute worst since, and frequently compared to, hitler.)

so throughout bush’s first term i was careful not to kneejerkingly fall into the third category. yeah, the guy’s an embarassment, but that’s a far cry from being ‘the worst.’ and then all the torture crap broke and group 3 started looking real fucken nice.

the worst. Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus. FDR ignored the neutrality acts and interned the japanese. but there’s a key difference. as Mayer points out:

While earlier presidents overstepped boundaries in times of emergency, neither Lincoln nor Roosevelt claimed the routine presidential right to do so. (pg. 47)

in other words, Bush/Cheney took literally Nixon’s famous line, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” and this tiny distinction makes all the difference… (see Louis XIV : ‘I am the State!’)


the worst. in our revolutionary war, the british considered us as 'unlawful combatants' so saw no reason to adhere to any rules of war. nonetheless, George Washington did. against an infinitely more powerful organized wealthy and better armed enemy. and this shaped the national consciousness forever until 2001. Abe Lincoln could’ve easily declared the south beyond the law by declaring them all saboteurs and internal enemies. he didn’t. Wilson in WW1, FDR in WW2, Reagan during the Cold War, etc… every president knew that the codification of torture was a no-brainer.


the worst. those who most need to prove their toughness are always the most weak. and pretty much always weaken themselves and those around them in the process. check it:

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.

john yoo is a tough guy.


the worst. torture is one of those things that provides an easy marker of a society in decline. it’s ‘Fall of Rome’ and lions in the street shit.


the worst. torture doesn’t work.

so, yeah, a lot more reasons to declare Bush the absolute worst. and a lot of other shit that's up for debate. but not torture. naw. torture makes debate easy in that it ends it.

obama seems interested in reuniting the country and that’s a good thing but it’d be damn cool if, on january 21st, seconds after being declared president he had all these toughguys marched off to prison. to stand trial. as criminals – yes, even war criminals – deserve.

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished this book even though I remember watching all of this unfold post 9/11. It is an excellent book and it is enraging. The Bush torture memos were appalling then and are still appalling. I can't believe that the lawyers who defended these torture methods still have their licenses. Like John Yoo--Yoo should not be able to teach law students anything about the law. What I think is important to remember about all of this is that there were people at the time who were protesting from the beginning--and apparently there were a few people on the inside who opposed it too. The point is that we should not excuse any of this as just a post 9/11 over-reaction that just happened to cross the line. It was always evil and they knew torture didn't even work.

Also, we need to talk about Jack Bauer's role in all of this at some point.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was well aware of the excesses of the Bush administration’s war on terror, but still Mayer’s book was shocking. It’s been eleven years since we saw the first pictures of abuse in Abu Ghraib. Mayer starkly brings back the memory. This detailed account of disregard for human decency, false imprisonments, and torture brought on feelings of disgust and revulsion. Given some of the rhetoric in the current presidential campaign, this book is as relevant as ever. I can’t recommend it highly enough. My notes below cover some major points. To get the full story you must read the book.

Following the 9-11 attacks, the White House went into panic mode. Dick Cheney in particular lost it. Longtime friend Brent Scowcroft said, “I don’t know him anymore.” Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson said, “The poor guy became paranoid.” What ensued were the authorization of torture and the deprival of basic human rights. In short order, centuries of American values were undermined.

The CIA had dropped the ball tracking Al Qaeda operatives abroad. The CIA knew two of the eventual hijackers had entered the US in 2000 and stopped following them, but failed to notify the FBI, which arguably could have prevented the attacks. Concerned about a potential Al Qaeda attack, longtime counterterrorism official Richard Clarke on January 25, 2001 wrote Bush’s new National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, a memo outlining the threat and asked for a Principals Meeting to discuss it. Instead she demoted him. CIA Chief George Tenet met with Rice on July 10, 2001 to warn about Al Qaeda, but according to Tenet got “the brushoff.” Rice denied any urgent warning was given at the meeting. On August 10 the CIA delivered a briefing to President Bush entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US. Bush dismissed it with “All right. You’ve covered your ass now.” Finally on September 4, 2001 after a final plea from Clarke to Rice the meeting with the Vice President, CIA Director, National Security Advisor and other top officials was held. Despite an impassioned plea from Clarke to take action against Bin laden, no action was taken. A frustrated Clarke resigned in 2003.

Immediately after the September 11 attacks, the CIA proposed that it be authorized to detain, interrogate and kill people they identified as enemy combatants as needed. Bush readily agreed. The Agency began recruiting and forming a paramilitary unit. White House lawyers wrote secret memos to justify warrantless seizures and searches saying that the fourth amendment did not apply when the president deemed there to be a national emergency. Internal secret memos gave the president authority to conduct war at will, even deploying troops in the US without congressional approval. Essentially Bush was proclaiming as had King Louis XIV, “I am the state.” Bush began talking of himself in the third person as the commander in chief and later called himself “the decider”. In fact, decisions were made before they ever got to him. If you can frame the question, you can get the answer you want. The framer in chief was Dick Cheney. Working through his chief of staff, lawyer David Addington, he controlled the Bush administration lawyers that were sending documents for Bush to sign. Addington reviewed and corrected each document to his satisfaction before Bush saw it. One authorized Bush to declare terrorists “illegal enemy combatants” with no prisoner of war or any other rights. They would be subject to any treatment the president deemed appropriate. Cheney, who had served as President Ford’s Chief of Staff, had been appalled at the decline of presidential power following Watergate when Congress passed legislation to prevent future abuses. 9-11 was his opportunity to return to Nixonian policies. As Nixon said, “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Cheney’s 1987 Minority Report, written as Ranking Member of the House Select Committee investigating the Iran Contra Affair, declared the president had every right to take covert action without notifying congress. In 2000 Cheney became Bush’s adviser on vice presidential selection and in true Machiavellian fashion selected himself. Cheney had extensive Washington experience and Bush had none. Cheney quickly took control.

With the capture of “The American Taliban” John Walker Lindh in Afghanistan in November 2001 the issue of what to do with detainees became paramount. Ignoring traditional interagency mechanisms for deciding such issues, Dick Cheney, Addington and their self-appointed War Council of like-minded hardliners would decide. They established military commissions which could prosecute suspected terrorists without the presumption of innocence, the right to council, the right to remain silent, Geneva Convention protections against torture or any other safeguards. Evidence collected by physical coercion would be admissible as would hearsay. Conviction would not require evidence beyond a reasonable doubt and the death penalty would not require a unanimous decision. After subjecting Lindh to sleep deprivation and extreme cold, evidence was extracted with him blindfolded, naked and duct taped to a stretcher while being fed barely enough to keep him alive. Fortunately for Lindh as the first detainee he was to be tried in a US Court. Afraid of the revelations of Lindh’s treatment, the Justice Department reached a plea deal and he “only” got twenty years on charges backed by little genuine evidence. But the larger impact of this case was not lost on Cheney, et al. From this point forward detainees would not be tried in US courts.

To avoid culpability, The CIA Counterterrorist Center turned to “extraordinary renditions.” It extradited suspects to countries such as Egypt and Jordan where torture was the norm. The US no longer had to even make charges, just have masked CIA agents transport detainees to countries where interrogation techniques were aligned with administration policy. The most notable case that serves as a good example of the type of intelligence torture elicits is that of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi who ran Bin Laden’s Afghanistan training camp. At first with “rapport building” techniques the FBI was getting useful information with the captured al-Libi, but then the CIA spirited him away to Egypt. Repeatedly brutalized and in fear of his life, al-Libi said whatever his captors wanted to hear, in this case that Iraq was training Al Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical weapons. This “intelligence” was then used by CIA Director George Tenet to convince Secretary of State Colin Powell to make his famous speech to the UN Security Council calling for a preemptive war against Iraq. Tenet never bothered to tell Powell that the DIA found al-Libi’s statements highly questionable.

