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The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals | 
 enlarge | Author: Jane Mayer
Creator: Richard Mcgonagle
Publisher: Random House Audio
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  102 reviews
Sales Rank: 85738
Format: Audiobook, Unabridged
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Unabridged
Number Of Items: 13
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 5.9 x 5.1 x 1.7
ISBN: 073937592X
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.931
EAN: 9780739375921
Publication Date: July 15, 2008
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Product Description
In the days following September 11, the most powerful people in the country were panic-stricken. The 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.
The Dark Side is a riveting narrative account of how the U.S. made terrible decisions in the pursuit of terrorists–decisions that not only violated the Constitution, but also hampered the pursuit of Al Qaeda. In gripping detail, acclaimed New Yorker writer and bestselling author Jane Mayer relates specific cases, shown in real time against the larger tableau of Washington, looking at the intelligence gained–or not–and the price paid. In all cases, whatever the short-term gains, there were incalculable losses in terms of moral standing, our country’s place in the world, and its sense of itself. The Dark Side chronicles one of the mostdisturbing chapters in American history, one that will serve as the lasting legacy of the George W. Bush presidency.
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 Without Liberty and Justice for All September 5, 2008
49 out of 53 found this review helpful
History is supposed to teach us lessons from the past. From the Alien and Sedition Act, the "Red Scare" of 1919, the detention of thousands of Americans during World War II because of their Japanese ancestry, we were supposed to learn that even through the most dire threat to our safety, the rule of law ennobles us and protects us from tyranny. In "The Dark Side," Jane Mayer explains how easy it is for history to repeat itself in the name of security.
By September 11, 2001, the President of the United States had already spent fifty days of his first eight months in office on vacation. Despite several warnings of an impending attack from foreign intelligence sources as well as our own, the administration never quite understands the threat.
The attack on a clear summer morning changes that, and it changes things for worse. The subsequent invasion of Afghanistan allows the military and the C.I.A. to round up hundreds of Taliban prisoners. An offer of a $5,000 bounty for the capture of al-Qaeda and Taliban nets them hundreds more. The administration screams for actionable intelligence from these detainees, but sorting them out and interrogating them is another matter. The assumption is that "enhanced interrogation techniques" will bring more accurate results in a shorter period of time. It also has to be justified.
That comes from John Yoo, the legal counsel for the Justice Department who provides just the argument Dick Cheney and his attorney, Dick Addington are looking for. It says the president can do essentially anything he wants, and ignore Congress, if it is for the security of the country. Yoo also states that such interrogation methods are not torture unless it results in organ failure or death. Alberto Gonzalez joins in describing Afghanistan as a failed state, and their detainees as unlawful combatants. The state department is not consulted.
America's shame is just beginning.
With John Yoo's memo providing the green light, American military and C.I.A. begin to torture detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Saddam Hussein's Abu-Ghraib prison, and one in Afghanistan. The techniques they employ are standing for prolonged periods, the absence of light and irregular meal periods to enhance disorientation, water boarding, extreme cold and heat, constant loud music, humiliation, no toilet breaks, confined spaces, prolonged restraints, especially Palestinian hangings, irregular and insufficient periods of sleep, and threats. Other detainees are sent to countries for rendition, countries known for human rights abuses. Prisoners will die of exposure, heart attack, asyphixiation, or from simply being beaten to death.
While the administration claims that the techniques work, there are too many instances where the tormented harden their resolve during harsh treatment, and cooperate when treated well. Many who are tortured provide false information that sends our intelligence assets on fools' errands. The most damaging disinformation comes from Sheikh Ibn als-Libi who gives evidence against Saddam Hussein while he is being tortured. This is the justification for going to war with Iraq. He only wanted his torturers to stop.
In 2003-4, the policy begins to unravel. Charges are reduced, dropped, or changed against John Walker Lindh, Yasser Hamdi, and Jose Padilla. Since they were tortured, their charges won't stand up in court. Justice Department lawyers begin to question John Yoo's legal precedents. The CIA Inspector General begins to investigate abuses. JAG officers refuse to prosecute or serve on military tribunals. In 2005, the Abu-Ghraib scandal will break. It is later estimated that most of the detainees at "Gitmo" are people who were rounded up when they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or were turned in for the generous bounty offered. They include an eighty-year old deaf man, and a wealthy Kuwaiti businessman who will indignantly refuse to buy another Cadillac after his mistreatment. A German and a Canadian citizen will be kidnapped and tortured before they are set free. Three hundred forty of 749 detainees held in Gitmo will remain there with only a handful being charged.
In spite of a growing rebellion inside the Departments of Defense and Justice, the President refuses to remove people he promised he would hold accountable for abuses. Human Rights Watch estimates that more than 600 U.S. military and civilian personnel were involved in torture.
