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 enlarge | Author: Jane Mayer
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $27.50
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Avg. Customer Rating:  96 reviews
Sales Rank: 888
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.7
ISBN: 0385526393
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.931
EAN: 9780385526395
Publication Date: July 15, 2008
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Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20081119222050T
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| Customer Reviews:
 Scary - best read in small doses if you have anger issues July 18, 2008
44 out of 55 found this review helpful
This book is a must read, if only to confirm what many of us expected and believed that the Bush Administration was capable of doing to human beings.
Graphic, nauseating, disgustingly filled with tidbits regarding the Bush Administrations gradual dismantling of the US Constitution and its full blown assault on human rights (including of course, their Trademark Torture), misuse of the judiciary and general attack on US citizens in general, this book will scare your socks off - and it's true.
The American public should be required to partake of this gem. We as citizens, have allowed these people to smash our rights and our Constitution and commit War Crimes in the name of our country without being held to any type of ethical standards.
You will come away believing that Bush and Cheney should stand trial at the Hague for War Crimes or be impeached for failing to uphold our Constitution and violating their Oath of Office.
Criminals - that's all they are.
A Lady Asked Dr. Franklin, "Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" August 29, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
"A republic," replied the Doctor, "if you can keep it."
Quoted in the Afterword from the papers of Dr. James McHenry at the time of the 1787 federal convention in Philadelphia.
`The Dark Side' by Jane Mayer tells one of the most profoundly disturbing stories that I have ever read. Mayer details how the Bush Administration led America to what VP Dick Cheney called `the dark side' in order to fight terrorism. A small coterie of officials at the highest level of the administration took this country down a path that ignored and thus destroyed the rule of law. Whether the damage is permanent remains to be seen.
Here are some of the most salient points:
Mayer confirms what others have asserted: that Cheney runs the national security apparatus. At least in this realm, Cheney operates like the prime minister. What is less known is the extraordinary power exercised by his legal counsel, David Addington. Cheney and Addington share a belief in an extreme view of the proper powers of the President in the national security area. In their view, the President has no limits on his power. None. Cheney used 9/11 to snatch greatly increased power for the executive.
To be fair, the top officials felt a huge personal responsibility to protect the US from another terrorist attack. One can only imagine the burden. This burden caused them to act out of fear and panic. Any action that might help reduce the chances of another attack even by a small amount was worth doing. They acted as if they and all Americans were cowering weaklings willing to jettison liberty for security. As Ben Franklin's aphorism concluded, we got neither.
As a lawyer, I found it personally distressing that lawyers played the key role in providing the `golden shield' of legal immunity for all manner of horrific acts in the quest for `actionable intelligence'. Lawyers, especially government lawyers, are supposed to tell their clients `no' when a proposed action crosses the line into criminality. A handful of lawyers, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, and Addington in particular, always gave their bosses the answer they wanted, `yes, we can torture, spy, kidnap, hold secret prisoners in secret prisons without charges'.
A few lawyers within the administration did resist. When Jack Goldsmith the newly appointed head of the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel discovered John Yoo's secret `torture memo', he moved successfully to get it revoked. Less known is that after Goldsmith left under extreme pressure, a new memo authorizing torture was issued by Steven Bradbury. Most other lawyers either caved in to Addington's bullying intimidation or were simply cut out.
Mayer's triumph was getting so many people to talk to her both on and off the record about closely held administration secrets. The reliance on unnamed sources necessarily forces the reader to place a certain amount of faith in Mayer's judgment (although certainly not to the extent of Bob Woodward).
Mayer established that the US killed several subjects during interrogation and kidnapped (`extraordinary rendition') at least 8 entirely innocent people, tortured them, and held them in secret prisons. Mayer was able to establish that one of these people was held on the `hunch' of the head of the CIA's al Qaeda unit and was not finally released until weeks after it was clear he was just had the same name as a wanted suspect. The fate of the other seven is unknown.
Beyond dispute is the affect the torture and kidnapping regime had on America's reputation. It will take at least a generation to recover it. Perhaps most worrisome is that these actions will serve as a precedent for future administrations, which only criminal prosecutions would obviate. Mayer provides the basis for the indictments. My only quibble with the book is that it needed a little tighter editing. Highest recommendation if you can stomach it.
Americans are clueless about terrorism July 23, 2008
21 out of 26 found this review helpful
Cuban born, I lived in Havana until two years after the 1958 communist takeover. Fortunately I escaped to the Land of the Free in 1961.
Never in my wildest nightmares I would have envisioned that the brothers Castro will remain solidly in power for over fifty years, especially in a country only ninety miles away from "the most powerful nation Earth has ever known." Yet my friends, it wasn't a bad dream. It was and still is a crude reality.
Never in my wildest nightmares I would have imagined my beloved America, the country that fed and warmed our hearts after escaping communist terror, falling prey to opportunists of the same kind and with equal objectives, and never in my entire life as an American citizen I considered the possibility of terrorism thriving in our adopted homeland as it does today.