The first “high-value detainee” was Abu Zubayda, supposedly Al Qaeda’s logistic chief. Captured by the Pakistani’s in return for $10 million from the CIA, Zubayda would be the first to experience the CIA’s own program of “enhanced interrogation”, the Bush administration’s euphemism for torture. But first the FBI used their “rapport building” techniques on Zubada and again elicited some useful information. Zubada revealed the nickname of 9-11’s central planner, “Mukhtar” (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), and a description of gang member Jose Padilla who was subsequently arrested for planning a “dirty” bomb attack. Then the CIA transferred him to a “black site” in Thailand. Black sites were secret CIA prisons which some countries offered in return for money or US favors. Zubada soon found himself naked in a small cage he later referred to as a “tiny coffin.” It was totally dark and not possible to stand or stretch. He never knew how many hours each session in the cage would Last. High-value prisoners reported being dosed with cold water and then subjected to extreme cold while naked. This was done with their ankles and wrists shackled pulling their arms overhead so they could only stand on their tiptoes. They could be left like this for hours and then have it repeated day after day for months. They were bombarded with bright lights and loud sounds and deprived of sleep for days. Some would be waterboarded in which the victims would feel like they are drowning inducing total terror. Naked, strapped so tightly to a board the head cannot move, the victim has water continuously poured over his mouth and nostrils while he gasps and gags. A favorite or torturers since the dark ages, Zubayda was the first to experience waterboarding by order of the President of the United States. The CIA actually filmed these sessions but destroyed the tapes before they could be used in a later criminal investigation by the Justice Department. Bush would claim “enhanced interrogation” was what led to the revelations about “Mukhtar” and Jose Padilla, but in fact the FBI had gotten this information before the CIA took over. Bush claimed information leading to the capture of Al Qaeda leader Ramsi bin al Shibh and subsequently Khalid Sheikh Mohammed came from the program but in fact this lead came from the Emir of Qatar.

The CIA prison in Guantanamo was established and by the summer of 2002 held 600 detainees. A senior CIA expert assigned to interview these prisoners determined that at least 200 of them had no connection to terrorism. Others put the estimate of innocent prisoners at over 50%. Few, probably less than 10% were directly involved with Al Qaeda. Many had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and were rounded up along with genuine suspects. Others were turned over by the Pakistanis for the generous bounties the CIA offered. But once in Guantanamo it was almost impossible to get out. And since most had no valuable information “enhanced interrogation” was needed to get them to finally come up with some. Interrogators were under tremendous pressure to get results. All the techniques were employed, sleep deprivation, blinding lights, shattering noise, confined positions, extreme temperatures, hooding, stripping, humiliation and fear. Detainee number 063 was Mohammed Mani’ Ahmad Sha’Lan al-Qahtani, the missing 20th 9-11 hijacker. He had been denied entry into the US by Customs at Orlando airport. Again the FBI made progress, confirming who he was and leading to another arrest and then DIA employee and chief of the military interrogation teams, Dave Becker, dissatisfied with the pace took over. After several months of enhanced interrogation Qahtani had stopped offering information and was reduced to crouching in a corner, hearing voices and talking to non-existent people. Qahtani was shackled, bolted to the floor and allowed only four hours sleep for 48 out of 54 days. He was forced to strip naked, wear a leash, perform dog tricks, and wear a bra and thong underwear on his head. Force fed liquids he was then denied a bathroom until he urinated on himself. Countless further humiliations and tortures were perpetrated for months with Qahtani becoming injured and seriously ill, but doctors were on hand to treat him so he could undergo more. 9-11 organizer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed when captured described Qahtani as “an unsophisticated Bedouin” and “extremely simple man” who didn’t even know what a visa was and “did not know the specifics of the operation” and had “very limited information about his points of contact.” Qahtani did not know who he was going to meet at the airport, but this is the question his interrogators demanded he answer. In January 2009 the Pentagon dropped all charges against Qahtani because his confession was not credible since he had been tortured. This was the first time any top official in the Bush administration acknowledged torturing detainees. However, Qahtani remains imprisoned at Guantanamo.


Rumsfeld was furious that weapons of mass destruction had not been found in Iraq. He and the administration were totally surprised by the insurgency. Thus in August 2003 Rumsfeld sent Guantanamo Joint Task Force Commander General Geoffrey Miller and his “tiger team” to “Gitmoize” Iraq. Miller centralized operations at Saddam Hussein’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison. Much different from Guantanamo’s population of hundreds of suspected terrorists, Abu Ghraib contained 6,000 prisoners of every kind including common petty criminals, captured ordinary soldiers and innocent people caught up in raids. No written policy for interrogation would be provided the interrogators. But the pressure was on. Dogs were brought in to help with the interrogations. A new category was established, “ghost prisoner”. These were prisoners not recorded in any official record, so neither the Red Cross nor anyone else would know who they were. Some of these would be sent out for “extraordinary rendition.” CBS’s 60 Minutes first exposed the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in April 2004 showing pictures of naked hooded prisoners being tormented. But most devastating was the picture of a smiling soldier, Sabrina Harmon, giving the thumbs-up over the frozen corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi, who the CIA had beaten to death.

Some in the administration did object to the widespread use of torture. Alberto Mora, General Counsel for the Navy and the entire TJAG group of senior uniformed lawyers strongly dissented from the administration policy but were silenced and then cut out of the loop as War Council members David Addington, DOD General Counsel William Haynes, Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John Yoo and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales controlled dissent at the behest of Cheney with the blessing of Rumsfeld, and the approval of Bush. Rumsfeld and Bush would continue to make public statements that detainees were treated humanely. John Yoo left the Office of Legal Council in 2003. Jack Goldsmith became its head followed by Dan Levin. They along with others would try to scale back the torture policies of the administration but at each step they were outmaneuvered by Cheney, Addington and Gonzales. Others who stood up to no avail were Attorney General John Ashcroft and his Deputy, now FBI director, James Comey. In 2004 the Supreme Court ruled in two decisions that US law applied to Guantanamo. The administration essentially ignored the court. Many in Congress from Republican John McCain to Democrat Dick Durbin tried to rally Congress in opposition, but not until the next President, Barack Obama, took office would Bush’s torture policies be officially rescinded.

Not only did the Bush Administration’s program frequently fail to produce useful intelligence, it produced a tremendous amount of misleading information wasting valuable resources and leading to false alarms. Many innocent people had their lives destroyed. The use of torture radicalized countless more terrorists and created more recruits for al Qaeda. America’s image abroad and the hope that America provided for abused people around the world was severely damaged.

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"He who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process becomes a monster himself." - Friedrich Nietzsche

In reaction to Britain's brutal treatment of American prisoners of war, George Washington vowed that this new Democracy would "take a higher road." Thus, the U.S. military doctrine was born, based upon the belief that "Brutality undermines military discipline and strengthens the enemy's resolve, while displays of humanity could be used to tactical advantage." Since its inception, this doctrine has certainly been tried, sometimes quite strenuously, but it has remained a fundamental tenet of American government since our country's birth. Remained, that is, until the events of September 11, 2001.

The attacks of Al Qaeda spun America into a state of chaos and fear, and in this atmosphere came the decision to abandon some of our country's most fundamental beliefs. Hell-bent on revenge and terrified of further attacks, White House officials deemed it necessary to throw out the old rule book in favor of their own set of rules. Despite evidence that torture only produces uncooperative prisoners and questionable information, the Bush Administration felt certain it was the only way to stop further acts of terrorism. Surrounding themselves with lawyers charged with seeking out the legal loopholes that would grant the military carte blanche, it was in these dark days when a new doctrine was born - one which ignored the Article 5 Tribunals, The Geneva Convention, and the Constitution itself in favor of arresting, detaining, torturing, and even killing anyone with suspected connections to terrorism, no matter how tenuous those connections may have been.

On January 27, 2005, President George W. Bush, speaking to a New York Times reporter, said, "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that torture." But while speaking these words, thousands of prisoners were currently being held without due process in one of America's "black sites," Gulag-like prisons hosted by as many as eight countries, including Afghanistan; Iraq; Cuba; and, allegedly; fledgling democracies such as Poland and Romania. Inside these ghost prisons lurked a secret horror show of abuse where "enhanced interrogation" techniques such as waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and exposure to extreme temperatures were often applied by untrained and unqualified guards to prisoners who may or may not have had any information to give. What little information was gained was either false or forever clouded by suspicion due to the method in which it was obtained, and in hindsight it's this false information procured by torture that mistakenly connected the events of 9/11 to Iraq.

