The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals | 
 enlarge | Author: Jane Mayer
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
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Rating:  95 reviews
Sales Rank: 829
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
ASIN: 0385526393
Publication Date: July 15, 2008
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Product Description
A dramatic and damning narrative account of how America has fought the
"War on Terror"
In the days immediately following September 11th, the most powerful people in the country were panic-stricken. The radical decisions about how to combat terrorists and strengthen national security were made in a state of utter chaos and fear, but the key players, Vice President Dick Cheney and his powerful, secretive adviser David Addington, used the crisis to further a long held agenda to enhance Presidential powers to a degree never known in U.S. history, and obliterate Constitutional protections that define the very essence of the American experiment.
THE DARK SIDE is a dramatic, riveting, and definitive narrative account of how the United States made terrible decisions in the pursuit of terrorists around the world-- decisions that not only violated the Constitution to which White House officials took an oath to uphold, but also hampered the pursuit of Al Qaeda. In gripping detail, acclaimed New Yorker writer and bestselling author, Jane Mayer, relates the impact of these decisions—U.S.-held prisoners, some of them completely innocent, were subjected to treatment more reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition than the twenty-first century.
THE DARK SIDE will chronicle real, specific cases, shown in real time against the larger tableau of what was happening in Washington, looking at the intelligence gained—or not—and the price paid. In some instances, torture worked. In many more, it led to false information, sometimes with devastating results. For instance, there is the stunning admission of one of the detainees, Sheikh Ibn al-Libi, that the confession he gave under duress—which provided a key piece of evidence buttressing congressional support of going to war against Iraq--was in fact fabricated, to make the torture stop.
In all cases, whatever the short term gains, there were incalculable losses in terms of moral standing, and our country's place in the world, and its sense of itself. THE DARK SIDE chronicles one of the most disturbing chapters in American history, one that will serve as the lasting legacy of the George W. Bush presidency.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 90 more reviews...
 Wake Up America November 17, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Someone wise once said: to those who understand no explanation is necessary; to those who do not, none is possible. Citing "human rights," Meyer and her minions agonize over such practices as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and such. This reveals that she knows nothing about torture as it has been practised our enemies over millenia. The irony of this is that the very people who denounce these interrogative techinques are the same ones who turn a blind eye to the inhuman, agonizingly painful destruction on helpless infants in the cause of "privacy" and "the right to choose." How can any sensible person take the likes of the irrational Bush haters such as Mayer seriously? The book reveals nothing that has not been in the news. Did Mayer complain about Clinton administration policy that Muslim attacks were to be treated as criminal matters and prosecuted accordingly? Do she understand that under the Rules of Criminal Procedure, matters of national security would have to be disclosed to defendants during a criminal prosecution? Is that really wise and would it keep us safe? One is tempted to think that Jane Mayer either wants to make money or she wants our country to go down the drain. Tell me, Ms. Mayer, what liberties would the culture that produced the inhabitants of Gitmo accord to you?
 Illuminates the darkness November 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A beautifully written, powerful, well-documented book written by an honest, courageous, patriotic American. I found her book impossible to put down.
Mayer's The Dark Side is a synthetic examination of the Bush presidency, and provides a most comprehensive overview of the history of the use of torture in support of the "war on terrorism." Mayer introduces us to the people who advocated for and developed the illegitimate legal arguments used to suspend basic human rights in opposition to the U.S. Constitution and a corpus of international law. She shows how an incompetent, mendacious, and cowardly triumvirate of Cheney/Addington/ Yoo developed, justified, and implemented policies that directly contradict the rights and freedoms that had previously defined America.
Mayer is a master at her craft, and deserves our thanks for producing a book that allows us to peer into a world that its creators tried so hard to conceal from us. The Dark Side is essential reading.
One question, not addressed by Ms. Mayer, remains unanswered: why were Bush and Cheney not impeached?
Blood, and Fire, and Pillars of Smoke November 15, 2008
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a
War on American Ideals
Reviewed by Harold Reynolds
Foreigners one day may visit this country to teach our children
how our democracy decayed, drop by drop. The text for the course will be Jane Mayer's The Dark Side. A classically great work of investigative journalism, it is an appalling, profoundly disturbing revelation of the Bush Administration's war on terrorism. It is a grim warning of the threat to us that exists in a President who sets himself against the Constitution in a parallel world that he secretly constructs in the name of security. When reading it, you may have the fleeting sense that you are in Berlin and the year is 1938.
The questions posed to our children will be whether President George W. Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, together with other high office holders and military commanders,should have been indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the violation of federal criminal statutes described in The Dark Side, and whether, failing in that, we endangered ourselves to greater subversions of liberty.
