2008 Nonfiction Finalist: The Dark Side, by Jane Mayer

by admin | Feb-20-2009

Each day leading up to the March 12 announcement of the 2008 NBCC awards, we highlight one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Mary Ann Gwinn discusses Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)

In The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, her deeply unsettling, clearly written and brilliantly reported book, Jane Mayer shows how, in the aftermath of 9/11, former Vice President Dick Cheney and key colleagues effectively trampled national and international law in the service of enabling Americans to torture detainees, both at Guantánamo Bay and at CIA “dark sites” worldwide.

Innocent people were held for months on end without charges and without notification to their families; many were tortured to extract information they did not possess. The likely guilty were so badly mistreated as to undercut any prosecutorial argument that might be used against them in a court of law. And some were flown to third-world allies of the United States, such as Egypt, and disappeared forever.

Prisoners were subjected to degrading and health-threatening treatment, including “waterboarding, head and belly slapping, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, temperature extremes, and stress positions,” among others, for hours on end. One prisoner died from the cold. Others reportedly lost their minds.

All this was enabled by a systematic—and often secret—rewriting of American laws and regulations by two Cheney cohorts, vice presidential counsel David Addington and John Yoo, an attorney with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. All this despite the fact, as Mayer clearly demonstrates, that torture is a largely ineffective method for extracting intelligence, because it yields unreliable information.

Those who like their politics black and white (liberals good, conservatives bad, or vice versa) may be surprised to learn that many deeply conservative government appointees within the Bush administration tried to stop the torture program, at the price of their government careers. Alberto Mora, the general counsel of the Navy, argued long and passionately that torture violated basic American principles; Jack Goldsmith, who became head of the office of legal counsel in 2003 and was a strong believer in the war against terrorists, nonetheless sought to revoke a memo Yoo had written authorizing extreme forms of torture. The FBI tried unsuccessfully to stop the program, and at one point officials of the NCIS, the Navy’s investigative arm, who believed the military interrogators at Guantánamo were “poorly trained and were dangerously frustrated by their lack of success,” hacked into the Army’s interrogation logs at Guantánamo to attempt to ascertain what was going on.

Mora and Goldsmith soon left the government after trying to stop the torture authorization program. Mayer shows that many techniques developed at Guantánamo were “perfected” at the notorious Iraq prison Abu Ghraib, until leaked photos and worldwide outrage stopped the program.

Today, those who authorized and participated in these programs are fighting to avoid prosecution; in January Addington and Yoo were called before a House committee to explain themselves, and refused to cooperate. In one of his first acts as president, Barack Obama ordered the dismantling of Guantánamo and the “black sites.”

This is a gut-wrenching but illuminating book, in part because it shows how a few government officials can subvert the deliberate and transparent processes our country relies on as safeguards against extremism. Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, has done the country a great service by reporting and writing it.