Perhaps "essential reading" is a distinction too easily granted to too many books, but after reading Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, it struck me that this is a case when it is certainly appropriately-applied. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Mayer provides a non-partisan narrative of how America lost its way in the aftermath of September 11th. Resisting the urge to infuse her own commentary, Mayer lets the events spanning from the attacks of September 11 to the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal speak for themselves, lending the narrative an unmistakable air of credibility. Of course, this also makes the story all the more repugnant.

Like most politically aware Americans, I remember being confused at how an attack by a Afghan-based terrorist cell could lead to a war in Iraq, was aware of the goings on at Guantanamo Bay, and was appropriately shocked when the Abu Ghraib story broke, but reading the finer details of these events alongside their causes and effects was both eye-opening and overwhelming. But though unpleasant, this is a story that demands to be heard, especially now when elections can and should be used to bring events such as these to light. Mayer's story is gripping, intensely troubling, and an absolutely necessary reminder of why we Americans deserve better leadership. I'd strongly encourage each and every one of you to read it.

[Map · Rating 5 out of 5]

Required reading for every American. Jane Mayer documents how a handful of people in the Bush Administration changed the moral course of America and tarnished our global reputation in the name of "keeping us safe." Benjamin Franklin said that those who would sacrifice liberty for safety deserver neither liberty nor safety. Well, that's pretty much where we are at. Yes, there have been no more attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11. But that "safety" was not a product of torture. Just because they got a few ambitious people in the justice dept to declare their misguided intentions "legal" doesn't mean they were. And the techniques they all approved were and are torture.

Disgraceful. Bush, Cheney, Addington, Rumsfeld, Yoo and a several others should be brought up on war crimes charges. And they should go to jail. Bill Clinton was impeached for "lying" about oral sex, yet these guys lied to get us in a war—and the lied about so much else in the name of "national security."

We are Americans—we're supposed to be better than our enemies. We are the example to the world. As The Dark Side shows, for the past seven years, we certainly have not been. Let's hope the next four years are better.

[Kurt · Rating 5 out of 5]

No book has ever made me feel more disgusted and outraged. The fact that the highest leaders in the U.S. government had condoned and authorized torture was really not news to me after seeing the photos of Abu-Ghraib (in 2004) and the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side (in 2008). I had also read numerous reports about suspicions and evidence of abuse at Guantanamo and various "black sites" around the world. But the details of abuse of power, secrecy, and coverup by many of our highest elected leaders and their appointees and the criminal passivity of hundreds of other so-called public servants that are documented by this book angered me more than I was prepared for.

While the book was mostly about the ineptitude of President Bush and the criminal activity of evil men like Dick Cheney and David Addington and the sycophantism of others like George Tenet and Alberto Gonzalez, it also tells the story of many other honorable, courageous, and patriotic Americans who stood up to the criminals. It is their stories that saves this book from being overwhelmingly depressing.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Devastating critique of Bush/Cheney's deranged emotional response to 9/11. Clarifies not just the abject illegality and anti-Americanism of torture, but also its ineffectiveness and dangerous consequences. The book is not as tightly written as Mayer's subsequent "Dark" work: Dark Money

[Kathrynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eyeopening! Glad I opted to read this as it explained a lot of what I'd picked up in bits in pieces from other media over the years, but I thought to myself, "No way! We have too many checks and balances for a single individual to take over." The author did a nice job of timelining what happened after September 11, 2001 and how key players and top officials were swept out of the way while Vice President Dick Cheney and his "adviser" David Addington took over The White House.

In my opinion, David Addington, Dick Cheney and the other 4 members of the self-proclaimed "War Council" need to be held accountable for their actions. George Bush is ultimately responsible for allowing that group to take over and push his advisers under the rug along with completely ignoring the U.S. Constitution, the Geneva Convention and a slew of other documents and guidelines that SHOULD have prevented what happened. Mr. Bush couldn't have been that blind!

Yes, desperate times called for desperate measures, but from what was described in The Dark Side a handful of power hungry people wanted to change our government system and give the President complete power to arrest, detain, and torture ANYONE for as long as he felt necessary without having to justify, inform, or put on trial. ANYONE--inside or outside the United States. U.S. citizen or not. WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.

That meant that any of US could have been rounded up and thrown in prison at any time if there was even a slight hint or someone that didn't like us whispered in the right ear.

Two words: Witch hunt.

I can see how this would have been abused and used long after 9/11 and the "detainees" went off our radar.

Three words: Abuse of power!

Information in the book indicated two separate CIA and FBI detainee investigations revealed that maybe 50 prisoners were actually al-Queda members, but David Rumsfield, Condoleeza Rice and many other top officials refused to discuss it.

We (freakin') paid Pakistan to round up people THEY thought were terrorists, so they rounded up people they didn't like just for our money. How wrong is that? To never be given a trial, never be told what they were charged with? We just went back several hundred years to a time our forefathers and veterans fought hard to have certain rights and in a few swirls of a pen, those rights were obliterated.

What about prisoner number 001, John Walker Lindh? The evidence in this book indicates he was NOT a member of al-Queda. The American felt the need to go to Afghanistan and help fight against the Northern Alliance during a time when WE were giving aid to the Taliban--as was Saudi Arabia. He'd been over there for so long and out of touch. He was NOT in an al-Queda training camp. He was beaten and tortured (by US), his parents hired a lawyer for him and sent numerous letters to officials, including David Rumsfield, but they told him he had no lawyer.

To play devil's advocate, even if he (or anyone else) were linked to al-Queda, the Geneva Convention, our countries HONOR, our U.S. Constitution....our founding fathers must have been rolling over in their graves to see what inhumane treatment....why didn't anyone try to re-educate some of the "detainees" to show them the better side of America?

I refuse to call them "enemy combatants." That's just dumb. Prisoners of war are prisoners of war. If it walks like a duck....

Have we not learned from history? Richard Nixon resigned before he could be impeached for behavior not as severe as what happened in our White House after 9/11. People need to be held accountable.

What about the way people were bullied inside the political arena, demoted, lost jobs?

I'm all for kicking some serious butt for what happened on 9/11, Somalia, on board the U.S.S. Cole to name a few, but we have to maintain our own integrity in the process. Reading The Dark Side had this American ashamed of her country for the first time in her life.

The four stars were due to some rambling I thought the author did from time-to-time. The last half of the book could have been summed up in a few short chapters.

[Clif · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the end of WW2, Europe was devastated, Germany in particular. It had reaped what it had sowed. German prestige was non-existent after the horrors of Nazism and the prestige of the United States could not have been higher. The whole world looked to the U.S. for the future.

Just last week, I saw a ranking of countries in world public opinion. Germany was by far and away number one and the United States was well down the list. Less than 75 years after being at the top, the U.S. has been easily surpassed by a country that was despised. Power and empire are intimately involved. Germany repudiated the corrupting combination of military power and global domination as the U.S. embraced it.

Jane Meyer's book is an account of how a few people at the top, stung by the attack of 9/11, filled with a sense of outrage, fearful of further attacks, but at the same time drunk on the idea that nothing could limit a U.S. president, decided to repudiate the respect for law built up over two centuries, and dropped into the abyss, the dark side.

Now you would think conservatives, being the law-and-order folks they claim to be, would be the last ones to show contempt for the law. But there is something about conservatives that might provide a clue to a weak spot: they are adamant about the law applying to others, yet consider themselves so upstanding and their motivations so patently correct that their own behavior, in their own eyes, might be considered so worthy as to be law itself.

Led by Dick Cheney and his un-elected aide, the imperious, brow-beating, physically imposing, reclusive David Addington, the simple thinking of President G. W. Bush was directed, with his eager participation, down a path to kidnapping and torture that spread like a virus from the CIA to the military. It produced no significant positive results but a host of negatives including a lying president ("we don't torture"), Guantanamo, the atrocity of Abu Ghraib and the destruction of the physical and mental health of innocent people, ground up in a system that knew no bounds.

