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The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals
by Jane Mayer (Author)
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Product Details
- Binding: Paperback
- ISBN-10: 0307456293
- ISBN-13: 9780307456298
- Edition: Reprint
- Number Of Pages: 432
- Publication Date: May 05, 2009
- Publisher: Anchor
- Release Date: May 05, 2009
Product Features
- ISBN13: 9780307456298
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Product Description
One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year
National Bestseller
With a New Afterword
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A Best Book of the Year: Salon, Slate, The Economist, The Washington Post, Cleveland Plain-Dealer
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, but also hampered the pursuit of Al Qaeda. In spellbinding detail, Jane Mayer relates the impact of these decisions by which key players, namely Vice President Dick Cheney and his powerful, secretive adviser David Addington, exploited September 11 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.
Customer Reviews
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The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
Jane Mayer takes a topic, namely the illegal detainment of foreigners and their subsequent systematic maltreatment by American agents, and forces us to look deeply into the abyss to glimpse what we've become in our zeal to squash terrorism. Her excellent treatment and accounting of the hijacking of American ideals reveals some very unsettling arguments and actions by the highest elected officials in a land founded on the principle that every person, regardless of station in life or the charges being brought against them, are entitled to legal representation precisely to curb the abuse of power by the state.
Her research leads us from the germ of the formative ideas and fears of the principal movers and how they, despite appearances and protestations, start and end with the president telling his attorneys he wanted a "legal black hole" for him to dispose of the enemy combatants domestic and international laws and treaties be damned. The beauty of Ms. Mayer's book us that it never, ever loses its laser-like focus on what was at stake and why it is so important that the story be related accurately in order that it, the sanctioned use of torture, hopefully never happens again.
The importance of this book cannot be over-stated, especially if you believe that the idea of America, the "Great Experiment" in civil rule by representative democracy in which no man or woman is above or, more importantly, BELOW the law. The writ of habeas corpus is the absolute linchpin of a functioning democracy, and "The Dark Side" inescapably paints the painful picture of the unraveling of democracy, even if for a brief period, and the potential tragedy for getting caught on a slippery slope that could conceivably result in the premature, contrived end of the Experiment. Read this book if you care enough to ensure this never, ever happens again. EVER.
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While Mayer has a definite and critical opinion of the Bush Administration's treatment of terrorist suspects, she does an excellent and judicious job of weighing the evidence to support her opinion. She is convincing in showing that there is very little empirical support for the claim that extreme measures produced any new reliable information that would not have been better produced by conventional methods. Indeed, the historical purpose of these methods is to produce false confessions at show trials. The high profile cases that have been routinely cited by Bush supporters to justify the methods all tend to support the opposite conclusion: that the reliable information was obtained by the FBI or others using conventional methods before the CIA "hard ball" interrogators showed up.
Mayer is also excellent in analyzing the legal arguments provided by Bush's lawyers to support the new methods. In truth and fact, ever since Washington, the American way of war has been to treat prisoners humanely, not out of lack of any lack of zeal but in recognition of the enlightened self interst served by demonstrating the benefits of the American way. The Bush lawyers rendered extraordinary secret opinions that granted amnesty to interrogators in advance of any misconduct. The opinions are unsupported by any fair reading of the limits of Presidential powers and make no sense from the perspective of the Geneva Convention. The essential premise is that the terrorist detainees were nonpersons wholly uncovered by either the Geneva Convention or domestic law. This is nonsense. Even spies and saboteurs are covered by international law.
As Mayer points out, lawyers need to be able to tell clients what they don't want to hear. In this sense, Bush was ill-served by the likes of Addington and Yoo and Gonzalez. Indeed, Mayer demonstrates that the lawyers simply came up with, and then implemented, the most aggressive interpretation possible for the expanse of Presidential power. There was no serious policy discussion of whether the President -- as a matter of good policy -- should exercise all of that power. Mayer does concede that the Administration may have been understandably concerned with an imminent second wave of attacks and was acting from the exigencies of the moment. But Mayer proves that for that last few years of the life of the Administration, this extreme circumstance was removed, and the Administration was doing little more than engaging in a great cover up.
