Book of the week: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer

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

by Jane Mayer

(Doubleday, $27.50)

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Vice President Dick Cheney made no secret of his disdain for international law following 9/11. Five days after the attacks, he appeared on Meet the Press and announced that U.S. intelligence officials would “have to work sort of the dark side.” Terror suspects were soon rounded up worldwide—hundreds of them innocents, FBI and CIA analysts later found. Yet indefinite imprisonment at offshore U.S. camps and “black sites” wasn’t the worst of it. Just last year, the International Red Cross produced a secret report declaring, according to reporter Jane Mayer’s sources, that the highest officials in the U.S. government were in jeopardy of being prosecuted for war crimes. Their legal handiwork had authorized prisoner abuses, the organizations found, that could only be categorized as torture.

The Bush administration’s success in building “what amounts to an American gulag” already has been documented by piecemeal stories in the press, said Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times. The accomplishment of The New Yorker’s Mayer is to fuse the scattered reports into “a single compelling narrative” that underscores its tragic dimensions. “If you intend to vote in November and read only one book between now and then, this should be it.” Cheney is the central figure, said Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The New York Observer. A “smart, ruthless, driven” man, he can be seen erecting “something new in American history: the imperial vice presidency.” When a few heroic White House staffers mounted a 2005 campaign to clean up the war effort by shuttering the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cheney and his chief counsel, David Addington, drove the rebels from office.

Mayer doesn’t blame all excesses in the war on terror on a few “pasty men in ties,” said Louis Bayard in Salon.com. Congress and the public saw what was happening, and we too bear some responsibility for the extralegal activities that “happened on our watch.” Sadly, our walk on the dark side hasn’t even provided a short-term payoff. The reward for torturing one al Qaida suspect was a heap of disinformation that helped draw us into Iraq. The cost of mistreating hundreds of other detainees is that we may have radicalized many times that number.