Richard Nixon was properly denounced for his excesses in the use of power, widely known for his comment that if the president does it, it's legal. However, though he and his aides circumvented the law, they knew the law and were attorneys.

In the case of G. W. Bush, the law itself was corrupted through the convenient interpretations of attorney John Yoo, an employee at the office of Legal Counsel (OLC) eager to comply with the wishes of Cheney and Addington. This office, intended to advise the president on the legality of proposed policy, was instead subverted into a place to re-interpret law to give the appearance of legality to anything and everything the chief executive wanted to do. This spat in the face of the long legal tradition the United States had professed to uphold in a chaotic world. It threw the doctrine of separation of power out the window allowing the president a tyranny the founding fathers were adamant to prevent.

The detailed account Meyer provides leaves no aspect of this legal lawlessness un-examined. The reader sees into the operations of the CIA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice. You will understand torture in detail, the methods and the history of the effort to prevent its use prior to 9/11. From a discussion of the Geneva Conventions to the aircraft numbers on the Gulfstream jet used to "render" kidnapped suspects to hellish black sites in foreign countries, the whole dark story is here, including the famous Ashcroft sickbed showdown.

Never tedious, always finding just the right amount of detail, clearly describing each person and subject at hand, Meyer expertly puts to paper the results of her voluminous research. This book is historical documentation at the highest level. I just wish it had the subtitle "conservatives gone wild".

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Adams famously described the American government as one of "laws, not of men." In eight years, the Bush Administration has reacted to the attacks of September 11, 2001, by turning that dictum on its head in their zeal to ensure that another attack does not occur on their watch. In particular, the President's confidence that he is a "good man," has led him to embrace the advice of a ruthless cabal within the United States government whose first article of faith is that there are no limitations on presidential power in a "time of war."

Jane Mayer's excellent book on the prosecution of the so-called "War on Terror" is a "must read" not primarily because it reveals new information: many of the facts have already been exposed in the nation's media, including in some of Mayer's own articles for the New Yorker. Rather, this book adds two essential dimensions to the national debate on the government's actions. First, it describes the political and legal decisions of the White House, the Vice President's Office, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and the Attorney General to reinterpret, and subvert, the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and the criminal statutes of the United States with horrific consequences. Second, in describing those consequences, it paints a far more vivid picture of the gruesome consequences of the torture policy than the press's usual glib invocation of "water boarding."

As the book describes, Vice President Dick Cheney's unprecedented ability to control the flow and content of information to the president, coupled with the weight his advice has been given, put him in a unique position to guide the direction of the Administration's policy toward "enemy combatants" captured on the battlefield or subsequently abducted. With Cheney's aide David Addington as the architect in chief, the administration concluded, under the cover of John Yoo's memoranda from the Justice Department, that any limits on the president's power to order torture — whether law or treaty — could be set aside on the grounds that they were subordinate to the president's constitutional powers as Commander in Chief. On the basis of a superficially plausible theory, generally rejected by expert opinion, that the most effective way to obtain information is to inflict a maximum of pain, the Administration provided the C.I.A. with authorized methods of torture, many of which had hitherto been acknowledged in the United States and elsewhere to constitute war crimes. To the extent these failed to achieve results, the Administration pushed for the infliction of more pain. To the extent its actions were opposed or questioned, the Administration made demonstrably false claims about the effectiveness of its illegal methods in obtaining actionable intelligence. To the extent that military lawyers in the Judge Advocate General's office and other lawyers risked their careers to restore the rule of law, the seasoned bureaucratic infighters in the Vice President's office, particularly Addington, fought back ferociously.

Mayer is no less thorough in describing the hair-raising consequences of the Administration's legal decisions. In constructing their refined programs of systematic cruelty, the C.I.A. and the military drew upon the military's training programs developed to counter Chinese Communist "brainwashing" and the C.I.A.'s massive experiments on the effects of prolonged sensory deprivation during the Vietnam War. Impressed by the ability of the Communist regimes to force false confessions from prisoners at show trials in the 50's, the military had researched Communist torture programs in depth in order to train its soldiers to resist as much as possible through its Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program. In a diabolical twist, the C.I.A. and the military used the lessons of the SERE program to devise an affirmative program of torture designed to extract information from detainees. The fact that torture techniques had proved useful in the past primarily for forcing false confessions does not seem to have given the C.I.A. much pause. Combined with the C.I.A.'s own research into the effectiveness of sensory deprivation in creating total mental breakdown and introducing a schizophrenic state, these techniques were used to inflict a maximum of pain on detainees in the expressed hope of extracting information and (usually unexpressed) hope of exacting revenge. In reading the book, one gets a full sense of the brutal consequences of these techniques in combination, and the savagery with which our government's interrogators redoubled the pain they inflicted when they did not get the results they wanted. To the extent there were any limits on the suffering our intelligence service imposed, those limits were cast aside when the C.I.A. delivered detainees through "extraordinary rendition" to the secret police of Arab dictatorships such as Egypt and Syria.

Jane Mayer's compelling work thus documents not only how vital, and how fragile, is the rule of law, but also reminds us of the terrible consequences that ensue when it breaks down.

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mayer tells her story slowly, deliberately, carefully placing interview upon interview until we are faced with a pile of facts so distastful that it is difficult to imagine we turned faces away for so long. It is true we "didn't know," but the secrecy surrounding the internal operations of the White House is no excuse for allowing what we all may have suspected--that we were losing our moral high ground in the war against terror by stooping so low as to disregard our own, and international laws, in order to fight a virally-organized group of people that hated us for our excesses--the very excesses we were proving to be unequivocably true.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book makes my blood boil. These people, who not only authorized torture, but encouraged it, have disgraced our country and screwed up our struggle against jihadism. It is a story of incompetence and arrogance, centered on the Vice Presidency and the VP's grey eminence, David Addington.

Notable in the book are the stories of honorable men with military and conservative backgrounds who could not stomach what was going on and resisted it.

Also notable is the argument that torture, ultimately, is ineffective because victims will and did say anything to make the pain stop. If it worked, we would have to have recourse to some kind of moral calculus--how much torture can we inflict to save so many lives, at such-and-such levels of probability and certainty? The claim that torture is ineffective, or at least yields unreliable information (which I believe to be generally true), avoids those dilemmas.

Barack, appoint me Special Prosecutor.

[Bennett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent, a bit repetitive

[Hatuxka · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone who wasn't unaware of most of the cases described in this book, upon seeing the book I snapped it up, eager to know how particularly bad it was, having read some of the author's earlier work, on Clarence Thomas for example. But I was unprepared for how sickening the details would be about this modern day set of barbaric outrages perpetrated by the CIA and the U. S. military in dealing with people they had captured in the "war on terror". The decision to unilaterally declare as legal torture, degradation and dehumanizing of suspects was made through a banal, bureaucratic process involving a good-old boy network of hard right extremist lawyers. That the author over-sells the idea that a counter network of good old boys who are not quite as right wing are some kind of force of good was a sore point with me. Here's what I gathered: such counter righty lawyers in Justice, Defense etc., were loyal Repubs, but they are dismayed by the legal shoddiness of the arguments for torture and disregard for the law and decency made in the memos or opinions by the hard right lawyers to justify "enhanced" interrogation (=torture), they remonstrate with each other (or to themselves), make attempts to voice their dismay, are chewed out by Cheney's staffer, David Addington, well portrayed as a ruthless zealot for going to the nth degree for the application of torture early and often, and the softer hard righty lawyers resign. Soon enough the Supreme Court steps in and makes all their internecine drama moot and overrules the Bushies. That's roughly how at least three different episodes involving one or more of these Repub righty lawyers for the Bush administration proceeded. Short shrift is given to the team of lefty constitutional lawyers who actually do something and take the cases to the high court where they win victories for due process. Odd. The book suffers from poor editing, being pieced together from articles Mayer wrote for the New Yorker and it shows, with facts given earlier reprised more than once. At one point the author mentions that the CIA were concerned about how the military was handling interrogations In Iraq in 2003 and withdrew their participation in joint interrogations. But the author goes on in the rest of the book, beginning with their key role in the death of an Iraqi captive at Abu Ghraib and shows how guilty the CIA was of every kind of atrocity and war crime in their rendition, torturing and mental tormenting of those they captured and further she details their garden variety cruelty, stupidity and incompetence. As for the emphasis on the internal struggles of the various legal counsels within the Bush admin. which ultimately yielded very little except for how they could deliver platitudes to each other about the constitution and freedom and what we were "doing to ourselves" by legally justifying and then carrying out torture, the undue emphasis on these substitutes for any kind of real heroes makes one wonder if the author was a Washington cocktail party insider with these people. Particularly well detailed is how little the treatment given the prisoners actually yielded and she breaks down the few claims that were made about what the torture and torment yielded. Now we know that Condi Rice has admitted that torture was discussed in the White House. How did Mayer miss this? Take a couple stars away.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

This is a good book to read in conjunction with "A Higher Loyalty" by James Comey. Mayer provides the deeper background of the major players in the GWB administration during the war on terror and Comey provides the insider's perspective. Mayer presents David Addington as an ideologue (and more) hellbent on expanding presidential authority and Comey tells us why he's a bully in need of a comeuppance. The books diverge quite a bit beyond this time in history but are thematically complementary.

