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

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 chronicles 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 underduress — 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.

"This hard-hitting expose examines both the controversial excesses of the war on terror and the home-front struggle to circumvent legal obstacles to its prosecution. New Yorker correspondent Mayer (Strange Justice) details the battle within the Bush Administration over a new anti-terrorism policy of harsh interrogations, indefinite detentions without due process, extraordinary renditions, secret CIA prisons and warrantless wiretappings. Fighting with memos and legal briefs, Mayer reports, hard-liners led by Dick Cheney, his aide David Addingtion and then-Justice Department lawyer John Yoo rejected any constraints on the treatment of prisoners or limitations on presidential power in fighting terrorism, while less militant administration lawyers invoked the Constitution and international law to oppose their initiatives. As a counterpoint to the wrangling over the definition of torture and the Geneva Conventions, the author looks at the use of techniques like waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation against prisoners by the American military and CIA; her chilling account compellingly argues that this 'enhanced interrogation' regimen constitutes torture. The result is a must-read: a meticulous behind-the-scenes reconstruction of policymaking that demonstrates how legal abstractions became an ugly reality." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

With the appearance of this very fine book, Hillary Clinton can claim a belated vindication of sorts: A right-wing conspiracy does indeed exist, although she misapprehended its scope and nature. The conspiracy is not vast and does not consist of Clinton-haters. It is small, secretive and made up chiefly of lawyers contemptuous of the Constitution and the rule of law.

In "The Dark... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Side," Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, documents some of the ugliest allegations of wrongdoing charged against the Bush administration. Her achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces. Recast as a series of indictments, the story Mayer tells goes like this: Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.

Under the guise of "enhanced interrogation techniques," it has succeeded, in Mayer's words, in "making torture the official law of the land in all but name." Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.

To dismiss these as wild, anti-American ravings will not do. They are facts, which Mayer substantiates in persuasive detail, citing the testimony not of noted liberals like Noam Chomsky or Keith Olbermann but of military officers, intelligence professionals, "hard-line law-and-order stalwarts in the criminal justice system" and impeccably conservative Bush appointees who resisted the conspiracy from within the administration.

Above all, the story Mayer tells is one of fear and its exploitation.

That fear should trump concern for due process and indeed justice qualifies as a recurring phenomenon in American history. In 1919, government-stoked paranoia about radicalism produced the Red Scare. After Pearl Harbor, hysteria mixed with racism led to the confinement of some 110,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps. The onset of the Cold War triggered another panic, anxieties about a new communist threat giving rise to McCarthyism. In this sense, the response evoked by 9/11 looks a bit like deja vu all over again: Frightened Americans, more worried about their own safety than someone else's civil liberties, allowed senior government officials to exploit a climate of fear.

Although Mayer does not dwell on this historical context, her account suggests implicitly that the present period differs in at least one crucial respect. Whereas the earlier departures from the rule of law represented momentary if egregious lapses in democratic practice, the abuses orchestrated from within the Bush administration suggest that democracy itself is fast becoming something of a sham. From Mayer, we learn that in George W. Bush's Washington, the decisions that matter are made in secret by a handful of presidential appointees committed to the proposition that nothing should inhibit the exercise of executive power. The Congress, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the "interagency process" — all of these constitute impediments that threaten to constrain the president. In a national security crisis, constraint is intolerable. Much the same applies to the media and, by extension, to the American people: The public's right to know extends no further than whatever the White House wishes to make known.

In the Bush administration, the task of sweeping aside impediments to the exercise of power fell to a small group of lawyers styling themselves the "War Council." Led by David Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, and including Alberto Gonzalez, then serving as White House counsel, and John Yoo, at the time deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the War Council seized upon 9/11 as a pretext for establishing what Addington himself referred to as a "new paradigm" of vastly expanded presidential authority. As the administration embarked upon its war on terror, Mayer says, the American legal system "was instantly regarded as a burden." To shed that burden, members of the War Council issued (in secret, of course) what she describes as "error-prone legal decisions whose preordained conclusions were dictated by Addington." In the view of the War Council, Mayer writes, when it came to matters of national security, presidential authority was "not limited by any laws"; indeed, the president "had the power to override existing laws that Congress had specifically designed to curb him." The net effect was to declare the concept of checks and balances inoperable.

