The New York Times Reviews Jane Mayer’s New Book

Alan Brinkley reviews Jane Mayer’s new book, “The Dark Side,” about how the Bush administration became a torture regime. Brinkley’s review is important reading regardless of whether you have read the book or plan to. 

For me, the most chilling aspect of the evil and lawlessness that became normative policy over the last eight years is the extent to which it is all the creation of one man: 

Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Cheney in effect took command of the national security operations of the federal government. Quickly and instinctively, he began to act in response to two longstanding beliefs: that the great dangers facing the United States justified almost any response, whether or not legal; and that the presidency needed vastly to enhance its authority, which had been unjustifiably and dangerously weakened in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate years. George Bush was an eager enabler, but not often an active architect, of the government’s response to terror. His instinct was to be tough and aggressive in response to challenges, and Cheney’s belligerence fit comfortably with the president’s own inclinations.

And further down in the review:

The architects of this network of secret prisons and secret torture were a small but powerful group within the Bush administration. Dick Cheney stood at the center of the effort but delegated many of its operations to others. The vice president’s counsel (and later chief of staff), David Addington, was a ruthless, bullying enforcer of the strategy, effectively derailing all challenges by claiming that everything had been mandated by the president and by dismissing all legal and moral challenges as naïve and weak. John Yoo, a law professor from the University of California, Berkeley, who worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, drafted an infamous memo giving legal cover to torture by simply redefining what torture was — virtually anything short of deliberate killing. George Tenet, the eager-to-please C.I.A. director; William Haynes, the militant general counsel to the Pentagon; Alberto Gonzales, the weak and pliable White House counsel who later became attorney general: all played vital roles in the creation and protection of these covert strategies. At the urging of Cheney — or his surrogate Addington — President Bush nullified the Geneva Conventions and, without publicly stating it, suspended habeas corpus for terror suspects, thus removing two important impediments to torture. Others worked to undermine the 1984 international Convention Against Torture, which, under American leadership, had provided the first explicit definition of what torture was.

This “vast regime of pain and terror” was created, as we all know, in the name of fighting terror, and it was based “in large part on the untested belief of a few high-ranking leaders in Washington that torture is an effective tool for eliciting valuable information.”

… But there is, Mayer persuasively argues, little available evidence that this assumption is true, and a great deal of evidence from numerous sources (including the United States military and the F.B.I.) that torture is, in fact, one of the least effective methods of gathering information and a likely source of false confessions. Among the many cases Mayer and other journalists have chronicled — including the case of the most notable Al Qaeda operative yet captured, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — the information gleaned from tortured detainees has produced unreliable and often entirely unusable information.  …

In the light of the infamous August 1, 2002, torture memo, which made “specific intent” an element of torture, and defined specific intent as having “an honest belief” that the pain and suffering being inflicted are not causing the victim to feel pain or to suffer, it is particularly instructive to find out that, although some interrogators “were traumatized by what they had done and seen, and suffered psychologically as a result,” others very much enjoyed what they did:  ”… ‘It was the Camelot of counterterrorism,’ one officer later told a journalist. ‘We didn’t have to mess with others and it was fun.’ ” And let me be clear, both of those responses are equally horrifying. In the instances of individuals who suffered long-term psychological consequences as a result of having committed or witnessed torture, the government is implicated in that mental harm.

Almost everything about the gulag that this tight little cabal put together is still unknown. Abu Ghraib was in many ways the least of it — and although Brinkley does not say this, the sense I get is that, because Abu Ghraib became such a public scandal, the true extent of the policies put into place by the administration has been obscured:

Occasional lurid revelations of abuse — most prominent among them the appalling photographs of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, made public in 2004 — have been widely denounced throughout the world. The president has expressed outrage and has insisted that the degradation was the work of a few bad apples who would be appropriately punished. But it was only the pictures that made Abu Ghraib an aberration. The tactics the president denounced were precisely those he had authorized and encouraged in the growing network of secret prisons around the world. The detainees in these scattered sites — many of them innocent — have been held for months and years without charges, without lawyers, without notification to their families and often without respite from torture for weeks and months at a time. The Bush administration’s response to the Abu Ghraib scandal was not to stop the behavior, but to try to hide it more effectively.

No one knows how many people were rounded up and spirited away into these secret locations, although the number is very likely in the thousands. No one knows either how many detainees have died once in custody. Nor is there any solid information about the many detainees who have been the victims of what the United States government calls “extraordinary rendition,” the handing over of detainees to other governments, mostly in the Middle East, whose secret police have no qualms about torturing their prisoners and face no legal consequences for doing so.

Interestingly, just as I was about to wrap up this post, I read the news that Alexander Solzhenitsyn died today, at the age of 89. I expect that we will soon be treated to reams of laudatory praise for this towering human rights hero (which he was) coming from the mouths of people who are responsible for exactly the same horrors Solzhenitsyn experienced.

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