I found the sections of politics and power struggles far more interesting than the discussions about torture. I agreed with the author's dim view of torture, so I didn't need to be won over, and saw a sameness in the material.

Note that the hardcover version has a picture insert and the kindle version has no pictures.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an ambitious work of reportage that discusses how far over the line the U.S. stepped in its pursuit of the war on terror, and why. In regard to the actual definition of torture, Mayer uses interviews to show opposing viewpoints rather than presenting much legal research of her own. The book is more about the political situation that allowed the U.S. to operate on "the dark side," despite many warning signs that this was illegal or at the very least imprudent and ineffective.

Mayer describes how Cheney's interest in strengthening executive power goes back to his days in the Ford administration and how the emergency of 9/11 was an irresistible opportunity for him to promote that agenda. Although his theory of executive power included any potential area of government, the handling of suspected terrorists became the primary battle ground. His protegé David Addington and another lawyer, John Yoo, were the ones primarily responsible for forcing through secret memos with radical and unfounded interpretations of the law, behind the backs of John Ashcroft and other administration figures who should have been involved. If one weren't paying close attention to the content of these disputed memos, it would seem like childish bureaucratic game, best followed with an org chart and an eyeroll. Cheney controlled access to Bush, so that players with alternate agendas found themselves frozen out and unable to air their concerns. Addington had an explosive temper and refused to even hear out opposing arguments. Gonzales would say in private meetings that he was concerned about torture, but then acquiescently nod his way through meetings with the president and cabinet. From late 2001 until the exposure of the Abu Ghraib photos, career civil servants, highly experienced lawyers, and military officials--many of whom were more well-qualified to give advice on interrogation methods and the law than Addington and Yoo--seemed powerless to halt the creep of illegal practices across different territories and through different departments.

One of the more upsetting things about the practices described in the book is how ineffective they appear to have been. The proponents of strong-armed interrogation presented no evidence that it worked; one official at Guantanamo reportedly cited the fictional Fox television series 24 as evidence that torture elicits important, usable information. Quite the opposite proved true--the intelligence received from enhanced interrogation was often wrong, intentionally misleading, and the bad treatment of prisoners means that many will never be able to be tried due to the whole process being tainted. At the same time, the advice of agents and military personnel with experience handling enemy combatants was ignored, and some of them had their careers ruined after tangling with torture proponents. So in addition to the idea of torture being itself upsetting, the reader can also be horrified by the stupidity underlying that approach as well as the disrespect shown to dedicated Americans who were trying to handle things properly.

The structure of The Dark Side can be quite difficult to follow; one paragraph flows into the next effortlessly, but I would be hard-pressed to write a brief outline of the whole work. Each chapter focuses on a particular transgression (extraordinary rendition, black site prisons, etc.), with a great deal of chronological and biographical overlap. Still, the key moments and players stand out, ready to be analyzed in the law school classrooms, history books, and business school case studies of the future. Bush advertised himself as the "MBA president" but what's really striking in this book is his utter irrelevance in his own administration, leaving a vacuum of power that was ironically filled by those preaching a theory of executive power with no accountability.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jane Mayer is extremely readable, she has managed to create an overview of the Executive Order that Cheney and Addington put together that vastly expanded Presidential powers, cleared the way for renditions, shredded the Geneva Convention, presented weak and strained arguments that made torture acceptable, and expanded the surveillance of Americans by their government and gave the President unrestrained war powers. She then shows how these expanded powers created a reign of terror where America was doing its best to be more barbaric than its declared enemy. Most of what she has researched and set out in a timeline that brings all of the players in an understandable timeline of how these abuses occurred and their tragic consequences are organized in a way that allows the reader to have a better understanding of what exactly we did as a nation.
Most of the stories and characters have been handled in several books that deal with one aspect or another of Cheney's march to the "dark side" that would eventually lead to drawing in almost every institution and corrupting it. It was not a period that would make any American proud and we are still dealing with the ramifications of these actions today. I did discover some new heroes, who risked all to stand up to the over reach of the State, many of whom became victims of smear campaigns that destroyed their lives. The only institution that survived relatively unsullied was the FBI.
I look at this episode through the eyes and harm done to our military. Our first President, George Washington, commander of the Army of the Potomac established Americas 'No torture" policy. He knew that even though all powers at that time used torture extensively, that our country was setting out to be morally and ethically superior to all other nations. He also knew it was counter intuitive...that once our enemy understood that surrender would not lead to torture, they found surrender to our forces acceptable. It is easy to choose to fight to the death if you understand that surrender would only bring torture and slaughter. Washington also understood that those who tortured others became corrupted and it became hard to maintain military discipline.
The military is set with two conflicting tasks, to teach young men to kill those who we would do battle with and yet retain some level of sanity, that fighting a good fight for a good cause with honor allows.
Coming from a family with generations of Veterans who survived war and for the most part reintegrated into the civilian world or post war world as productive citizens. This did not mean that my father and uncles or Grandfather did not have flashbacks, faces that haunted them, because war is so horrid that you can never unsee what you have seen, those images, smells and sounds will always stay with you. My father was very aware that his bombing runs killed civilians and even allies and occasionally our own troops. He transported freed POWs as camps were liberated. He remained a career officer after the war, and knew Korean War POWs who had been tortured in captivity. But he didn't kill out of vengeance or joy, he felt that he did what he had to do, nothing more nothing less. He also knew that one of the ways the military teaches young men to kill was to subject them to propaganda to make them hate the enemy and view them somehow as subhuman. Perhaps it was because my father knew German and Japanese Americans he did not fall prey to believe that the enemy and all civilians were evil incarnate. He was at war with a system, an ideology that was destructive to democratic ideals. He was proud to belong to a military that did not commit atrocities for the sake of committing atrocities. He knew in war that men regardless of military policy did pass over boundaries that would shatter them psychologically, that in spite of all some soldiers would rape and kill civilians. My father believed that responsibility for those type of actions lay solely on the commanding officer, what he encouraged and allowed to happen under his command.
We live in a culture where there are forces that no longer cling to the ideals of America at our best, at our most honorable. Post 9/11 the anger and sense of vengeance that swept over certain people in power can be traced to attitudes that they held prior to 9/11 and our 'War on Terror'. We all grew up in neighborhoods that had bullies, that kid who tortured animals and abused children half their age, those 10 year old's who tried to rape 3 and 4 year old neighborhood children. Children who built bombs in their parents' garages. We recognize that they have deficiencies and lack of empathy that puts their behaviour along a spectrum of psychopathic behaviour. Many survive childhood to become adults who have a deep sense of rage and have learned to be very manipulative and manage not to cross any social boundaries as long as they always get their way...but if someone crosses them our thwarts them, they can become very dangerous.
Starting somewhere in the 70s we began to romantize those who live on the darkside, they became popular anti-heroes. The darkest of all was the Jack Bauer character of the TV show '24' a post 9/11 character who used torture save America weekly. It always worked as an effective tool in our governments arsenal and the bad guy would break down spill the beans and the plot would be interrupted and hundreds of innocents would be saved.
The sad part is that we have so much documentation regarding torture, that intellectually we know that torture does not work. We know this from the release of our own POWs who have been tortured and from those we have tortured, from those who have tortured in South American and Middle Eastern countries where torture is used to terrorize their own populations. We know from interviewing those who survived Nazi torture...people who are being tortured will tell you anything to get the torture to stop. The torturer is rarely looking for the truth or the facts, they are looking for their victim to give them information that will validate their own beliefs. Often the person being tortured does not understand even what the torturer wants from them, and will keep confessing to things until they have fulfilled the exact need of the torturer. When we look back and see that we entered the War in Iraq because we had a group of neo-cons in power who wanted a war in Iraq and had people tortured until they understood that what their tortures wanted was some link between Saddam and Al Qaeda and finally gave them what they wanted. Even though our experienced counter-terrorism officers were very suspect of the information received and wrote analysis that clearly stated that the information was suspect..their analysis never made it to the top, much like their analysis that Al Qaeda was planning a major attack on America also got set in some outbox. The fix was in and the drum beat to go to war was set in motion.
It is interesting how Colin Powell and Secretary Rice were kept out of the loop as the initial executive order was enacted, that our most experienced foreign service and counterintelligence people were ignored. Off to war we went, with no one having any understanding of the culture, the aspirations of the Iraqi people, or understanding of the deep tensions between Sunni and Shia factions within the country and with no end game, no grand postwar strategy. It is, like Afghanistan a war that still consumes us has destabilized an entire region, and our behaviour, the incarceration of locals who were turned in for bounties we paid war lords to produce, the number of people we tortured only fed the radicals ability to recruit. Our actions created more terrorists than existed before 9/11.
This is an important book to read at this time because we again have someone in the White House, who believes that torture is totally acceptable and has through rhetoric declared Islam the enemy and taken actions that create a perfect recruitment tool for radicals. And once again we are expanding our war on terror into Yemen, the Philippines, Somalia, Libya, Syria asking for more troops, placing more American lives in jeopardy, still without much of an understanding of the politics of the regions where we are taking our new war. We are dropping phosphorous bombs on the civilians of Raqqa in hopes of killing a few ISIS soldiers. The most brilliant of our military minds know that there is no military solution to the war on terror. As we our sending the finest of our youth into the battle zones it is time to take a hard look at what we are doing. As a Blue Star Mom whose son served in 2006-2007 and an avid reader of anything relating to the War on Terror my hope is that we wake up from the the nightmare we have created and start looking for ways to address the conditions that feed this frenzy of errors.