Mayer recognizes but does not dwell on the intimate relationship between the global war on terror and Addington's new paradigm. The entire rationale of the latter derived from the former: no war, no new paradigm. Hence, the rush to declare that after Sept. 11, 2001, everything had changed. The insistence that the gloves had to come off, that the so-called law enforcement approach to dealing with terrorism had failed definitively, that only conflict on a global scale could keep America safe: These provided the weapons that Addington's War Council wielded to mount its assault on the Constitution — all of course justified as necessary to keep Americans safe.

Matthew Waxman, who in 2001 was serving as special assistant to then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, told Mayer that the decision to frame the U.S. response to 9/11 as a war was taken with "little or no detailed deliberation about long-term consequences." Yet the decision was a momentous one, he continues, setting the United States on "a course not only for our international response, but also in our domestic constitutional relations."

Little deliberation occurred because none was deemed necessary. As Mayer makes clear, the White House seized upon the prospect of open-ended war with alacrity. And why not? In the near term at least, going to war almost invariably works to the benefit of the executive branch. War elicits deference from Congress and the courts. As a wartime commander-in-chief, the president wields greater clout. In this particular case, war also helped deflect demands for accountability: Despite what Mayer describes as "the worst intelligence failure in the nation's history," the aftermath of 9/11 saw not a single senior official fired. (Last week a bipartisan commission headed by former secretaries of state James A. Baker III and Warren Christopher proposed new legislation to govern the war-making powers of the president and Congress.)

Whether the prospect of war stretching for decades actually would serve the country's true interests received comparatively less attention. The issue was not one that troubled the War Council, obsessed as it was about ensuring that when it came to national security, nothing should encroach upon the prerogatives of the chief executive. "What was missing," Mayer says, "was a discussion of policy — not just what was legal, but what was moral, ethical, right, and smart to do." Such matters remained on the periphery because "fundamentally, the drive for expanded presidential authority was about power."

The extremists of the last century, both on the far left and far right, would have seen much to admire in Addington and his War Council. They too had an appreciation for how war concentrates power and removes constraints on its use. For this very reason defenders of democracy once viewed war warily.

The Bush administration has rendered such thinking obsolete: In Washington, the concept of the global war on terror continuing for generations has become widely accepted. This ranks as a considerable — if almost entirely noxious — achievement. "The Dark Side" allows us a glimpse of what that achievement signifies.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is the author of "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."

Reviewed by Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"[G]ripping....[T]he most vivid and comprehensive account we have had so far of how a government founded on checks and balances and respect for individual rights could have been turned against those ideals." Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times

"[A]ngry and important...[Mayer] takes us, step by step, through the process by which practices and methods we associate with tyrannies became official U.S. policy." San Antonio Express-News

"Mayer's singular accomplishment is to fuse the years of events that have brought us to this pass into a single compelling narrative and to use her own considerable reportorial powers to fill in important connective and contextual events." Los Angeles Times

"[Mayer] documents some of the ugliest allegations of wrongdoing charged against the Bush administration. Her achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces." The Washington Post

"[A] powerful, brilliantly researched and deeply unsettling book....[E]xtraordinary and invaluable..." Alan Brinkley, The New York Times Book Review

"Some of The Dark Side seems right out of The Final Days, minus Nixon's operatic boozing and weeping....The Dark Side is scarier than The Final Days because these final days aren't over yet and because the stakes are much higher." Frank Rich, The New York Times

The Dark Side is a dramatic, riveting, and definitive narrative account of how the U.S. has made self-destructive decisions in the pursuit of terrorists around the world — decisions that have not only violated the Constitution and American values, but have also hampered the pursuit of Al Qaeda.

Jane Mayer is the co-author of two bestselling and critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction books, Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988 and Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, the latter of which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Mayer was also awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in connection with The Dark Side. She is currently a Washington-based staff writer for The New Yorker, specializing in political and investigative reporting. Before that, she was a senior writer and front-page editor for The Wall Street Journal, as well as the Journal's first female White House correspondent. She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with her husband, Bill, and their daughter, Kate.