The Dark Side: The Inside Story on How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer [Anchor Books, 2008, 2009]
In her essay, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” published after her death in At the Same Time, Susan Sontag considers the photographs from Abu Ghraib. Like many appalled and disgusted Americans she was quite willing to believe that the “highest levels” of government were responsible, albeit indirectly: “It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle.” I believe that she got it wrong. I’m not quoting Susan Sontag in order to set her up but to show how difficult it was and still is to accept the truth of the Abu Ghraib photographs. In other words, Sontag believed that the photographs of Abu Ghraib showed the by-products of a flawed policy rather than stood as evidence that torture was the policy. But then, she did not have the benefit of Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side.
Torture was not a by-product; Bush administration officials actively pursued unethical, immoral and illegal methods for dealing with prisoners taken after September 11, 2001. Jane Mayer has collected and sorted through an Augean Stables full of information in order to lay bare the record. I doubt that criminal charges will ever be brought in an American court, but charges of war crimes were filed against six Bush officials in Spain in 2009. The officials are: Alberto Gonzales, former US Attorney General, John Yoo and Jay Bybee from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Douglas Feith, former Undersecretary of Defense for policy, William Haynes II, chief counsel for Donald Rumsfield, and David Addington, chief of staff to US Vice President Dick Cheney.
The perversion of American values and procedures began in Afghanistan soon after 9/11, and the target was an American, John Walker Lindh. On December 9, 2001, an official in the Justice Department in Washington received an email question from Afghanistan as to whether Lindh could be questioned without a lawyer present. Jesselyn Radack, the official, did not know that 19-year old Lindh, with a bullet wound in his leg, was being kept in a shipping container, naked, blindfolded, duct taped to a stretcher. She did know that his father had retained counsel and so she advised that questioning without counsel would be improper. Her advice was ignored. When Radack attempted to correct the record as stated to the press by Attorney John Ashcroft, she discovered that the pertinent emails were missing. She was subsequently told to find another job, which she did, but she was able to make copies of the emails available to Newsweek. Years before the retaliation against Valerie Plame, Radack found that her new job offer was rescinded, criminal investigations were begun against her in the states where she could practice law, and she was on a no-fly list requiring full body searches. Jesselyn Radack has written her own memoir, The Canary in the Coal Mine.
Detail is the strength of The Dark Side. Mayer cites marker after marker of the descent into sanctioned torture. She makes the narrative connections necessary to understand links between the CIA taking prisoner interrogation away from the FBI, the extraordinary increase of extraordinary renditions, the suspension of Article 5 military hearings, the designation of prisoners as unlawful combatants, the “golden shield” of legal protection created by the secret John Yoo torture memos, the reverse engineering of the SERE program, and much much more. Never in doubt is the responsibility of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington, who “set up the most powerful vice presidency in American history.” Addington and Cheney were determined to expand presidential power and they engineered the process by which America became the “first nation ever to authorize violations of the Geneva Conventions.”(p9) They did this by controlling who saw President Bush and what he read: “Addington’s would be the last box before paperwork reached the President. According to another lawyer on the White House staff, he would ‘review every proposed executive order before it reached the President for his signature. Frequently, he would rewrite the entire thing.’”(p63)
Camouflaged by euphemisms like enhanced or harsh interrogation are the following procedures: water boarding or partial drowning, subjecting prisoners to extreme heat or cold, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, striking with open hands, handcuffing in physically painful positions for such long periods that prisoners were forced to soil themselves, administering enemas, threatening with death, threatening family members with death, enforced nudity, using fears like fear of dogs, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation -- and this is only a partial list of forbidden methods that were often used in combinations. That some of these were visible at Abu Ghraib is evidence that the “few bad apples” were most likely operating under CIA instigation if not outright orders. The CIA’s General Counsel, Scott Muller “insisted that every single action taken by the CIA toward its detainees had been declared legal by John Yoo. With Yoo gone, it fell to Goldsmith [Yoo’s successor] to figure out exactly what the OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] had given the CIA the green light to do and what, in fact, the CIA had done.”(p288)
Jack Goldsmith, Yoo’s successor in the Office of Legal Counsel, is one of a number of people whom Mayer credits with impeding the administration’s illegal activities. In a bizarre and dramatic episode reminiscent of a scene from “The Godfather,” Goldsmith and James Comey, Deputy Attorney General, made a late night rush to the hospital bed of Attorney General Ashcroft in response to an alarmed call from Mrs. Ashcroft. They arrived in time to prevent White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and White House Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, from bullying Ashcroft into signing a renewal of an illegal wiretap program. (Alberto Gonzales was named Attorney General in Bush’s second term.) Singularly alarming is Mayer’s subsequent comment: “[Comey and Goldsmith] were so paranoid by then about the powerful backlash they had provoked inside the administration that they actually thought they might be in physical danger.”(p.294)
Another figure given credit is Alberto Mora, General Counsel of the U.S. Navy, whose response to the abuses at Guantanamo is noteworthy. He made no distinction between torture and cruelty: “‘If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America.’”(p218) Unfortunately, Mora’s attempts to rectify Guantanamo were circumvented by Yoo, Addington, and William Haynes, General Counsel to the U.S. Department of Defense; these three are now part of the Bush Six and under investigation in Spain.
From grade school, I was taught that torture is the wrongest wrong, not that I needed to be taught since every child instinctively fears cruelty. Torture was the nightmare practice of barbarians and savages, of Nazis and Inquisitors, of thugs and criminals. Before and after the pictures from Abu Ghraib, rumors of deplorable practices against prisoners were loud enough that denials were being forced from various government officials. Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side is absolutely necessary for clarifying the need to accept how the law was broken and who broke the law. John Yoo is on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley; in May 2010, Jesselyn Radack was still under a disciplinary referral that was filed against her in the District of Columbia Bar. This is wrong.
[Gem rating: black onyx, hematite and bloodstone]