[Raghu · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those of us, who believe in the Constitution’s sanctity and liberal American values and ideals, the past fifteen years have been one bad news after another. There were the lies which led to waging war on Iraq and the killing of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis. It was followed by officially sanctioned torture of prisoners, followed by pervasive electronic surveillance of all US citizens, all of which again denied blatantly by the government at first. We have had suspects, which included some US citizens, imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for years without any charges being laid. There was the ritual abuse, humiliation and denial of due process to the detainees. To cap it all, many detainees were handed over to brutal intelligence agencies in Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, Romania etc for torture. This book deals with how all these sordid affairs came about, in addition to the details of many unjust incarcerations in Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib. I have read a few books already on the happenings in Guantanamo and elsewhere. I was more interested in finding explanations as to why suddenly the US would acquiesce to the macabre idea of disobeying the Geneva Conventions in its pursuit of the Islamic extremists. After all, the US adhered strictly to the Geneva conventions in dealing with Viet Cong prisoners during the Vietnam war and later with the Iraqi prisoners in the first Gulf War of 1991, even though this commitment was sorely tested during the Vietnam war. Going even further back, the same was true during the Korean war as well as World War II. Those adversaries were formidable compared to the Al-Qaeda fighters who have no nation of their own, no sophisticated weapons, not much money and are just a few thousand in number, according the CIA’s own estimates. On the face of it, there seems no logical reason to abandon our commitment to human rights in dealing with this adversary. This book provides some interesting historical background to how we got to where we are now.

Author Jane Mayer weaves a picture involving three key actors - Dick Cheney, David Addington and John Yoo - in her investigation of how we came to choosing Guantanamo Bay as the destination of Al-Qaeda prisoners. Dick Cheney has had a long stint in politics. He was Secretary of Defense in the Bush Sr administration in an earlier avatar. He was also chief of staff in the Gerald Ford administration. He was scarred by what happened in the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra scandal. His experience had conditioned him to come to the conclusion that the office of the President is gradually being deprived of its rightful and legitimate power in doing its duty. When 9/11 happened, he naturally concluded that the President needed substantial powers, unhindered by the constitutional and legal restrictions because national security is paramount. David Addington was Dick Cheney’s legal counsel and was like-minded. He provided whatever legal backing that would be needed to make Cheney’s vision a reality. John Yoo was in the Justice Department and he undertook the job of providing the necessary interpretations of the law in circumventing the Constitution. The CIA also helped with its proposal and endorsement of ‘enhanced interrogation’ and transferring suspects to third countries for torture as a necessary mechanism to extract confessions from detainees. There were dissenting voices from the FBI and many experts outside this inner group, but they were all overridden by President Bush.

Once the President acquired extra-constitutional powers, it became necessary to use it to formulate a mechanism to deal with the enormous number of prisoners in the wake of 9/11. Guantanamo Bay had 775 detainees. The Pentagon admitted that they had 21000 prisoners in Iraq and the Red Cross recorded more than 10000 prisoners in Afghanistan. The author details the shady process of how we came to choosing Guantanamo as the location to keep detainees. When CIA captures a suspected Al-Qaeda terrorist, what can it do with him? He can’t be killed because it is against international law to kill someone in custody. He can’t be released because he may be too dangerous or a valuable source of information. European countries treated them as criminals and dealt with them through the regular courts. But the Bush administration believed that the civilian court system is too rule-bound to deal with them. One idea was to set up military commissions to try the suspects. By putting the Pentagon in charge, the fight against terrorism becomes War and not a law-enforcement matter. But it needed Congress approval, which was deemed undesirable. Nuremberg type trials also were contemplated, consisting of civilian and military experts, but was dismissed because of the civilian element. The CIA suggested plans of putting the detainees on a ship and keeping them perpetually sailing in international waters. That way, they never have to be put on trial. It was also eventually deemed impractical. An unspecified African country (believed to be Zambia) was asked to take the prisoners. The country initially agreed but later backed out when it figured out what sorts of prisoners were in question. Then, someone in the White House realized that Guantanamo Bay suited the purpose ideally. Guantanamo has unique legal status. Leased in perpetuity to the US by Cuba in 1903, it was arguably under US control but not under US law. So, the executive branch could hold and interrogate foreign prisoners there in any manner deemed necessary, beyond meddling from Congress and the courts. At least, this is what the Bush White House believed. So, a military commission was decided upon as the solution. This is how the US came to impose an alternative legal system, following the rules devised by the executive branch as the way to solve all the legal problems posed by the courts and the Constitution in processing the Al-Qaeda detainees. Ironically, it became the source of a whole set of new vexing legal problems.

The US is not the only nation in this episode which exhibited conduct about which it would surely be embarrassed of in future. Poland, which was known for the peaceful Solidarity movement against the Communists in the 1980s, seems to have sunk low enough to host many detainees from the US and torture them, all in return for an US carrot of NATO membership. Similarly, Romania also accepted prisoners for torture in return for the promise of NATO membership. Pakistan is even worse, rounding up some high value terrorists as well as hundreds of innocent people and shipping them off to torture centers in Afghanistan, Egypt and Guantanamo, in return for millions of dollars of cash from the CIA. Almost all the cash was likely appropriated by the Pakistani Intelligence and its Army. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind 9/11, was worth $25 million while Abu Zubayda was handed over for $10 million, which was used by the Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) for a swanky new headquarters. It must be said, however, that the book documents Pakistan as having helped the US a lot in capturing and handing over many Al-Qaeda targets, albeit for money.