The true leader of this policy holds a tight rein and his resistance to change is fierce. It is Dick Cheney and his loyal lawyer, Dave Addington. Even the new attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez refuses to go toe to toe with Dave, a tall, snarling bully. Cheney takes the unprecedented step of summoning the C.I.A.'s Inspector General to his office while he is conducting his investigation. The military holds a number of investigations that limit them to looking at the lower ranks. It is also clear by 2005, that Bush is fully aware that some of his senior officials believe that Gitmo should be closed and his detention policy changed. The dissenters and naysayers are excluded from any more discussion. To this day, Bush refuses to budge.
This is a powerful story. The author is holding a mirror to people who have long believed they were just and righteous. This is not just a bucket of cold water, it is being thrown into a river of ice. She tells us that we must look at ourselves if we ever hope to recapture our moral greatness. Even this she concedes will take years. Her book is a good place for our national introspection to begin.
She concludes this powerful report with the following: "Seven years after Al Qaeda's attacks on America, as the Bush Administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continues to be a battle for the country's soul."
"This country does not believe in torture." George W. Bush, March 16, 2005.
This might be too scary for you to read... July 26, 2008
78 out of 89 found this review helpful
As of late, I've read three books on the Bush Administration. The first was What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, the next wasThe Bush Tragedy, and now this. With Bush's administration finally ending (I'll willingly admit to being a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat), I thought it was time to read some early "look backs" of this presidency gone so wrong. The first book allowed me to see the inner workings of the White House, while allowing me to see, if briefly, the human Bush. The second book explained some possible patterns and trends in Bush's psyche by examining his family tree. Out of all three, the one that has absolutely scared the politico out of me is Jane Mayer's astounding new book "The Dark Side".
This book is an examination of how the Bush presidency, in many ways, used the war on terror as a subversive tool to start to undermine the basic civil rights we had in this country up until then. Starting with that horrible day we all remember, we see Cheney in action, who apparently had been expecting some country wide issue that would require him to work from a "shadow government" base near Camp David. As the World Trade Center buildings came down, Cheney was stationed in the White House bunker, commanding everything as well as he could. Fear instantly pervaded the adminstration, deservedly so. Anthrax popping up in letters and people dying from it made Cheney sure that America was under attack and it wouldn't stop.
As Americans, we turn to our government in times of crisis to quickly handle the problem.
The problem wasn't their fear, ultimately, it was the unfortunate decisions made at this time that would send our country into a civil liberty tailspin. Cheney long since believed that our presidency had been weakened by Nixon's administration, not because of Watergate, but because of a series of laws passed by Congress that he thought ultimately weakened the president. Cheney saw the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to regain the power of the presidency, seemingly to go as far as suggesting that our president has absolute power (didn't George Lucas do a series of movies about a person wanting absolute power?).
Being a prime presidental confident, Cheney manages to convince Bush to make a series of decisions early on that ultimately would infringe on our basic civil rights: domestic spying, advocating torture, bypassing Congressional oversight on the war on terror, to name a few. Mayer goes into detail about all of these movements, and the effect of these decisions had on people in and out of our country.
Clearly, in reading Mayer's book, she is clearly not a fan of the Bush administration. However, the reading is literally so scary that you forgive that immediately. Bush, a novice on domestic aggression issues, gives Cheney the power to conduct the war on terror, agreeing to support all of his decisions. Mayer introduces us to some new players in this governmental travesty, and her clear writing never becomes so overburdened with names that I was confused. Her chapters on the Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisoners debacle are absolutely horrifying.
Bush and Cheney's publicly stated goal in the "War on Terror" was to protect America. Ultimately, our position in the world has deteriorated, and we are only making other countries more angry with the "either you are with us or against us" dogma. It's certainly frightening, but it's important the truth comes out now, lest we make the same mistakes.
l'etat, c'est moi! July 28, 2008
57 out of 66 found this review helpful
This is a singularly depressing work, and the worst of the worst is when a study concluded that only 8% of the Guantanamo detainees were alleged to have any association with Al Qaeda. Only 5% were captured by US forces (the other 95% by Pakistanis and bounty hunters, etc, mostly for hefty fees). 55% were not implicated in any hostile act against the US, and for many of the rest, "hostile acts" included fleeing US bombs. The book describes how Bellinger took the study to the White House--and was confronted by Addington and Gonzales. Addington told Bellinger that there would be no discussion of the matter: President Bush had decided that every single one of the detainees was an enemy combatant and that was the final word.