Ultimately, Cheney's power is what explains the misguided course taken after 9/11. In ordinary times, nerds like Yoo and Addington would have been short circuited by review and input from senior lawyers at State, Defense, and Justice. But Cheney was pushing for these extraordinary powers and the nerds were able to cite his directives to prevent any questioning from elsewhere in the Administration. Bush's failings as a leader can be seen in his inability to appreciate the radical break from precedent and his inability to foresee that in the long run, beating false confessions out of detainees was not going to sell well.
What is insufficiently explored by Mayer is the mechanisms at work that allowed Bush to get away with it for his entire Presidency and that now impede Obama from resolving the detainee problem. For me, the true dark side is that of the American people. While we have on the whole promoted humane treatment of citizens and foreign nationals, we have also always struggled to control our violent nature and weakness for racism. We don't want to admit that we torture, but we sure wanted to get tough in the rageful times after 2001. The way to have your cake and eat it too is simply to deny that we are "torturing" ... Read More
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Dig deep into the underbelly of the Bush/Cheney war on terror and the legal memos that gave them the green light to torture. I agree that the book seems partisan at time, but it is thoroughly researched and a great read regardless. Highly recommended.
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This book represents the best education possible in the Bush Administration's commission of (and the Obama admin's perpetuation of) horrible abuses across the globe. Liberals and conservatives alike will be shocked at the mal-administration of our intelligence services and the abuses committed for no gain whatsoever in actual homeland security. Read it!
The books were shipped in timely manner. One note: the books came with a small but noticeable purple ink dot on one edge of the binding.
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Although we have all covered the ground before and there is a fatigue that all of us feel, whether progressive, moderate, or conservative, with discussions of how the U.S. went from defender of the Geneva Conventions to their first publicly shameless defilers, Jane Mayer's book is more than worth the investment.
First, Mayer's writing style is exceptional. She is clear, concise, with variety in sentence structure, precision in word choice, and vocabulary that is always accurate without being esoteric. She never falls into the jargon of our source material, never gets into the alphabet soup of acronyms that other journalists and analysts do, and remains objective about her sources. She does not lead cheers for a party or a player in the account, and so she is never chained to a particular set of eyes for her reportage. This frees her language, as well as her analysis, from the foibles and shackles of the participants. She has a wonderful ear for the bon mots of her witnesses, and she quotes liberally, but judiciously, making her witnesses appear wittier and wiser and clearer than those of us who have followed this affair know them to be. (Some of these witnesses are still ranting and raging on television today, and, when we meet them as they have been selected by the careful Jane Mayer, they seem far more rational than they present themselves in person.)
Second, Mayer uses Rise of the Vulcans, Bush at War, Cobra II and the other analyses that emerged earlier on. These were all sterling works. Books like Blood Money are not replaced, and the "Frontline" documentary "The Dark Side" (parts one and two) from PBS are not replaced. Instead, these works, which were first drafts of history (what good journalism is), are source material for Mayer. She is intelligent enough not to argue with them and not to repeat them, but, rather, to offer something rare: analytical synthesis with a persuasive thesis.
Third, Mayer's presentation is compelling. I had intended to read her book last out of the shipment I had gotten from Amazon. However, I looked at the first page, and that was all it took. This is a rare thing for a jaded reader like myself. Despite professional reading I "had" to do, The Dark Side took priority.
I realize that we are all reluctant to revisit these horrors, but the horrors are present still. There is more than a change of personnel that will be necessary, and that is what Mayer makes clear. What this "dark side" trip represented was not a momentary lapse, but a fundamental change, a change of the basis of the nation that we made and have not reversed, one we made without even a moment's reflection. We will need more than atonement: we will need to vigorously, loudly, and statutorily to reclaim the principles that our nation really did build itself upon.
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