Answering terror with terror

In "The Dark Side," Jane Mayer chronicles the terrible, destructive decisions the Bush administration made in the name of fighting terrorism.

By Louis Bayard

Read more: George W. Bush, Books, Terrorism, Reviews, Book reviews, Dick Cheney, Louis Bayard

Reuters/Larry Downing

Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush in the Oval Office at the White House.

July 15, 2008 | We can't say we weren't warned.

The very first Sunday after the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney descended like a cloud on "Meet the Press" to outline the Bush administration's response. "We'll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies -- if we are going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in. And, uh, so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objectives."

Around the nation, one presumes, numbed heads were nodding in approval. Whatever it takes to get those bastards. The true nature of our Faustian bargain would not become clear until later, and maybe it needed a journalist as steely and tenacious as Jane Mayer to give us the full picture. "The Dark Side" is about how the war on terror became "a war on American ideals," and Mayer gives this story all the weight and sorrow it deserves. Many books get tagged with the word "essential"; hers actually is.

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Above all, it underscores one of the least remarked aspects of our nation's counterterrorist policy: the degree to which it has been driven not by spies or generals but by pasty men in ties. "The first thing we do," goes that crowd-pleasing line from Shakespeare's "Henry VI," "let's kill all the lawyers." Readers of "The Dark Side" might be moved to add: "Before they kill you." Almost from the moment America was attacked, Mayer writes, Cheney "saw to it that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country, working in secret in the White House and the United States Department of Justice, came up with legal justifications for a vast expansion of the government's power in waging war on terror. As part of that process, for the first time in history, the United States sanctioned government officials to physically and psychologically torment U.S.-held captives, making torture the official law of the land in all but name." This "extralegal counterterrorism program," contends Mayer, "presented the most dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history."

We already know, of course, that wars give presidents plenty of room for overreaching. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War; FDR, during World War II, interned hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans. What separates the Bush White House from its forebears, suggests Mayer, was that its "doctrine of presidential prerogative" admitted no challenge and operated, as much as it could, out of sight.

And yet so much of it happened on our watch. Nov. 13, 2001: The White House proclaimed a state of "extraordinary emergency" and announced plans to try "enemy combatants" before military commissions. Jan. 8, 2002: President Bush nullified the Geneva Conventions. Aug. 1, 2002: The Justice Department issued the now-infamous "torture memo." Written largely by White House lawyer John Yoo (later to join the University of California at Berkeley faculty), the memo deliberately removed whole realms of pain from the category of "torture." What was left? Mental suffering "of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or years" and physical suffering that causes "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Everything else was in play.

These were not semantic distinctions because, by then, the U.S. military had the perfect laboratory for putting Yoo's memo into practice: a prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that promised interrogators "total isolation, total secrecy, and total control." But who exactly was being interrogated? Mayer's big find is a classified CIA report from the summer of 2002, in which a senior analyst concludes that one-third of the camp's 600 prisoners have no connection to terrorism whatsoever. That figure was later amended by an FBI counterterrorism expert, who argued that no more than 50 of the detainees were worth holding. These findings directly contradicted administration assertions that Guantánamo harbored only "the worst of the worst." Not surprisingly, the administration refused to review the detainees' cases, with the result that many of them are still there, years after their initial incarceration -- and still without legal recourse because they have never been charged with a crime.

Behind the Guantánamo debacle lies a serious question: Do suspected terrorists deserve the same rights as you and I? The answer for Cheney and his lawyers was an unequivocal no. And with that no, a whole world of yes blossomed forth. Bush administration officials could now shut away terror suspects in clandestine prisons called "black sites." They could ramp up the little-used practice of "extraordinary rendition," allowing the CIA to kidnap dozens of suspects and extradite them to countries -- notably Egypt -- where torture could be practiced with greater impunity. President Bush, not quite grasping the appearance problem, hoped to publish a running tally of these kidnappings, so Americans could keep score from home. CIA director George Tenet talked him out of it.

The Bush administration could also co-opt a secret program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE). Originally designed to train U.S. military personnel in resisting enemy torture, the program, as opportunists soon found, could also be used to torture enemies. SERE techniques were initially approved only for al-Qaida logistics chief Abu Zubayda, but within months, they had migrated to Guantánamo, where the U.S. military, Mayer writes, began "subjecting prisoners to treatment that would have been unimaginable, and prosecutable, before September 11" -- hooding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, extremes of temperature, and a rich array of often sexual humiliations. (Suspected 9/11 accomplice Mohammed al-Qahtani was stripped naked, ordered to bark like a dog and forced to wear variously a leash, a bra and thong underwear.) The SERE template was then exported to the detention facilities of Iraq, and it wasn't until the dissemination of the Abu Ghraib photographs that Americans could see what had been wrought in their name.

Sadism, as Orwell taught us, is best screened by syntax, and administration lawyers were especially adept at the neutering of language. Interrogations were merely "special" or "enhanced" or "robust" and were always consistent with the Bush administration's "new paradigm." Under duress, these euphemisms morphed into denials. "We don't torture," announced Vice President Cheney. "Torture is never acceptable," Bush told the New York Times in January 2005. "Nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture." But even the administration was hard-pressed to put a happy face on waterboarding -- though the media certainly did their part to help, describing the practice in such value-neutral terms as "simulated drowning." "It's not simulated anything," explains one SERE instructor. "It's slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration ... You can feel every drop. Every drop."

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