As a teenager I lived under the terror of Batista's butchers. Friends died under the explosion of bombs placed by Castro's terrorists aka "revolution freedom fighters" underneath random cars, in shopping centers, garbage cans, movie theatres, public transportation and in every imaginable location where the end justified the means. Those were the days when Cubans refused to believe in the reality of a communist country existing at swimming distance from the US. Unbelievable?
When I attended college after dark my mother awaited me every single night and thanked God on her knees upon my arrival, for I had made it home safe, sound and untortured one more time.
When Fidel arrived, terrorism got even worse because it was perpetrated by brothers against brothers, friends vs. friends, blacks against whites. The country became divided and as a result evil thrived in its midst. Shortly thereafter my family decided to escape from hell into the Land of the Free.
Today, some forty years later I detect so many similarities between my former country during those years and the US today, that I'm scared to the bone about the fate of my grandchildren.
Are most American citizens waiting for John Wayne to come alive and save us from our own form of terrorism by shooting the enemy from the hip Hollywood style? Have we become so greedy in America that only money makes us think straight? Are we dumb enough to believe that America still is the world's strongest superpower therefore invincible by the will of God?
"The Dark Side" is the best book I've read this year, not because it is great literature but because it is much more than a simple book. It is an ominous warning about the loss of freedom and the birth of a dictatorship. Like Milovan Djilas's "The New Class" and George Orwell's "Animal Farm" opened my eyes to the sources of terrorism in the Cuba of the fifties, "The Dark Side" should be read and fully understood by every responsible American, black, white, yellow, green, republican, democrat, gay or straight. After all aren't we brothers and sisters first and foremost?
Together let us change the history proven adage; "Imbedded in democracy are the seeds of its own destruction." GOD SAVE AMERICA! and Damn it, buy the book!
signed: Andrew J. Rodriguez, author of "Adios, Havana" a memoir.
A MUST READ FOR EVERY AMERICAN July 25, 2008
15 out of 18 found this review helpful
This is a "page turner". I couldn't put it down. We've heard many of these stories before, but to have it laid out in one piece is startling. Never in my life have I ever been so ashamed of my government. (I lived through the Nixon/Watergate era and thought I could never be more disgusted. Nixon pales to a ghost in comparison.)
This should be a "must read" for every American over the age of 18. Its a wake up call for how close we've come to the brink. In addition its a compelling read. Once you get started its impossible to look away. Rather like being mesmerized by a cobra.
The Dark Side, Indeed! August 5, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
This book should be required reading for all who are interested in the workings of government, and in how government power can be abused. In one sense, it is just another in a long series of books on this subject. In another sense, it is an important step in shedding light on an American regime which has corroded American values.
There is a very real irony in the fact that the very party which purports to oppose excessive governmental power and influence has so thoroughly wielded such power to excess.
This dark and disturbing look into the Bush Administration's approach to government is quite well documented. (There are several instances where the documentation should have been provided but wasn't, and footnoting vice quoting would have been preferable.)
"L'etat, c'est moi!" indeed, as one reviewer has noted. The root cause, the underlying pattern here is that the President has assumed that he is above the law. This is reflected in many ways, from the overly broad claims of Executive Privilege to the implicit argument that no laws can constrain the President of the United States. It is this latter assumption, as Ms. Mayer's account demonstrates, that underlies the administration's arguments that no Federal or international law prohibits the President from torturing captives if he chooses to do so. And clearly he has chosen to do so.
"The Dark Side" serves as a warning against laxity on the part of the American public. Despite numerous warning signs -- the several reports alleging torture, the photos from Abu Ghraib (the abuses were not confined just to Abu Ghraib), the documented deaths of some detainees, et cetera -- the American public simply failed to react. Apparently many found it too difficult to verify the facts and to sort through the reports, and so most chose not to. For others, it seemed as though it was too hard to believe. Either way, the American public has not yet responded to the savaging of American principles done in their name. Such passivity has given dictators throughout history a clear field for their abuses, dictators from Julius Caesar (see Tom Holland's book Rubicon) to Oliver Cromwell and Robespierre, to Hitler and Stalin. In every case, as Gustav Bychowski noted in Dictators and Disciples from Caesar to Stalin, the average citizens under those dictators seemed like people who had awakened from a bad dream once the dictators had been deposed.
Within the administration, those who objected, regardless of the grounds for their objections, were simply isolated, encapsulated like grains of sand in an oyster. And, like those encapsulated grains of sand, they became gleaming pearls in a sea of moral darkness. Ms. Mayer recounts their efforts to provide a voice of reason and the efforts of their opponents to isolate those objectors. In all, despite the conscientious outcries of several good men, the likes of John Yoo and David Addington managed to give their masters free legal rein to violate the humanitarian and legal principles which should have bound this administration.
Please read the book, and then take the time to follow at least some of the references Ms. Mayer provides. Look at the wording of the Geneva Conventions and of the Convention Against Torture, both of which the United States has ratified. Consider the rights in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution, for they embody American ideals. They enshrine the core American values for how people should treat one another, and how a government should treat people. Think about the Golden Rule. Then ask yourself whether the activity Ms. Mayer has documented here is worthy of having been done in the name of the citizens of the United States of America. Does torture really represent American values? Is that what Americans should stand for?
Ask those questions, and know that others throughout the world also are asking them.
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