In September, 2001, when the dust of the Twin Towers had not yet settled, Cheney, mentor to Bush and long fixated on his felt need to increase the power of a presidency weakened by Vietnam and Watergate, took charge of national security issues. President Bush authorized CIA Director Tenet to use secret paramilitary death squads anywhere on earth to detain and interrogate suspected terrorists. When Congress, however, would not give him unlimited war powers, he secretly obtained from a cadre of lawyers in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel bizarre, some said insane, legal memoranda that in sum held that Congress could not limit Bush's conduct of warfare. This cadre informally called themselves the "War Council". They advised Bush that he could defend the nation as he saw fit and ride over laws specifically designed to curb him. They assured him that he could set aside statutes prohibiting torture and secret detentions. Terrorists, they said, were outside the body of law, beyond the protection of the Geneva Conventions. They could be tortured. They knew what Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld wanted and accordingly advised Bush that he had inherent authority to use military commissions empowered to sentence illegal combatants to death, all without review by Congress or the courts. These legal memos, hidden from all but a select White House circle, were five-and-dime store stunts manufactured to create a paper world of authority where none existed and upon which the principal actors, such was their contempt for the public, were ready to rely in justification of their abhorrent conduct. Indeed, these masters of self-deceit honed a memo stating that proof of torture required not only proof of the specific intent to inflict suffering but proof that the suffering was of "significant" duration. In short, the world might condemn an act out of hand as painful torture, but the torturer could raise in defense the claim that he intended an objective that involved a result other than that pain.
And so it was that the natural passion to defend this country and punish those who had slaughtered our people was tragically placed in the hands of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld whose joint cunning and stupidity has caused one of the greatest horrors in our national history.
The nightmare CIA secret "extraordinary rendition" program sent detainees to Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan for torture. Bush and CIA Director Tenet knew that those renditions were forbidden by the Convention against Torture. Suspects in our custody were held in CIA top-secret "black site" prisons. Thus, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, Mayer contends, are prosecutable for war crimes and crimes against humanity, to say nothing of their violations of our federal criminal law.
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld approved of "enhanced" interrogation techniques in violation of the Convention Against Torture. After all, an Office of Legal Counsel memo declared that Convention unconstitutional because Bush, they said, had the power to order any interrogation technique. Indeed, the Office of Legal Counsel declared waterboarding lawful. Sexual humiliation, hoodings, shackled 8-hour standing with arms extended overhead, slamming prisoners headfirst against walls, sleep deprivation, bright light bombardment , 24-hour a day ear-drum shattering noise for weeks, caging squatting men in dog crates, was the order of the day. One of the Office of Legal Counsel scholars hypothetically suggested as lawful the gouging out of a prisoner's eyes, "slitting an ear, nose, or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb". Among the barbaric cruelties was "Palestinian hanging" in which a man's hands are secured behind his back and he is suspended from behind like a carcass in a slaughter house. Examining such a corpse, Dr. Michael Baden, the noted forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, found that "asphyxia is what he died from - as in a crucifixion". Surely, to see a crucifixion where beatings, broken bones, and murder were commonplace might give pause even to a predatory animal passing through at night.
The International Committee for the Red Cross described the treatment of Abu Zubayda, an Al Qaeda logistics chief, as torture that constituted war crimes. The Los Angeles Times demanded a criminal investigation of Bush Administration for war crimes. So dismissive was
Bush of lawful restraints that he himself ordered the waterboarding of Zubayda. So in-your-face arrogant was the CIA that hundreds of hours of video tapes of the interrogation of Zubayda , including his extensive waterboarding, were withheld from the 9/11 Commission and, in defiance of a federal court, were actually destroyed by the CIA.
In 2002, one-third of Guantanamo's 600 prisoners had no connection with terrorism, thus implicating Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld in committing war crimes. Bush had thoughtfully determined that they were all "enemy combatants". Rumsfeld was directly involved in the straight out of hell, unutterably inhumane savaging of Mohammed al-Qahtani, the suspected "20th hijacker" who had set out but failed to join the 9/11 hijackers. His torture produced nothing of substance except the Pentagon's dismissal of the charges against him because his torture tainted his confession. Military interrogators opened themselves to prosecution for the brutal abuse of detainees. Frightened by the criminality of military torturers, the FBI denounced them for fear of being implicated. Alberto Mora, General Counsel of the Navy, warned that criminal charges from assault to war crimes were chargeable against Bush Administration officials. Incredibly, a March 2003 memo declared that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming, and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators in Guantanamo.
The scenario left by the Bush Administration is beyond ordinary imagining. When the next president is elected, a "transition team" will be designated by him to assist him in taking power. That team will be confronted with determining the location, inhabitants, and history of that parallel world of perhaps thousands of uncharged men and women cut off from access to their families, tortured, humiliated, beaten, kept off stage to this day by those fearful of prosecution.
Smirky Journalism November 9, 2008
0 out of 11 found this review helpful
Meyer's thesis is that Islamic terrorism is a joke. As a person who has never had the duty to act in situations involving important interests, she uses 20/20 hindsight to smirk at and criticize those who performed that duty in good faith for us. Her cheap shots cause an ecstatic response at The New Yorker, but do not explain the decisions of the Bush administration. Meyer is almost totally ignorant of the constitution, and how the system of checks and balances operates. She attributes legislative power to Bush when almost every elementary student knows that Congress, not the president, makes the laws, and the president's duty is to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed". If Bush's acts were as unconstitutional as she claims, Congress could have, but did not, refuse to pay for them. If you are a Bush hater, you will love her book. If you are interested in unbiased history of terrorism, read Bernard Lewis' books instead.
Exceptional and Horrific! November 5, 2008
We have committed war crimes as a nation, and we should be held accountable. It's a desaster that needs an immediate recovery effort led by our new president-elect. Jane Mayer deserves the National Book Award.
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