In a word, The Dark Side by Jane Mayer is shocking.  It’s shocking even for the hardest cynic and fiercest Bush critic.

Jane Mayer has compiled the most comprehensive and damning exposé of detainee treatment during the Bush Administration.  The level of detail and inside knowledge that was presented on the inner workings of the CIA, DoD, State, DOJ, and the White House is nothing short of astounding.

The book begins with a bit of biography, but not of President Bush.  This book is all about Richard Cheney and his right-hand man, David Addington.  Dick Cheney had always been a purveyor of the view that the executive branch always reigned supreme when it came to national security.  The book cites his completely outlandish Minority Report, authored with the help of Addington, in response to the Iran-Contra affair, which surprisingly defended the Reagan administration from the “overreach” of Congress.

The president, the report noted, “will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit him to exceed the laws.”

Monarchical.  This is the basis with which this fiasco was built upon.  Mayer goes on to document the amazing level of haphazardness that wrought the slipshod detention policy that emerged after 9/11.  The CIA had very little knowledge of how to conduct interrogations of high-value detainees.  Most of the reasearch that the CIA had conducted on “enhanced” techniques were holdovers from the Cold War, the most interesting of which was conducted by psychologist Donald Hebb:

Hebb found that in as few as forty-eight hours some subjects suspended in water tanks—or confined in air-conditioned isolated rooms wearing blacked-out goggles, gloves, and earmuffs—regressed to semi-psychotic states.  “I had no idea what a potentially vicious weapon this could be,” Hebb admitted in an interview.

It’s important to point out that the majority of this research was aimed at extracting false confessions.  In fact, this is the only thing at which torture excels.  This is why these draconian methods are so popular in dictatorships, where justice is never the raison d’être.

The military’s SERE program also became a large wealth of knowledge.  This program was designed to prepare American soldiers for torture abroad, but was now being used to torture foreign detainees at home.  But these weren’t the only sources of guidance for the new detainee policy.  There was another expert in this field.

In conversation with British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, the top military lawyer in Guantánamo, Diane Beaver, said quite earnestly that Jack Bauer “gave people lots of ideas” as they sought for interrogation models that fall.  Beaver explained that even in Guantánamo, “We saw it on cable…It was hugely popular.”

After scrambling to put together a coherent interrogation strategy, the CIA soon became worried that the the way they were treating detainees may be illegal.  Enter John Yoo and Jay Bybee.  In August 2002, Yoo and Bybee crafted one of the most dangerous, and flawed, legal memos ever to leave the Office of Legal Council.  The memo became known as “the golden shield” in the intelligence community, due to its unbelievably expansive view of executive power.  This opinion was so egregious that Yoo’s successor at OLC, a conservative lawyer named Jack Goldsmith, set out to do what was unthinkable:

By custom, the OLC acted somewhat like the Supreme Court, overturning as few prior opinions as possible in order to create legal consistency and clarity within the executive branch.  To do otherwise would create terrible disruption. [...]

But by early December 2003, Goldsmith decided he had to revoke the interrogation opinions.

What happened next was a clash between Goldsmith and the chief enforcer of the Vice President, David Addington.  Ultimately, the final memo was watered down, and the status quo continued, while Goldsmith was fired.

The next portion of the book is truly difficult to read in some portions.  There were times when I had to stop reading for minutes at a time before I could compose myself to continue.  It describes in horrible detail some of the conditions that were forced upon detainees of varying intelligence value.  By 2003, there was a somewhat standardized procedure:

A former member of a CIA transport team described the “takeout” of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location.

This was just the beginning.  What came after were drastic environmental conditions, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and other forms of psychological torture.

Some detainees held by the CIA claimed that their cells were bombarded with deafening sound twenty-four hours a day for weeks and even months.  Usually the sounds were music, but a detainee named Moazzam Begg described hearing hysterical female screams from an unseen woman who he was led to believe was his wife.  Binyam Mohammed, who was later transferred to Guantánamo, told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that he found the psychological torture more intolerable than the physical abuse that he said he had been previously subjected to in Morocco, where, he said, local intelligence agents had sliced his penis with a razor blade.  “The CIA worked people day and night for months,” Smith quoted his client as saying. “Plenty lost their minds.  I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.”

Then there are the cases of innocents being snatched from their lives and rendered to places unknown.  Such was the case for Khaled al-Masri, who was mistakenly apprehended while crossing the border between Serbia and Macedonia, because his legitimate, but newly designed, German passport was mistaken for a forgery.  He was subjected to a “nightmarish tour through the secret underworld of America’s war on terror,” where he suffered for months on a diet putrid water and rotten chicken bones.  Sixty pounds and many months later, Masri was finally released, and found that his family, with no word on his whereabouts, had assumed they had been deserted and fled Germany for Lebanon.

Although this book is obviously a critique of the detainee plicies of the Bush Administration, Mayer maintains a relatively objective tone throughout the book.  She uses her voluminous knowledge and sources to craft a fact-based prosecution of Bush policies.  She does, however, do some editorializing in her afterword, which serves as an excellent summary.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and a small handful of trusted advisors sought and obtained dubious legal opinions enabling them to circumvent American laws and traditions.  In the name of prosecuting national security, the executive branch sanctioned coerced confessions, extrajudicial detention, and other violations of individuals’ liberties that had been prohibited since the country’s founding.  They turned the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council into a political instrument, which they used to expand their own executive powerat the expense of long-standing checks and balances.  When warned that these policies were unlawful and counterproductive, they ignored the experts and made decisions outside of ordinary bureaucratic channels, and often outside of the public’s view.  Rather than risking the possibility of congressional opposition, they classified vital interpretations of law as top secret.  No one knows to this day how many more secret opinions the Bush Justice Department has produced.  Far from tempering these policies over time, they marginalized and penalized those who challenged their idées fixes.  Because the subject matter was shrouded in claims of national security, much of the internal dissent remained hidden.

I am convinced, after reading this book, that George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo, and Jay Bybee should be tried for war crimes.  It absolutely pains me to my soul that my country is responsible for these inhumane and vicious crimes.

The record needs to be set straight.

Tags: book review, Jane Mayer, torture

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