Alan Brinkley reviews Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side" for the NYT

THE DARK SIDE
The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.
By Jane Mayer.
Illustrated. 392 pp. Doubleday. $27.50.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/books/review/Brinkley-t.html?_r=1&ref=review&oref=slogin


August 3, 2008
Black Sites

By ALAN BRINKLEY


Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Cheney in effect took command of the national security operations of the federal government. Quickly and instinctively, he began to act in response to two longstanding beliefs: that the great dangers facing the United States justified almost any response, whether or not legal; and that the presidency needed vastly to enhance its authority, which had been unjustifiably and dangerously weakened in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate years. George Bush was an eager enabler, but not often an active architect, of the government’s response to terror. His instinct was to be tough and aggressive in response to challenges, and Cheney’s belligerence fit comfortably with the president’s own inclinations.

In fairness, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax scare that followed, who could not have imagined the worst and contemplated extraordinary efforts to prevent it? But as Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, makes clear in “The Dark Side,” a powerful, brilliantly researched and deeply unsettling book, what almost immediately came to be called the “war on terror” led quickly and inexorably to some of the most harrowing tactics ever contemplated by the United States government. The war in Iraq is the most obvious and familiar result of the heedless “toughness” of the new administration. But Mayer recounts a different, if at least equally chilling, story: the emergence of the widespread use of torture as a central tool in the battle against terrorism; and the fierce, stubborn defense of torture against powerful opposition from within the administration and beyond. It is the story of how a small group of determined men and women thwarted international and American law; fought off powerful challenges from colleagues within the Justice Department, the State Department, the National Security Council and the C.I.A.; ignored or circumvented Supreme Court rulings and Congressional resolutions; and blithely dismissed a growing clamor of outrage and contempt from much of the world — all in the service of preserving their ability to use extreme forms of torture in the search for usable intelligence.

Occasional lurid revelations of abuse — most prominent among them the appalling photographs of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, made public in 2004 — have been widely denounced throughout the world. The president has expressed outrage and has insisted that the degradation was the work of a few bad apples who would be appropriately punished. But it was only the pictures that made Abu Ghraib an aberration. The tactics the president denounced were precisely those he had authorized and encouraged in the growing network of secret prisons around the world. The detainees in these scattered sites — many of them innocent — have been held for months and years without charges, without lawyers, without notification to their families and often without respite from torture for weeks and months at a time. The Bush administration’s response to the Abu Ghraib scandal was not to stop the behavior, but to try to hide it more effectively.

No one knows how many people were rounded up and spirited away into these secret locations, although the number is very likely in the thousands. No one knows either how many detainees have died once in custody. Nor is there any solid information about the many detainees who have been the victims of what the United States government calls “extraordinary rendition,” the handing over of detainees to other governments, mostly in the Middle East, whose secret police have no qualms about torturing their prisoners and face no legal consequences for doing so.

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America has become a truly malevolent force in the world under the sick-in-the-head cheney regime. The fact that we Americans do nothing whatsoever about it and hold no one accountable, ever, makes all of us complicit in the endless crimes of our vile "elected" leaders. I am so ashamed of my country these days! If I went overseas, I would hang my head.

And just what do we expect the rest of the world to do about the threat posed by America? How will they stop us? Will they form an anti-American equivalent of NATO to "contain" our imperial ambitions? Or simply attack us, to complete our self-destruction (already well underway) so that the rest of the world can get back to normal?

Ask yourself this. What if the Soviet Union had gone on to become the "sole superpower" after the Cold War instead of us, and then started behaving in the arrogant, irrational, hostile, criminal manner that our country has behaved for the last 7 years? What would we do to them?

Cheney used the attempted murder of Daschle and Leahy to justify escalating the "War On Terror" when in fact his own fans were responsible. The only question: did Cheney order the Anthrax attack?