What was the final outcome of the Guantanamo Bay incarceration? A review of 517 detainees showed that only 8% were alleged to have been associated with Al-Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee US bombs!!
All but five percent of the detainees were captured by non-US players, many of whom were bounty hunters, which inevitably means that many of them would be innocent victims of greed. The author draws a parallel with the Phoenix program of the Vietnam war era, which was known among military historians as a state-sanctioned torture and murder program. The Pentagon found later that 97% of the Viet Cong it targeted then were of negligible importance.

After reading this book and several other investigative and analytical reports in various newspapers and magazines, I get the feeling that the visual media, in spite of its round-the-clock news coverage, does not give much time for all this detail, either in analysis or in reporting. So, it is important to read books like this so that the falsifications are challenged and the record is set straight as much as possible. It is essential if we want to live in a democracy that is informed, humane and compassionate.

[Dr. Carl Ludwig Dorsch · Rating 2 out of 5]

We had high expectations of this work, which though perhaps unfair, were disappointed. Hoping for a fierce and well ordered indictment, though indictment there was what we all too often found ourselves upon was a more-or-less (given the inherent difficulty of access) complete, but often scattered, episodic and anecdotal tour of the federal legal bureaucracy as it dealt with the possession and interrogation of captives in the G.W. Bush administration’s “War on Terror.” Here are sips and hints of the niceties of the private arguments, worries and justifications the final effects of which Mr. Kafka has so well earlier described.

Presumably one should not expect a volume admittedly rooted in a dozen or more long-format periodical pieces written over 5 years’ time to read with the focus or structure of a formal brief, and indeed it does not. At times in fact, we could not escape the feeling of having been thrown into a slightly breathless spy novel, but of the legal governmental sort. And at times it oddly seemed that Mr. Cheney’s most egregious fault may have been his lack of a law degree.

If one remains under the misapprehension that the US federal government, acting from the highest levels, does not only systematically and on a global scale brutally kidnap, torture, and likely murder as a matter of conscious policy but then also simultaneously lie about and legally justify the same, we would recommend reading of this work. If however one awaits a conclusive “J'accuse” on the US government’s 2001-2008 captive policy (as we do), The Dark Side, not surprisingly, falls a bit short.

The book is, however, an illuminating glance at the meaning and methods of “rule by law” in the most explicitly legalistic national culture of the 21st century – and perhaps the most extensive, coherent and fully ramified legal ecology in all of human history thus far.

For instance: surprisingly little of the consideration described in the volume occurs in the courts. Largely we are witness to argument and deliberation within the nests of lawyers within, among other venues, the various separate and multiple legal offices of the Justice Department, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the offices of the President and Vice-President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the US Army, Navy, the various Judge Advocate General's Corps, the CIA, the NSA, the NSC, the DIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, etc. The populations involved seem enormous: it could be supposed that the number of lawyers and staff of the entities cited number in the many thousands. And it is worth remembering that these represent a mere sliver of the federal executive legal enterprise…

As Publius Mauritius is once noted to have said: “Truly until that day when all possible men, animals and works of the earth, and all possible intercourse amongst them, according to their vital qualities, have been fully enumerated, the work of the law has barely begun.”

(Mauritius, On the Persians, IV 348-9)

- Carl and Louisa Dorsch

[Jennifer Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, Mayer's book brought to mind a line from Yeats (one of my favorite poets)..."The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." In this case, it's Cheney, Rumsfeld, John Yoo, David Addington, and a host of other White House appointees whose dogmatic belief that coersion and torture are the only way to extract information from alleged terrorists (despite hard evidence to contrary - the best evidence we got out of anyone came from FBI interrogators, using old-fashioned police work, criminal investigation, and a rapport-building interrogation technique).

Mayer traces the development of the infamous Bybee/Yoo torture memo and the establishment of a policy of "enhanced techniques" in interrogation (i.e., waterboarding), as well as the valiant efforts of many military, Justice Department, FBI, and Pentagon attorneys to reverse course and put a stop to what they saw as cruel and inhumate treatment at best, and outright torture and war crimes at worst.

While Cheney, Yoo, and Addington basically put the Constitution through a shredder and throw the Gevena Conventions out the window, it's the protests of many loyal Republican attorneys that I found most heartening. The uniformed military attorneys in particular understood the damage that these interrogation and detention policies (black sites, Guantanamo) had on American's standing in the world, and our ability to bring any accused terrorist to justice.

This, combined with Kafka Comes to America, truly brings to light the damage that we've done to our country's values over the last 7 years - largely out of paranoia (there was some serious bunker mentality going on) and fear - and these things aren't actually making us safer (again, we mostly get false confessions from the CIA's "enhanced" techniques - there's a euphamism for ya).

I think reading this seriously made my blood pressure go up, but this, Wax's book, and seeing Obama speak yesterday made me realize just how much work we've got to do as a country to restore what is we've always stood for - and how important that is.

Now, I'm off to read a book about an adorable library cat to restore my faith in the world.

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I heard and read about some of the main facts written in this book, but when Jane Mayer put the story altogether I became even more sickened by the administration's (Cheney and Addington's) authorization of the capture and torture of suspected terrorists, keeping them without charges of crimes in order to keep their illegal activities secret in Guantanamo and other hidden torture sites throughout the world. (When the stories leaked out, they then attempted to grant immunity to themselves and those who followed out their orders.) But the most frightening part of the book to me was to learn how the Vice President and his legal counsel, Addington, set themselves up above the law and Constitution. These tyrants specifically directed the Office of General Counsel to write a document saying what they did was lawful--and then kept it hidden from other OGC lawyers,under the guise of of "National Security." Cheney kept the flow of information away from the President and told him the Geneva Convention laws did not apply and the torture was legal He played on Bush's trigger points so the President would sign off on the illegal actions. George W. Bush should have been impeached, and then Cheney along with him. Now they should be prosecuted against for war crimes and crimes against the laws of the land. To do otherwise will destroy the best things the people of the United States have--their Constitution, their civil rights, their freedom, and their democracy.

[Stop]

Read the STOP SMILING interview with author Jane Mayer

Lift Every Voice
By James Hughes

(This interview originally appeared in the third annual STOP SMILING 20 Interviews Issue)

After millions embraced Barack Obama on election night in Chicago, though still weeks before the record crowds that flooded the National Mall and its tributaries became flyover country for a departing president bound for Dallas dormancy, I spoke with author Jane Mayer about the range of emotions and challenges churned up in her startling account of detainee abuse under the Bush administration, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday).

“I’m glad you had the time to read all those happy chapters,” Mayer says with equal parts consolation and self-deprecation. “Was it depressing?” Though the material is not for the faint of heart, her reporting in the book contributes vital information to the national conversation about our government’s stance on torture, and provokes essential questions about how to challenge violators of the Geneva Conventions.

Read the complete interview...

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Dark Side, that name conjures up many images from the Bush presidency. Unlike many books that dealt with this subject, this one seems largely free of political bias and presents information in a clear, neutral way. From the very beginning, when 9/11 happened, you get the sense that something bad was about to happen, and indeed it does. The political disaster that was going to grip Washington, and the United States, was a kind of perfect storm that The Dark Side examines. Not only did the administration throw away core ideals that have existed since the Revolution, but it seems as though many of the players involved were just waiting for an opportunity to instituate an imperial presidency. While reading this book, I experienced anger, sadness, and shock at what our leaders were willing to do. For all of this to happen, many pieces had to co-exist at the same time, such as a national disaster that led to reactionary, not rational, decisions, cronyism, incompetence, lawyers that argued on behalf of their client and not the law, an easily manipulated president, a Congress with powers similar to that of the Byzantine Senate, and high-ranking government officials who wanted a monarchical executive. This is a must read for anyone interested in post 9/11 politics.

[Jerome Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice overview of various aspects of the war on terror.

While it is well written, it charges many people with attitudes and deeds, but offers only the author's word as truth.

Meyer's thesis is that Islamic terrorism is a joke. Some may be critical of her use of hindsight, perhaps.