The Magna Carta bound kings to follow certain legal procedures and is the basis for governance in English and American jurisprudence: habeas corpus and other legal matters were codified. It's the forerunner of the US Constitution. It has remained in force in England from 1215 to the present day and was the basis for the US (Louisiana state law is founded on the Napoleonic Code) until 2001. Much of our legal system is intact, but in 2001 the Bush Administration decided that the law was whatever the President and his advisors said it was. Habeas corpus delenda est. The Dark Side shows that the law, when inconvenient, was routinely broken. Normal chains of authority were destroyed, legal decisions were made by people who were not lawyers--such as Cheney--and people who wanted the President to have--literally--life and death firmly in his hands, unrestrained. The Geneva Convention's restrictions on torture was, in Gonzales' words, "quaint". Objections by Powell and legal experts (inside the military and out), were ignored: the objectors were considered not to be team players and "soft on terrorism". Euphemisms and weasel words such as "robust interrogations" became the norm. The Dark Side notes that the TV series "24" in which the hero tortures people to prevent terrorist acts was immensely popular with the CIA, and the Guantanamo forces. I've never seen it myself--but I wonder if Jack Bauer ever makes mistakes? Does he torture innocents who don't have any information? As Dark Side and other sources make abundantly clear, the vast majority of information you get during torture is useless.
As the book shows, there are plenty of those who say "We must treat terror suspects harshly. Why should they have any legal rights?" The Dark Side recounts many tales of where mistakes were made, and people without any connection to terrorism were arrested, tortured (or robustly interrogated if you prefer), rendered to Egypt, Syria, etc. (Clive Smith's The Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side focusses on one such poor soul at Guantanamo.) The book shows that for altogether too many of these people, the harsh treatment continued long after it became readily apparent that they had no connection to terrorists. Under Stalin, being a suspect was a crime in and by itself--you had no legal rights at all. Plus la change, plus la meme chose, as they say. The final sentence in the book is a quote from Phillip Zelikow speaking of the internment of Japanse-Americans in WW II: "Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools".
The Scariest Book of the 21st Century July 31, 2008
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
Jane Mayer's The Dark Side is "eye-opening" in the same way that walking into a bedroom to find someone sexually assaulting a minor is "eye-opening": it is shocking, dismaying, anger-provoking, and saddening all at the same time.
With abundance evidence, most of it gathered from the most "inside" of sources, Mayer lays out the case against the Bush Administration and how its war on terror became in so many appalling ways a series of wars on other things--human rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law among them. The callous disregard exhibited by the so-called "War Council" for everything from basic human rights to the checks and balances established by the Constitution is appalling.
This book is not a polemic, nor a jeremaiad. Though sometimes Mayer inserts comments or facts that serve only to gild the lily, most of the book is a straightforward accounting of the events and decision-making behind a number of different areas, some well known (Abu Ghraid, rendition, etc.) and some less so. She also chronicles the courageous--but almost always unsuccessful attempts of a number of people within the military and the Pentagon, within the FBI, within the Justice Department and sometimes elsewhere to stop or slow down or mitigate the endless series of abuses, often at the expense of their careers.
This is especially, above and beyond everything else, a book about lawyers, and I think this is a fact that Jane Mayer herself perhaps did not fully consciously realize. Many, perhaps most, of the actors in this book are attorneys--usually counsels, those who provide legal advice and guidance for government agencies. Some of those attorneys used their skills to try to subvert the law, while others were motivated by their love of and respect for the law (as well as by a basic sense of humanity) to try to end the abuses. It would be an amazing book to use in a law school legal ethics class.
I highly recommend this book. It is disturbing, depressing, and damning, and you need to read it.
Becoming the Devil Ourselves! July 17, 2008
44 out of 53 found this review helpful
"The Dark Side" documents how the Bush Administration immediately took the wrong direction post 9/11 in an effort to avert blame for what was a colossal bureaucratic failure (people not doing their jobs or using common sense), combined with inattention and lack of political will at the top. Instead of trying to learn from the tragedy, as Roosevelt did after Pearl Harbor, we blamed it on too much international law, civil liberties, and constraints on the President and covert actions.
This "blameless" direction also fit neatly in with Cheney's effort to strengthen executive powers - his secret energy task force. Cheney immediately saw to it that lawyers came up with rationale sanctioning vast expansions of power in the War on Terror, including physical and psychological torment of captives, and secret capture and indefinite detention of suspects without charges.
Those failing to fall into line, one way or another, were demoted or simply cast aside. Later, as criticism continue to mount, Bush et al tried evading responsibility through new legal opinions, convoluted hair-splitting, and lying.
Where did all this get us? We now have nearly-unanimous negative world opinion (India and Russia being the exceptions), thanks to the Iraq War, the continuing middle-East conflict, deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan-Pakistan, AND the torture of detainees. Nearly seven years post 9/11 not one terror suspect held outside the U.S. criminal justice system has been tried, cases have been dropped because of concerns regarding "evidence" acquired through torture, and no senior Bush Administration person has been prosecuted or fired in connection with prisoner abuse - despite Human Rights Watch' estimates that over 600 U.S. personnel have been involved abusing over 460 detainees, the International Red Cross' unqualified conclusion that torture was utilized, and General Taguba's similar conclusion. Finally, a well-intentioned Congressional ban on torture has been defeated through explicitly excluding the CIA and a Bush "signing statement."
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