Last weekend the New York Times ran a book review about the Bush administrations tactics in the war on terror and how it uses torture, secret prisons, excessive governmental secrecy and other counter-productive and unlawful strategies largely designed by Vice President Cheney and his minions, presumably with the consent of the clueless President, who did what he was told. I am reprinting the review below, as the details are too harrowing for me to summarize here. God help us all.
August 3, 2008
Black Sites
By ALAN BRINKLEY
THE DARK SIDE
The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.
By Jane Mayer.
Illustrated. 392 pp. Doubleday. $27.50.
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.
In fairness, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax scare that followed, who could not have imagined the worst and contemplated extraordinary efforts to prevent it? But as Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, makes clear in “The Dark Side,” a powerful, brilliantly researched and deeply unsettling book, what almost immediately came to be called the “war on terror” led quickly and inexorably to some of the most harrowing tactics ever contemplated by the United States government. The war in Iraq is the most obvious and familiar result of the heedless “toughness” of the new administration. But Mayer recounts a different, if at least equally chilling, story: the emergence of the widespread use of torture as a central tool in the battle against terrorism; and the fierce, stubborn defense of torture against powerful opposition from within the administration and beyond. It is the story of how a small group of determined men and women thwarted international and American law; fought off powerful challenges from colleagues within the Justice Department, the State Department, the National Security Council and the C.I.A.; ignored or circumvented Supreme Court rulings and Congressional resolutions; and blithely dismissed a growing clamor of outrage and contempt from much of the world — all in the service of preserving their ability to use extreme forms of torture in the search for usable intelligence.
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.
This vast regime of pain and terror, inflicted in the name of a war on terror, rests 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. That many of the interrogations were conducted by American servicemen and -women with scant training made the likelihood of success even lower. (Some of the interrogators had no qualms about what they were doing and welcomed being unconstrained by any laws or rules. “It was the Camelot of counterterrorism,” one officer later told a journalist. “We didn’t have to mess with others and it was fun.” Others were traumatized by what they had done and seen, and suffered psychologically as a result.)
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.
Mayer provides a particularly ghoulish description of James Mitchell, a former military psychologist, who introduced the C.I.A. to a secret military program that had been designed in the 1950s to teach high-risk personnel to withstand torture. Known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), it rested on the belief that inflicting a controlled level of pain and humiliation on those who might face it in combat would help them survive the real thing if they were captured. For the C.I.A. after 2001, SERE became not a tool for resisting torture, but a template for inflicting it — a template soon adopted by interrogators in the far-flung “black sites” where detainees were imprisoned. Mitchell dismissed the arguments of F.B.I. agents that his tactics were ineffective and that he had no experience with the Middle East or Islamic terrorism. “Science is science,” he said. At one point, the F.B.I. agents collaborating with the C.I.A. on interrogation plans were so alarmed by what they were hearing that they urged their superiors to arrest Mitchell. Soon after that, they withdrew from the program altogether. “We don’t do that,” one of the F.B.I. agents said. “It’s what our enemies do!”
From the very beginning, there was strong resistance to the regime of torture. Those who challenged it included journalists like The New York Times’s James Risen and Scott Shane, The Washington Post’s Dana Priest, Ron Suskind (the author of “The One Percent Doctrine”), The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh and Mayer herself (who scrupulously credits the work of her many colleagues). Other opponents were officials in the State Department, the F.B.I., the C.I.A., members of Congress of both parties and many career military officers, including former chiefs of staff. But as Mayer notes, few of them “had the temerity to confront Cheney, who clearly was the true source of these policies.” Among the most courageous opponents of the use of torture was a small group of lawyers working within the Bush administration — conservative men, loyal Republicans, who in the face of enormous pressure to go along attempted to use the law to stop what they considered a series of policies that were both illegal and immoral: Alberto Mora, the Navy general counsel, who tried to work within the system to stop what he believed were renegade actions; Jack Goldsmith, who became the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and sought to revoke the Yoo memo of 2002, convinced that it had violated the law in authorizing what he believed was clearly torture; and Matthew Waxman, a Defense Department lawyer overseeing detainee issues, who sought ways to stop what he believed to be illegal and dangerous policies. Waxman summoned a meeting of high-ranking military officers and Defense Department officials (including the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force), all of whom supported the restoration of Geneva Convention protections. Waxman was quickly hauled up before Addington and told that his efforts constituted “an abomination.” All of these lawyers, and others, soon left the government after being deceived, bullied, thwarted and marginalized by the Cheney loyalists.
By the end of 2005, those defending the regime of torture were no longer seeking primarily to protect the search for valuable intelligence. They were fighting for its survival, in the face of considerable evidence of the failure of SERE and other programs, because they feared being prosecuted should the program be halted and exposed. Even releasing detainees whom they knew to be entirely innocent was dangerous, since once released they could talk. “People will ask where they’ve been and ‘What have you been doing with them?’” Cheney said in a White House meeting. “They’ll all get lawyers.”
There is no happy ending to this sordid and shameful story. Despite growing political pressure, despite Supreme Court decisions challenging the detainment policy, despite increasing revelations of the once-hidden program that have shocked the conscience of the world, there is little evidence that the secret camps and the torture programs have been abandoned or even much diminished. New heads of the Defense and Justice Departments have resisted addressing the torture issue, aware that dozens of their colleagues would face legal jeopardy should they do so. And the presidential candidates of both parties have so far shown little interest in confronting the use of torture or recommitting the country to the Geneva Conventions and to America’s own laws and traditions.
The Bush administration is not, of course, the first or only regime to violate civil liberties. John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt all authorized or tolerated terrible violations of civil and human rights, all of them in response to great national and global crises. In some respects, the Bush administration is simply following a familiar path by responding to real dangers with illegal and deplorable methods. But Jane Mayer’s extraordinary and invaluable book suggests that it would be difficult to find any precedent in American history for the scale, brutality and illegality of the torture and degradation inflicted on detainees over the last six years; and that it would be even harder to imagine a set of policies more likely to increase the dangers facing the United States and the world.