There are 340 endnotes. About 65 cite anonymous sources...no idea from the notes about how many people and what sort of agenda they brought to the table when they talked to the author. A lot of the remaining notes simply quote other books like Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 and James Risen's State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. This leaves the reader with no idea what those quotes and citations are based on.

[Kurt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I guess I'm getting to be squarely middle-aged; I find these days I'm tearing through non-fiction of a political nature -- books that help me secure my place in these insane times. Mayer's book is dense, detailed, and disturbing. I can't figure out whether this kind of writing is politically partisan ... or if it's just a case of the scary f***king truth being succinctly reported. It was helpful for a scatter-brained reader like myself to hop around a bit from section to section, then circle back for any detail that I thought might be entertaining, but I got through the whole enchilada in record time. The chapter that lays out the history, philosophy, and examples of "extraordinary rendition" is more thrilling than any movie or fiction piece I've taken in lately -- the truth can chill you to the core.

Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that this book confirms Dick Cheney really IS a bad, bad guy. To characterize him as a "sinister" figure would be a gross understatement. It'll make you shake your head.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only book (ok, aside from the series that included Zizek's little book) about 911 I've ever read. It'll probably remain that way for some time, but this is a great work of journalistic history. It made me understand things about the Bush administration (or, according to this book's overarching argument, the Cheney administration) that I never fully grasped. A lot of the broad strokes here we all know already, but it makes such a difference to read them in a succinct historical narrative instead of a zeitgeist of nyt articles and tv cut-ups. A lot of shit went down, and it really looks like the list of culpable people is shorter than I thought, and it broke my heart to read about all the theretofore loyal conservatives who actually tried to STOP what was going on because it was so obviously horribly wrong.

[Theresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mayer has done an outstanding research job on this horrendous episode of US history. She describes the paranoia that grabbed the White House (particularly Dick Cheney) after 9/11 which ultimately allowed the use of torture and deception to run rampant. Bush and his bunch repeatedly lied to Congress and the people about the tactics they were using and the damage done as a result of those tactics. She also emphasizes the push to give uncontrolled executive power to the president much in the same way Republicans are doing now with Trump. I would recommend this book to anyone concerned about how our government operates.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

Because I apparently wish to be angry and miserable this February, for the political book club I pitched Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. I have uhh opinions about the subtitle, because as a leftist I am minimally familiar with the history of the CIA (although not as familiar as I should be), but it’s Jane Mayer, one of the best investigative reporters working today, so I figured I could suck up a little bit of institutionalist liberal framing.

I was a youngish teen when most of this was going down--the 9/11 attacks occurred a week into eighth grade, and the invasion of Iraq in the spring semester of my freshman year in high school. So while I was generally aware of these things that happened--when the news broke about them, not while they were necessarily going on--my understanding was a bit scattered and underdeveloped, as I was just starting to read grown-up news on a regular basis, and I would periodically get distracted from following the news for big chunks of time by the general drama of being a teenager. So while I remember big moments like the Abu Ghraib photos being leaked, I wouldn’t have recognized names like John Yoo and David Addington at the time (I knew my more public-facing ghouls, like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld).

Reading a more orderly, well-researched accounting of the whole debacle really does a lot to highlight just how incredibly fucked up it was--on every level. There are reactions I had to some of this stuff that come from experiences I had that I hadn’t had when I was a teen, like “having a job,” let alone stuff like “doing community safety work,” that I couldn’t help but have color my reactions to some of the office politics, bureaucratization of evil, and general incompetence I was reading about, not to mention stupid shit like everyone’s obsession with “24.” Reading about the Bin Laden Unit’s general failures of investigative work, data management, and basic communications was more frustrating to read than I’d have thought, because it occurs at the point where even the CIA’s general purpose and legacy of horrible violence and suppression reduces down to “All we do is work on documents, that’s all anyone does anymore,” and it just seemed… infuriatingly dumb? Like, if you’re in the kind of job where failing to file a memo means 9/11 happens, then maybe you should have people who can file a fucking memo? It’s not that hard, the entire rest of the white-collar workforce can do it. Idunno, like many stories of our country’s shitty, violent, and unaccountable elites, it can be hard not to take it weirdly personally if you’ve ever worked in a job where you have been held to any kind of performance standard whatsoever.

The book being a large part office drama is actually very effective, I think, because it allows for drawing some pretty disturbingly sharp contrasts between the petty yammering among well-educated white guys in suits and the stuff that actually happened as a result of all these meetings and memos. This makes the petty yammering even more infuriating when you go back to it--all these lawyers and politicos and military guys just casually wrecking people’s lives from on high while they write bad action movies starring themselves in their brains, having tantrums in the office and writing unhinged screeds about the divine right of kings dressed up as legal advisories, and not being held even the slightest bit accountable for any of it, ensuring that even when major scandals broke--kidnapping completely random people, beating folks to death--all punishments were directed as far down the ladder as possible.

One thing that’s really on bright display in this book is the conservative mindset that everything not forbidden is mandatory. Much of the book revolves around the lawyers and their hangers-on coming up with legal justifications for torture, and then those legal justifications are carefully hidden away so the absolute minimum possibly number of people ever read them, which seems weird for, you know, law? But the Bush administration seemed to use legal justifications almost instead of policy proposals. I don’t know if this was just to prop up their mental images of themselves as law-and-order types or what, but instead of writing illegal policies that were like “we’re gonna do X” where X is illegal, they decided to write themselves illegal legal memos that were like “it’s legal to do X” where it is clearly not legal to do X, and then they did X because they had told themselves it was legal. And then instead of secret policies, we wind up with secret law.

In addition to throwbacks from all the folks we hated in the Bush years we also get a number of (often self-serving) cameos from various Republican Daddies of the more modern era, like James Comey and Robert Mueller, often playing similar roles of pretending to be dispassionately principled defenders of democracy and kind of getting away with it when standing next to one-dimensional ghouls like David Addington, who, to be perfectly clear, is one of a very small number of people in the world that I believe actually does deserve to be waterboarded.

The weakest part of the book is undoubtedly the end, where the beginning of the Obama era is painted as a major turning point because some of the worst legal writings were retracted, but we all know how that went: Nobody in the Bush administration was held accountable, and Gitmo is still open.

Anyway, America is the bad guy, stop trying to rehabilitate George W. Bush.

Originally posted at On bad guys.

[Antonio Nunez · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book about the US' authorities reaction to 9-11 Jane Mayer is in fine form. Although the book came out in 2008 it holds up remarkably well. The story is a well-known one. The authorities (particularly the CIA and the Presidency) were caught napping and tried to make up for that lapse by unleashing the hounds of hell. Particularly damning is a conspiracy between high ranking government lawyers headed by VP Cheney's counsel Mr Addington (in this book, a bully and a heartless fanatic) and including the apparently useless Alberto Gonzales, who later became secretary of justice, to legalize torture in violation of international commitments (the Geneva Protocols). All lawyers, particularly all government lawyers should read this book, to see the extremes to which an attorney may be led to further his superiors' ideological vision. Because it was an ideological vision: the Cheney camp believed that torture worked to extract useful information from detainees, and that it was the only thing that worked. John Yoo, author of the famous "torture memos", is a particularly horrible example.

This belief was never tested and was proven wrong multiple times. Mayer shows that detainees lie to stop the torture, and that plain old fashioned detective work and proper interrogation actually got much more information than torture ever did. There are many shameful stories here. People being abducted by bounty hunters and then being held for years in "black op" sites, sometimes being tortured or beaten to death either by CIA interrogators or their local employees. A German Muslim was kidnapped while on vacation and then was given over to the CIA and not released for years because the head of the Al Qaeda desk at the CIA "thought" there was something fishy about him. The accumulation of details is sickening and damning, as is the willingness of those in power to destroy the lives not only of those who because of guilt or circumstance ended in their power, but also of soldiers and civilians, who ill-trained and poorly supervised, ended going even beyond their already extreme powers. The bottom-feeders on Abu Ghraib were thrown to the wolves while their bosses in the Pentagon and the VPs office got away scot-free.

Finally, the book brings home the risks of the current situation: should, God forbid, a new large scale terror attack strike America, how would the current administration react, given what we know of the Bush Administration?